Bottlenose dolphins are threatened by monofilament or braided fishing lines in the water, and by crab trap float lines. In 2011, operating at the request of Federal authorities, staff from the SDRP led or participated in 3 rescue attempts involving entangled dolphins. Most often, a dolphin requiring a rescue is entangled, and its swimming movements [...]

Rescues of entangled dolphins, Deepwater Horizon oil spill-related research, and international conservation capacity building activities were added to our usual behavioral and ecological studies in 2011. You can read about them by downloading a pdf of our annual newsletter Nicks n Notches. It contains articles written by SDRP staff, students, visiting scientists, and current and former [...]

Living in only 9 deep pools, an estimated 85 critically endangered Irrawaddy dolphins remain in the Mekong River population. Formally, the range of the Irrawaddy dolphin  extended through river, lake, and delta waters extending from Laos through Cambodia into Vietnam. The range is now down to an isolated 190 km section of the Mekong River, [...]

Researchers are still learning about how marine mammals can return from a long deep dive without suffering the “bends.” Nitrogen, which is a gas at the surface, will dissolve in the blood with increasing pressure. So, as a dolphin or whale makes a deep dive, more and more nitrogen will dissolve in the blood as [...]

Franciscana dolphin: Southern Brazil Signals continued to be received through the end of November from two of the five Franciscana dolphins tagged with satellite-linked tags. The dolphins are exhibiting a very high degree of residency to a very small area within the bay. These highly endangered dolphins were tagged as part of a tri-national (Brazil-Argentina-USA) [...]

SDRP Director Randy Wells provides an interesting glimpse into the difficulty of mounting a highly successful dolphin rescue (below). Usually dolphin rescues are not nearly this easy. The life of a bottlenose dolphin calf was threatened by entangling fishing line. It was captured, freed of the line, and released 17 minutes later. The calf had [...]

Lacaziosis (Lacazia loboi) is a fungal skin disease that occurs naturally only in humans and dolphins. It was first reported in a dolphin in 1970 in Sarasota Bay by Blair Irvine, who co-authored the first scientific article on the disease in dolphins. Recent analyses of longitudinal photographs of diseased dolphins in Sarasota Bay indicate that [...]

A total of 11 oral or poster presentations on SDRP research are scheduled at the Society for Marine Mammalogy’s upcoming Conference in Tampa, FL, from November 27th to December 2nd, 2011. The topics include conservation efforts to reduce dolphin entanglement and public interactions, prey density and foraging, tagging and tracking, and physiology. SDRP staff Brian [...]