Nicks 'n' Notches Online
A monthly newsletter from the SDRP
May 2020
Field & Lab Notes
By Randy Wells, Ph.D., Director
Thank You for Your Support!

The 24 hours of the 2020 Giving Challenge presented by the Community Foundation of Sarasota County, with giving strengthened by The Patterson Foundation, are over. 

We're so honored and pleased to report that thanks to the kindness and generosity of 104 donors and the matching funds provided by The Patterson Foundation, we more than doubled our $12,000 goal and raised $26,000!
Watch a special message from Dr. Randy Wells — and his assistant, Spot!
That means we can replace one of our aging boat motors. We will use the additional funds to help replace a 20-year-old boat trailer needed for getting one of our boats to Barataria Bay, Louisiana, for a new project with the University of St Andrews and the National Marine Mammal Foundation, and perform repairs to our dolphin veterinary examination/fish sampling vessel. 

Thank you so much for your support! Every dollar raised through the 2020 Giving Challenge will help to support dolphin conservation here in Sarasota Bay and beyond!

I’m also pleased to announce that another Chicago Zoological Society supporter recently donated a 24-foot, twin-engine boat that will help us conduct offshore field research focused on gaining a better understanding of the health and movements of dolphins living over the West Florida Shelf.

Through a special exemption in Florida’s “Safer at Home” orders that allows for essential environmental monitoring, we’ve been able to continue our regular dolphin photographic identification population monitoring surveys and other research with Barancik Foundation support. Our small field teams are wearing protective masks, remaining in assigned parts of boats, handling only gear assigned to a single person and using an abundance of hand sanitizer. During April, they documented 68% of the members of the long-term resident Sarasota Bay community, a typical level for these monthly surveys.  

Staff and our colleagues are also working on manuscripts for a special issue of the open-access, peer-review journal  Frontiers in Marine Science  that will celebrate 50 years of the Chicago Zoological Society’s Sarasota Dolphin Research Program (CZS SDRP). We expect to publish 25 papers about our long-term research and key findings. Please look for that later this year. We also want to thank the CZS Women’s Board, the Mote Scientific Foundation and several other donors for supporting this special edition.

As we spend this year looking back on our accomplishments and planning for our 50 th  Anniversary celebration in October, we’re really honored to know that we have a supportive community focused on helping us gain a greater understanding of dolphins and ways we can work together to ensure dolphin communities survive and thrive.

Thank you again for your support!


Randy Wells
Please Take Our Survey
To help celebrate our 50th Anniversary later this year and better showcase all of our program’s activities and accomplishments over the last five decades, we’re undertaking a redesign of our website, sarasotadolphin.org .

What information do you find most interesting about our program? What do you most want to know about dolphins? We’d like to hear from you!

Please take a few minutes of your time to complete our short survey, which will help us as we create a new site for the Program.

Puzzling Out the Lives of Dolphins
We thought we’d change it up this month.

Instead of offering you a “Fin of the Month,” we thought we’d give you something a little more active to do as you stay in place!

Want More Dolphins? Follow Us on Social Media!
We’re on Facebook ( @sarasotadolphins ), Twitter ( @dolphinsarasota ) and Instagram ( @SarasotaDolphinResearchProgram ). Be sure to check us out and watch for these tags: #tursiopstuesday, #funfact, #history.
50 Years of Research,
Conservation and Education
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.
Dolphin Biology Research Institute (DBA Sarasota Dolphin Research Program), the corporation that we established in 1982 to continue our long-term dolphin research program in Sarasota Bay, is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization. Thus, your donation should be tax deductible.