Bottlenose dolphins often listen for their next meal. While they eat many different fish species, among the favorites in Sarasota Bay are soniferous or noise-making fish, which include pigfish and toadfish. That’s right, dolphins,  which are famous for their sonar, use passive listening to help when hunting prey. Building on ground-breaking work by the late [...]

Predation constitutes a suite of behavioral, individual, and population effects and plays a critical role in population regulation. One important effect is the influence that predatory pressures exact upon the abundance and distribution of prey species. Conversely, individual predators such as bottlenose dolphins can be affected by changes in prey density by consuming more of [...]

A total of 11 oral or poster presentations on SDRP research are scheduled at the Society for Marine Mammalogy’s upcoming Conference in Tampa, FL, from November 27th to December 2nd, 2011. The topics include conservation efforts to reduce dolphin entanglement and public interactions, prey density and foraging, tagging and tracking, and physiology. SDRP staff Brian [...]

Do Sarasota dolphins all have the same “lifestyle?” Do some prefer different prey, or forage in the different habitats, like grass flats as opposed to open bays? We know a lot about the Sarasota dolphin community, but we actually know little about how individuals “make a living” in their environment. Do individuals specialize by hunting [...]

My contribution to dolphin conservation comes not from observing bottlenose dolphins directly in the warm Sarasota sun but rather by exploiting new mass spectrometric techniques that allow me to uncover various attributes of foraging habits by measuring tiny amounts of animal tissue. These techniques involve analysis of the stable isotopes of carbon. Different types of [...]

These data indicate that at the population level resident bottlenose dolphins of Sarasota Bay select soniferous prey. These results lend further support to the hypothesis that bottlenose dolphins use passive listening to locate sound-producing fishes.

This will be the first time that stable isotope analysis will be applied to individual annuli of bottlenose dolphin teeth.

There was no significant relationship between calf survivorship and milk composition. However, calf mass increased significantly with the percentage of milk fat and varied inversely with milk water and potassium content.