Dolphin F220

Stats

Name: F220, also known as Stormy

Sex: Male

Age: Born 1999

A Dolphin’s Life

We’ve observed Stormy more than 600 times since his birth in 1999. He’s the fourth calf of FB07, also known as Lightning.  In our research, we’ve found that adult male bottlenose dolphins in Sarasota Bay develop male alliances when they reach sexual maturity. These bonded male pairs spend much of their lives together, helping each other do things like mate and feed. We were the first to describe these long-term relationships. We don’t think that Stormy has developed such a relationship yet, but he could be exploring one with another Sarasota Bay dolphin nicknamed Pat (F173).

In this video, Stormy swims next to a female dolphin nicknamed Bobbitt.

Male dolphins Pat, in the foreground, and Stormy, in the back, surface on either side of an adult female dolphin nicknamed Murphy Brown.

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.