Beginning in the 1980’s, the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program pioneered the concept of population-level health assessments of free-ranging bottlenose dolphins.  The impetus for developing this approach of safely capturing, examining, sampling, and releasing wild bottlenose dolphins to evaluate their health derived from the increasing occurrence of large-scale dolphin mortality events around the world.  We were responsive to a need to better define health in wild dolphins, and to identify health problems proactively, before mortalities occur.  Based in large part on the success of our approach, several health assessment operations are currently being conducted by other organizations along the Atlantic coast of the United States, and other projects are in the planning stages.   In particular, the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program has been asked to participate in plans being developed to investigate the population of dolphins in the region of a large scale mortality event in Spring 2004 in the Florida panhandle, in the vicinity of St. Joseph Bay.  More than 100 dolphins died over a period of several weeks.  While preliminary analyses point toward the involvement of brevetoxin, many questions remain unresolved.  We also participated in a recent reconnaissance trip to the Upper Gulf of California with Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho to explore the possibility of a health assessment project in collaboration with Mexican colleagues.  One of the factors of interest in this area is potential effect from the near cessation of flow of the Colorado River into the Gulf.