A wild bottlenose dolphin nicknamed Seymour was briefly captured, disentangled from life-threatening fishing line, and released in Southwest Florida on March 9, 2012. SDRP staff member Aaron Barleycorn participated, along with volunteers from a multi-agency team from throughout Florida. SDRP responsibility on the project involved tagging Seymour with a satellite-linked tag to facilitate monitoring his [...]

An oil spill can have both lethal and sub-lethal effects on dolphins. Multiple research efforts are on-going to study the potential impact(s) on dolphins of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which occurred during April – July 2010, . Bottlenose dolphins are the most common cetacean in inshore waters in the southeastern United States, but little [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

The objective of the study was to develop and compare information on diet from stomach content analysis of stranded specimens of two dolphin species that are known to use offshore habitats. Data were available from eight Risso’s dolphins and 17 offshore bottlenose dolphins, stranded along the Gulf of Mexico, on the east coast of Florida [...]

January, 2012 In Sarasota Bay, the occurrence of a severe red tide in 2005 was followed by increases in dolphin depredation behaviors, declines in body condition, decreased abundance (through temporary and permanent movements to neighboring waters or disappearances), and increased mortality of weaning and newly independent calves. These changes in the dolphin population correlated with [...]

Skin lesions on bottlenose dolphins from Charleston, SC, Brunswick and Sapelo Island, GA, and Sarasota, FL were retrospectively examined using images from photo-ID surveys conducted during the months of February, April, July and October 2009. Skin lesion prevalence was calculated for each geographic site, as well as for each month within a particular site. The [...]

January, 2012 Bottlenose dolphins within southern Georgia estuaries have been exposed to extremely high levels of persistent organic pollutants (POPs). Dolphins in this region have the highest polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) levels recorded for any marine mammal, and these levels are related to distance from a known EPA Superfund point-source in the Turtle/Brunswick River Estuary (TBRE). [...]