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 [...]

Electronic tags have proven to be valuable tools in assessing small cetacean movement patterns and habitat use. While tag design and success rates have varied, problems associated with package size, attachment position on the dorsal fin, and number of attachment pins have, in some cases, shortened the predicted attachment duration or caused adverse impacts to [...]

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 [...]

Responding to a request by NOAA Fisheries on Friday night, 6 May, SDRP staff drove to Cudjoe Key in the lower Florida Keys early on the morning of 7 May to tag two male short-finned pilot whales from a mass stranding of about 21 whales. The animals were initially scattered through the area when the [...]

Important questions have been raised regarding the relative risks and benefits of rehabilitating and releasing stranded odontocete cetaceans, but until recently few data have been available to support an appropriate evaluation. In the early years of cetacean rehabilitation, success in getting the animals to the point of release was infrequent, but success rates have improved [...]

Franciscana dolphin: Southern Brazil Signals continued to be received through the end of November from two of the five Franciscana dolphins tagged with satellite-linked tags. The dolphins are exhibiting a very high degree of residency to a very small area within the bay. These highly endangered dolphins were tagged as part of a tri-national (Brazil-Argentina-USA) [...]

Individual bottlenose dolphins can be identified by their dorsal fins. But how exactly is that done? And why bother? A new report published by NOAA, with SDRP staff members Brian Balmer and Randy Wells as co-authors, explores the use of photo identification as a tool for making abundance estimates of inshore populations of bottlenose dolphins. [...]