I have been very lucky to participate once again in the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program, but this time working on my senior thesis, which will allow me to get my degree when I go back to Argentina. I’ve always been attracted to how a simple algal cell could cause such a big change in the [...]

Estuaries are highly productive and ecologically rich areas that are important habitats for fish and bird species. Over the past few decades, the frequency and duration of harmful algal blooms (HABs) have been increasing globally in coastal areas. HABs, especially those caused by the red tide organism, Karenia brevis, occur frequently along Florida’s west coast, [...]

Deborah Fauquier, DVM, has been named as a finalist for a prestigious Marine Policy Fellowship offered by the National Sea Grant College Program. Deb, is already a marine mammal veternarian, and she led the vet team during the 2010 dolphin health assessments in Sarasota Bay. Read more about her life as a marine mammal vet [...]

By Mike Twiner, PhD, University of Michigan and Spencer Fire, PhD, NOAA Marine Biotoxins Program Marine sentinel species such as bottlenose dolphins can be negatively impacted by toxic compounds produced by naturally occurring phytoplankton (single-celled marine algae). The Sarasota Bay bottlenose dolphin population is frequently exposed to toxic blooms of the marine algae Karenia brevis [...]

The fact that the majority of the live sea birds and sea turtles sampled during these red tide events were positive for the red tide toxin indicates that red tide intoxication plays a larger role in the morbidity and mortality of sea birds and sea turtles off the west coast of Florida than was previously recognized

We have been investigating the impacts of red tide on Sarasota Bay dolphins, sea turtles and sea birds over the last several years. Although the Sarasota Bay area did not experience a red tide bloom during 2007 we are still investigating the impacts of the severe red tide blooms in 2005 and 2006 on these [...]

Red tide can affect fish in several ways: by exposure to brevetoxin (the neurotoxin produced by the red tide organism, Karenia brevis) in the water; by consuming food that is tainted by brevetoxin; or by exposure to hypoxic water (water with unusually low concentrations of dissolved oxygen), which often accompanies severe red tides. Red tide [...]

Beginning in the 1980’s, the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program pioneered the concept of population-level health assessments of free-ranging bottlenose dolphins. The impetus for developing this approach of safely capturing, examining, sampling, and releasing wild bottlenose dolphins to evaluate their health derived from the increasing occurrence of large-scale dolphin mortality events around the world. We were [...]