Welcome to Nicks 'n' Notches Online, the enewsletter of the
Sarasota Dolphin Research Program.
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RESEARCH, CONSERVATION
AND EDUCATION SINCE 1970.
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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 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.
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We're on Facebook... Are You?
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If you're not following us on Facebook, you might be missing out on some of our latest news, as well as interesting posts about research conducted by the SDRP and our collaborators. Upcoming posts will talk about what one of our team members has learned about humpback whales...
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Notes from the Field and Lab...
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Randall Wells, Ph.D., Director
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Summer has continued to be a busy time for the SDRP team, with ongoing monthly dolphin photographic surveys and surveys of the Sarasota Bay fish
 community. Several staff members have also recently returned from Barataria Bay, La., where we helped with dolphin health assessments to better understand how the Deepwater Horizon oil spill may be continuing to affect that Bay's dolphin population.
During the two-week project, led by the National Marine Mammal Foundation and NOAA/NOS, we gathered health samples from 38 dolphins, including several that we had assessed between 2011 and 2014.
Because the resident Sarasota Bay dolphins offer a 45-plus year baseline that can be used for comparisons to bottlenose dolphin populations in other locations, they help us understand the difference between normal situations and anomalous events such as the oil spill.
The Barataria Bay health
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This image shows a satellite-linked tag similar to those placed on the Barataria Bay dolphins
that we are currently tracking.
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assessments are allowing scientists and veterinarians to study the reproductive failure in dolphins there that has been evident since the spill. Only 20 percent of pregnancies are successful in Barataria Bay -- compared to the 83 percent success we see in the Sarasota Bay dolphin community. The SDRP is also providing tracking services for the 10 satellite-linked tags we deployed on dolphins during the project to determine whether ranging patterns have changed since 2011-2014. We will certainly keep you posted on new information from this project as we have new findings to report.
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I'd also like to congratulate Duke University Ph.D. candidate Goldie Phillips, a former SDRP intern, who successfully defended her dissertation titled
Passive acoustics: A multifaceted tool for marine mammal conservation, which was based on research she conducted with Sarasota Bay dolphins. Goldie, who calls Trinidad/Tobago home, hopes to take her newly minted doctorate and apply her training and research skills to marine mammal issues in her home country.
Educating new generations of marine mammal scientists is important for dolphin conservation efforts -- not just in the U.S. but worldwide -- and we're glad to help students such as Goldie develop a strong base of knowledge that they can apply to help species in their own local regions. We wish
Dr. Phillips well!
And finally, I'd like to make a personal request that you mark your calendars for the
2016 Giving Challenge, scheduled for Sept. 20-21, and consider making a donation to the
 Sarasota Dolphin Research Program during that time. The annual
Giving Challenge is a 24-hour event sponsored by the
Community Foundation of Sarasota County, with support strengthened by The Patterson Foundation, the Manatee Community Foundation, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, William G. and Marie Selby Foundation and the Herald-Tribune Media Group.
During the Challenge, donations made to participating nonprofit organizations -- such as the
Sarasota Dolphin Research Program -- may be eligible to receive matching funds from the Patterson Foundation. Here's how it works:
- All donations of $25 to $100 will be matched 1 to 1 -- a $50 donation becomes $100.
- Donations of $25 to $100 from new donors will be matched 2 to 1 -- a $50 donation becomes $150. You're considered a new donor if you did not give to SDRP through the Giving Challenge last year.
That means your contributions during the Giving Challenge could double in size and have an even greater impact on dolphin conservation -- not just locally but worldwide. (
Giving Challenge FAQs.)
This year, funds we raise through the
Giving Challenge will support a
new project that I've asked SDRP Postdoctoral Researcher Dr. Reny Tyson to lead. Please page down for
details and know that donations made to SDRP truly do support dolphin conservation worldwide -- a subject that has been my personal calling for more than four decades.
As always, I wish you good luck, good health and plenty of dolphin sightings in your future!
