Dolphin F213
Stats
Name: F213, also known as Maddie
Sex: Female
Age: Born 2007
A Dolphin’s Life
F213 was born in 2007 to FB55, who is part of a life-long and well-known female lineage in Sarasota Bay. (FB55 is the third calf of a dolphin known as FB05, who was first identified in 1971, the year after the SDRP began.) F213, also known as Maddie, gave birth to her third calf, 2133, in 2022. Her first calf is F308, born in 2016, and her second is F320, born in 2019.
We regularly observe Maddie during our monthly photo identification surveys and she is known to frequent an area near New College of Florida, where we have installed a Passive Acoustic Listening Station as part of our PALS network. (Read more about the network.) Thanks to PALS, we’ve been able to match recordings that we have of Maddie’s vocalizations to sounds picked up on our receiver — helping us track dolphin movements even when we aren’t on the water!
A Dolphin’s Voice
A Special Note About the Audio Recording
In collaboration with numerous colleagues over the past 35 years, our dolphin communication research team has collected thousands of hours of acoustic recordings from members of the resident Sarasota bottlenose dolphin community, with a focus on individually distinctive signature whistles. Recordings have been made during periodic health assessments, when we are able to obtain high-quality recordings of known individual dolphins. We are currently in the process of systematically assembling a verified signature whistle catalog, with multiple samples from each of the approximately 1,000 unique recording sessions of almost 300 individual dolphins. Members of this collaborative team, and our student researchers, come from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the University of North Carolina Wilmington, University of St. Andrews, and Hampshire College. Learn more about dolphin communication.
This 2017 photo shows F213 in the rear with her first calf and her mom, FB55 (front).
