The 2006 SDRP “Manual for Field Research and Laboratory Activities,”  is available as a downloadable pdf file. This 62-page document provides detailed documentation of our protocols used for field operations and data processing. It includes chapters on: 1) Field survey protocols, 2) Post-survey lab protocols, 3) Photo-identification protocols, 4) Database entry, verification, and management, and [...]

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 [...]

In response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, a Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA) was performed on the St. Joseph Bay bottlenose dolphin community. The overall goals of the NRDA process, which is part of NOAA’s Damage Assessment, Remediation, and Restoration Program (DARRP), are to: 1) Identify the extent of resources that were damaged 2) [...]

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 [...]

In May, 2011, I found myself smiling as I packed my bags for a week of field research with the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program. I was reflecting on the fact that in 1991, I had boarded my very first flight, enroute to Sarasota for the first time. Now, 20 years and a couple hundred thousand [...]

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 [...]

My interest in marine species and the marine environment began when I started volunteering at The Marine Mammal Center (TMMC) in 1991, where I was first exposed to the impact that disease can have on marine mammal species. I returned to TMMC a decade later, as their first veterinary intern, after earning my veterinary degree [...]