Randy
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 Revolutionizing Dolphin Identification: Our 2016
Giving Challenge Project
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We use the unique nicks and notches on dolphin dorsal fins to ID individuals in the Sarasota Bay community -- which can be quite a time-consuming process. Funds we raise through the 2016 Giving Challenge will help us work with Wild Me to develop software that automates the process. |
You've heard of automated facial recognition software, right? Well, we hope to raise enough funds through our annual
Giving Challenge project to develop automated fin recognition software in partnership with another nonprofit organization called
Wild Me.
The Giving Challenge offers an opportunity for nonprofit organizations like ours to receive matching grants for donations made between noon on Sept. 20 and noon Sept. 21.
This year, we are dedicating those dollars to a project that will help us work with computer vision experts and software developers to create a new tool that will revolutionize how we track dolphins in Sarasota Bay and beyond.
Right now, we have more than 685,000 images of dolphin fins in our database, including more than 5,500 individuals that have been verified and placed in our photographic catalog that covers the central west coast of Florida. We add thousands of new images to our database each year. That means every time we take a picture of a dolphin, a staff member has to compare it to our catalog to determine whether the animal is known to us or not. For unfamiliar or potentially new dolphins, it's a process that takes about nine hours -- time for one person to review the catalog and verify the animal in the picture and a second person to confirm.
But how many more animals could we identify -- and how many other tasks could we complete -- if we could automate this process? The need for automation is becoming even more pressing as our Gulf-wide collaborative bottlenose dolphin identification catalog called GoMDIS grows. To date, we have received and incorporated 18 catalogs into GoMDIS, including 13,630 dolphins and 22,586 images, with at least one catalog from each U.S. Gulf state as well as Cuba. Based on firm expressions of interest from others, we expect to receive catalogs from at least 15 more sites.
Our goal is to raise at least $7,500 so we can work with
Wild Me to support development of a new algorithm in
Wildbook that will help us automatically ID dolphins here in Sarasota Bay. The funds will help to support a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science at
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute dedicated to developing this tool. While
Wild Me has already supported the development of software that helps research teams track individual animals of other species -- from whale sharks, to manta rays to zebras -- they've been a little "stuck" by dolphins.
"Dolphins are harder because they don't have complex coloration or patterns like zebras or whale sharks or even humpback whale flukes. Instead, we rely on the nicks and notches on dolphin fins and -- because the images we take are often at different angles -- that can be problematic for developing the algorithms to automate the process of reliably identifying individual animals," says SDRP's Dr. Reny Tyson. "But because we have such an extensive photographic catalog of known individual dolphins in Sarasota Bay, we think we can work together to develop, test and refine the algorithms we need for successful dolphin identification."
Once developed, this software will not only help us more quickly ID Sarasota Bay dolphins, it will help our Gulf of Mexico dolphin research partners identify dolphins in their own regions and support similar dolphin research programs around the world --
Wild Me bases its tools on open-source software, which means the technology will be open to our dolphin research colleagues worldwide.
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Name: FB54 
Age: 45
Sex: Female
A Dolphin's Life: FB54 was born in 1971 and has been observed more than 1,413 times since 1975 -- the second highest number of sightings for any dolphin in our catalog.
Thanks to our extensive monitoring program, we also know that one of her calves, born in 2000 and nicknamed Tricia, has given birth to two of her grandcalves.
Ongoing studies conducted by members of the SDRP team and our partners have allowed us to learn a great deal about the community of dolphins that call Sarasota Bay home.
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Dolphin Biology Research Institute (DBA Sarasota Dolphin Research Program)
is a 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization dedicated to research and conservation of dolphins and their habitat. Employer Identification No. 59-2288387; Florida Charitable Contributions Solicitations Registration No. CH1172. A COPY OF THE OFFICIAL FLORIDA REGISTRATION AND FINANCIAL INFORMATION MAY BE OBTAINED FROM THE DIVISION OF CONSUMER SERVICES BY CALLING TOLL-FREE (800-435-7352) WITHIN THE STATE OR AT WWW.FRESHFROMFLORIDA.COM. REGISTRATION DOES NOT IMPLY ENDORSEMENT, APPROVAL, OR RECOMMENDATION BY THE STATE. THIS ORGANIZATION RETAINS 100% OF ALL CONTRIBUTIONS RECEIVED.
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