Page 21 - Gateways_2017_Fall

THE SARASOTA DOLPHIN
Dolphins
RESEARCH PROGRAM HAS
Undstanding
Undstanding Dolphins SHAPED DOLPHIN CARE AND
CONSERVATION EFFORTS
FOR NEARLY FIVE DECADES

Leaps and
Leaps and Bounds

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o those of us who work to protect the natural world,
T 1970 was momentous. That year stands out for the first
celebration of Earth Day. In a manner somewhat less
conspicuous than that of the burgeoning environmental
movement, however, 1970 was also the year a 16-year-
old high school student named Randy Wells joined
forces with Blair Irvine, then a researcher at Florida’s
Mote Marine Laboratory, to initiate what would become
the world’s longest-running study of a population of
dolphins in the wild. Later in the 1970s, Wells would
take over as director of the study, which evolved into
the Chicago Zoological Society’s Sarasota Dolphin
ResearchProgram.
Today, the program is one of the world’s definitive
models for using scientific knowledge for the care
of a species in the wild and in managed settings, as
well as for large-scale conservation action. It acts as
a complicated version of a genealogy that charts not
only the social and familial relationships of ancestor
and contemporary dolphins but also their health and
behavior, ultimately documenting the ecology of up
to five concurrent generations of bottlenose dolphins
living in Sarasota Bay off the western coast of Florida.
Bottlenose dolphins leap out of the water along
Florida’s western coast, where the Chicago
Zoological Society’s Sarasota Dolphin Research
Program conducts the world’s longest-running
study of a wild dolphin population.
BROOKFIELD ZOO | FALL 2017 21