Nicks n Notches Online: Please Join Us October 3 for a Virtual Celebration of our Golden Anniversary

Sarasota Dolphin

Research Program

a Program of the

Chicago Zoological Society

Celebrating 50 Years of

Marine Mammal Research, Conservation and Education

Nicks 'n' Notches Online

A Special Invitation for You

Sept. 23, 2020

Please Join Us for a Virtual Celebration of Our 50th Anniversary

Greetings!

On October 3, 1970, two male bottlenose dolphins were tagged near Sarasota, Florida, in Palma Sola Bay. That moment would eventually blossom into the Chicago Zoological Society’s Sarasota Dolphin Research Program (SDRP), which today conducts the longest-running study of a wild dolphin population anywhere in the world.

To mark the Program’s 50^th anniversary and celebrate the many scientific breakthroughs that came from its creation, we'd like to invite you to join in a virtual celebration at 5 p.m. EDT on Saturday, October 3.

The virtual celebration will include Program founders Blair Irvine, Randy Wells, and Michael Scott, an overview of the Program’s history and its impacts, and the awarding of the Program’s first Dolphin Conservation Hero Awards, which honor some of those individuals and foundations that made the Program’s first 50 years possible — from its founding to today’s ongoing research.

The SDRP was the first to document the year-round residency of a population of bottlenose dolphins. This pioneering discovery, which allowed the SDRP to track recognizable individual dolphins through their lives, set the stage for research leading to many other important findings.

Today, the SDRP is the model program for dolphin studies in locales around the world and the Sarasota dolphins are used as a reference population for comparative studies of at-risk dolphins in other places, including Louisiana where the dolphins of Barataria Bay continue to be plagued by the effects of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil disaster.

The program, started by Dr. Blair Irvine, is today led by Dr. Randall Wells, a dolphin conservation biologist widely respected for his expertise who is often consulted by U.S. and foreign governmental and nongovernmental officials about all aspects of dolphin biology and conservation. Dr. Wells was a high school student working as an assistant to Dr. Irvine on the early dolphin-tagging initiative.

“What has developed over the decades is certainly beyond anything we could have imagined when we first started tagging dolphins,” Wells said. “Blair and I are humbled by the fact that the program is now recognized by many around the world as a pioneering model for the study and conservation of dolphin populations.”

We’re on Facebook (@sarasotadolphins), Twitter (@dolphinsarasota) and Instagram (@SarasotaDolphinResearchProgram). Be sure to check us out and watch for these tags: #tursiopstuesday, #funfact, #history.

To support wild dolphin research in Sarasota and around the world, please make a donation now.

50 Years of Research,

Conservation and Education

Dolphin Biology Research Institute — DBA Sarasota Dolphin Research Program — is dedicated to research and conservation of dolphins and their habitat. Community Foundation of Sarasota County Giving Partner Profile available here.

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