Greetings!

We’re already into a busy summer at the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program, with much field work under way or getting ready to begin in Sarasota and in other locales around the Gulf.

 

One new program we’ve started is a photo-identification project in the waters near Naples — a location where stock assessments prepared by NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service need updating. Staff Scientist Dr. Reny Tyson Moore led the first of these photo-identification surveys to estimate dolphin abundance and to develop a catalog of distinctive individuals for inclusion in our collaborative Gulf-wide catalog. 

 

The surveys, funded by the Batchelor Foundation, are designed to establish background information for a little-studied dolphin population. You might remember us talking about beginning this program last fall, but Hurricane Irma had other plans and we had to cancel our work at that time, due to damage at our field base, the Rookery Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve.

In July we’ll be heading to Barataria Bay, Louisiana, a region that has suffered severe impacts from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. Our ongoing study of dolphins here in our Sarasota Bay provides a baseline of “normal” dolphin health that we can use to assess how the Barataria Bay population is doing eight years after the spill.  This year we are working as part of a Consortium for Advanced Research on Marine Mammal Health Assessment (CARMMHA) led by the National Marine Mammal Foundation, and we will be providing opportunities to test and refine cardiac assessment techniques to investigate possible heart health issues among dolphins in the northern Gulf.

 

We’ll also be assisting with ongoing research in Galveston Bay, Texas, in our efforts to support dolphin conservation in the Gulf of Mexico.

 

We’re hoping for fair winds and following seas in our research and travels and we hope you enjoy the same!

 

Randy Wells

Name: FB33, aka Saida Beth

Age: 36

Sex: Female

A Dolphin’s Life: Saida Beth is one of the SDRP’s best-known and most recognizable dolphins. She has been observed in and around Sarasota Bay more than 1,200 times since her birth in 1982. She is one of our most prolific dolphins and has given birth to 10 calves (though not all of them have survived). That number ties with FB25 for the most observed births for females in the Sarasota dolphin community that we monitor. Saida Beth’s last calf was born in 2013, so it’s possible that she could have a record 11th calf this summer.

The Sarasota Dolphin Research Program (SDRP) is a collaboration dedicated to dolphin research, conservation and education.  

 

It began in 1970 at Mote Marine Laboratory when Blair Irvine and high school student Randy Wells started a pilot tagging study to find out whether dolphins on Florida's central west coast remained in the area or traveled more widely. In 1974, with a contract from the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission, they were joined by Michael Scott and expanded the study with radio-telemetry.

 

Their subsequent discovery of long-term dolphin residency set the stage for today's efforts by demonstrating opportunities to study individually identifiable dolphins throughout their lives in a natural laboratory setting.  

Our work is conducted under the name "Sarasota Dolphin Research Program." This name ties together several organizations dedicated to ensuring the continuity of our long-term research, conservation and education efforts in Sarasota Bay and elsewhere.

The SDRP has been operated by the Chicago Zoological Society (CZS) since 1989. 

"Dolphin Biology Research Institute," is a Sarasota-based 501(c)3 nonprofit corporation established in 1982. It provides logistical support with research vessels, towing vehicles, computers, cameras, field equipment, etc. Since 1992, the program has been based at Mote Marine Laboratory on City Island in Sarasota Bay, with office, lab, storage and dock space and easy access to boat launching ramps within the home range of the Sarasota Bay resident dolphins.