Intern Perspective
Leonardo Berninsone, AquaMarina

The Argentine capture-release crew celebrates the release of their fourth Fransiscana dolphin in March 2006.

I come from a country that is primarily known for its food and music, but not many people know that is one of the three countries in the world where you can find the most endangered cetacean of the south, the Franciscana dolphin. For the past three years I have worked as a volunteer for AquaMarina, an Argentinean NGO whose goal is to conserve the Franciscana dolphin by working in association with local fishermen to reduce their bycatch in gillnets. Recently, we have also attached radio and satellite tags to seven of these dolphins to better understand their movement and ranging patterns. This work would not have been possible without the help and support of SDRP, which provided training during the capture-release health assessment in Sarasota Bay and helped during our tagging and tracking efforts in Argentina.

Initiating a new program of international training, the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program invited Franciscana Project leader Pablo Bordino to select a member of AquaMarina to work with SDRP projects in need of research assistants. The first project to benefit from this program was the radio-tracking and photographic identification study sponsored by the National Marine Fisheries Service and conducted by Brian Balmer in the panhandle of Florida. This is how I became an intern for nearly four months working in St. Joseph Bay. The first two weeks of my internship I was part of the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program crew that took part in the NOAA capture-release health assessment project. For the next two months I lived with Brian at the St. Joseph Bay Buffer Preserve, tracking the dolphins with attached radio tags while doing photo identification on all the photographed animals. Once all of the tags stopped transmitting, we began line transect photo-identification surveys throughout the bay and nearby waters. Before leaving the Buffer Preserve we participated in the Birding and Wildflower Festival. We gave talks and took people on tours inside the bay to teach them about our work. The final three weeks I lived in Sarasota, working at the SDRP base at Mote Marine Laboratory, helping staff and volunteers with the monthly Sarasota Bay surveys.

It's been a great experience for me to share so much time with Dr. Randy Wells and his team learning about the different techniques and ways of working with marine mammals in the field. Being trained by this group of professionals is like "a living dream" for people who work in small or developing countries. It's good to know that there are organizations like the Chicago Zoological Society that care about research teams who work in other areas of the world and support internships like mine. I think that the communication between different groups of researchers and the training of young researchers is crucial for achieving the common goal: preserving the marine environment. I believe that these experiences are going to help me and others in Argentina understand and conserve the Franciscana.