January 2012 The overarching goal of this collaborative project is to develop indicators and methods to quantify chronic stress in bottlenose dolphins. Much research has focused on the stimuli which induce stress in marine mammals as well as the hormonal mediators of the stress response. Stress may be induced by a variety factors, including noise, [...]

SDRP staff lent their expertise as part of a multi-agency team that conducted a health assessment of bottlenose dolphins in Barataria Bay, Louisiana during August 3-16, 2011. The health assessment was one of several efforts being conducted as part of the Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA) for the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) Oil Spill. Barataria Bay [...]

The 2010 MC-252 disaster (Deepwater Horizon spill) caused weathered oil to wash ashore along the north central Gulf coast and impacted estuarine communities of plants and animals. We assembled a collaborative team from three Florida Institute of Oceanography (FIO) institutions (faculty and graduate students from the University of Central Florida, researchers from the Sarasota Dolphin [...]

Much concern surrounded the potential catastrophic impacts of the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil spill on wildlife and habitats in the Gulf of Mexico. The most common cetaceans in inshore waters of the Gulf, bottlenose dolphins, reside in coastal waters and bays, sounds, and estuaries where exposure to oil from the DWH incident was [...]

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) continues to help the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program (SRDP) in the area of bottlenose dolphin health assessment. Since 2002, we have assisted the program by developing sample collection procedures, archiving samples in the NIST Marine Environmental Specimen Bank (Marine ESB), assisting in field collections, and analyzing dolphin [...]

We conducted a 5-day capture-release dolphin health assessment project in Sarasota Bay in May 2011. The primary impetus behind the project was to obtain data and samples to serve as controls for comparison to samples to be collected by NOAA in oil-impacted Barataria Bay, Louisiana in August. An additional goal included training foreign scientists for [...]

Bad weather caused postponement of an innovative study of offshore bottlenose dolphins. Sponsored by the Georgia Aquarium and Dolphin Quest, 6 dolphins were to be captured, tagged, and released 10-30 miles off the Florida coast. The research was designed to collect health and movement data, which would be needed to gauge the effects of future [...]

The highest concentrations of PCBs ever reported in a marine mammal were found in the blubber of bottlenose dolphins near a Brunswick, GA Superfund site. New research compared contaminant concentrations of dolphins in three areas, including one with a Superfund site on the shoreline. Dolphins near the Superfund site had record contaminant levels, while dolphins [...]