In late fall, a fiberglass outboard fishing boat skimmed across Sarasota Bay, on Florida’s coast along the Gulf of Mexico, carrying six riders, all craning their necks at the water.
Suddenly the boat veered and slowed as one of the riders pointed to the treasure they had been seeking: the telltale dorsal fins of several bottlenose dolphins. The dolphins were milling at the water’s surface in the shallows of a sandbar.
“There’s Otter,” announced Randy Wells, pointing to the fin of a big male dolphin. “That means Stripe has to be around here too.”
“There’s No. 182, 175 and 87 and her calf. There’s Clair and her calf,” he continued, pointing to the fins of four females and two calves.
Wells, 47, a population biologist for the Brookfield Zoo in west suburban Brookfield, is to bottlenose dolphins what Jane Goodall is to chimpanzees. For 30 years he has directed the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program, and it is largely because of his efforts that intriguing new knowledge has come to light about some of the smartest marine creatures.
Wells, his staff and visiting scientists track the activities of the 120 bottlenose dolphins that live year-round in 50 square miles of the bay. They also have identified and compiled information on 2,500 dolphins that visit the bay occasionally or live in adjacent waters.
It amounts to science’s first systematic, long-term look at a wild population of a cetacean species (whales, dolphins and porpoises).
On this particular outing, the boat idled next to the dolphin band as the swift and graceful animals hunted and chased fish along the sandy bottom. Various members of the boat’s crew sprang into businesslike action. Somebody shouted out the water temperature, another the exact location and a third hurriedly jotted the data on a clipboard. One did a quick analysis of the water’s salinity. Another photographed the fins for later permanent, foolproof identification of the dolphins.
In the animal kingdom, few species can match dolphins for intelligence. Through various beeps, whistles and sonarlike echolocation skills, they communicate with one another. Sex-obsessed and highly social, females live most of their lives in organized groups, males seek out other males for lifelong unions and all honor family by keeping in touch with relatives through visits.
“This band here,” Wells said on this fall day as he looked upon the milling dolphins from his boat, “is representative of the four generations we’ve been observing over the years. Clair is Granny’s granddaughter. Granny was 50 years old when she died in 1994 and was one of the first dolphins we met when we started studying them.
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“Granny had three surviving daughters, Genie, Merrily and FB3. Genie’s daughter is Clair, and Clair had this calf two years ago, so now you have four generations. Clair’s two aunts have each had two kids, so Clair has cousins running around the bay too.
“If they were killer whales or elephants, we’d expect to see all of Granny’s female relatives living together all the time, but that’s not what we see in bottlenose dolphin society. They may come together from time to time, but they have more fluid social arrangements. Unless they are raising calves the same age, the possibility that they will spend a large amount of time together is low.”
Wells and his staff know the 120 Sarasota dolphins so well that they can identify them instantaneously by seeing the profile of their dorsal fins. Each is slightly different in shape and marked by telltale nicks, deformities or odd colorations.
Many of the names that have been assigned to the dolphins refer to those deformities: Blacktip Double Dip, Dr. Squarenotch, Fattop, Jagged Mamma, Jimmy Durante, Riptorn, Sawblade, Pair o’ Nicks, Racing Stripe.
Racing Stripe is another large adult male and companion to Otter, the lone male found swimming with Clair’s band last fall. Many male dolphins as young adults pair up with another adult and swim together for the rest of their lives as inseparable couples. Racing Stripe and Otter are one such pair bond in Sarasota Bay.
Male adult dolphins such as Otter don’t usually hang around female-dominated bands unless they are looking for female companions, but pair bonds usually go on those expeditions together. Wells was initially puzzled to see Otter in the female group by himself. After two hours of watching, Wells was relieved when Racing Stripe showed up.
Most research of wild animal populations necessarily takes place far from civilization, in remote forests and plains where the animals live. Sarasota’s bottlenose dolphins happen to live right at the end of the docks of all manner of retirement bungalows, flamboyant mansions, tacky motels and high-rise hotels and condominiums that have sprung up along the bay in this century.
The research program began as a temporary project in 1970, an effort by biologist Blair Irvine to capture, tag and release 12 dolphins through Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota. Wells, who moved to Sarasota as a teenager with his family from Peoria, was still in high school and had been working as a volunteer at Mote, and he helped Irvine with the initial tagging.
The project attracted enough attention that it soon became a permanent part of the agenda at Mote, a privately funded research and aquarium facility.
Wells went on to get a doctorate in biology at the University of California at Santa Cruz under the tutelage of the century’s most celebrated marine mammal expert, the late Ken Norris. He continued his work in Sarasota as a graduate student and became the program’s director after receiving his PhD.
“Having a 30-year database on a population of a single species, tracking individual animals for that long, as the Sarasota program has, is extremely rare,” said John Reynolds, chairman of the Marine Mammal Commission, a federal panel that oversees marine mammal research, including the Sarasota program.
Wells’ research is invaluable, Reynolds said, for government agencies struggling to devise workable policies protecting ocean wildlife.
Humans have been usurping Sarasota’s beaches and mangrove shorelines for real estate. They have been pouring toxic sewage into the water. The 34,000 pleasure boats registered there mean dolphins meet a boat once a minute in daylight hours. Post-mortems on dolphin carcasses point to a variety of human-caused afflictions, from toxic poisoning to grievous injuries from boat propellers.
Dying beds of seagrass have meant disappearing fish sources for dolphins to feed on. Wells has seen dolphins vomiting up plastic supermarket bags that they mistook for jellyfish in the water.
The popular perception is that dolphins are docile animals and friendly to humans. In fact, they are top predators in a violent undersea world, living in patterns similar in some way to that of lions in Africa. Not fond of humans, they try to avoid them.
There is evidence that increasing proximity to human culture is altering dolphin culture. A dolphin known as Beggar is perhaps the most visible of the Sarasota dolphins. Never seen anymore in the company of other dolphins, he hangs out in a narrow inlet at the south end of the bay to beg from passing boats. He has been seen consuming Twinkies, corn chips, bananas, bologna, sardines, sandwiches, beer, bait and frozen shrimp.
“Dolphins will bite people,” said Wells, “We have seen a number of people bitten by Beggar when they stuck their hands in the water with no food. Once, a woman was in the water trying to swim with Beggar, and he grabbed her around the leg and pulled her under, lacerating her skin, which resulted in a bad infection.”
Of the project as a whole, said Reynolds, “Randy’s work gives us a real snapshot of the biology of a small coastal cetacean that allows us to make wise management decisions to conserve (wild) bottlenose dolphins and other dolphin species.”
Virtually nothing is known about most whales and dolphins. There still are species of whales living in the oceans that no human has ever seen alive, known to science only by occasional skeletons that wash ashore, such as the skulls of 30-foot beaked whales that have been found on beaches in Australia and South Africa.
Wells’ program has made the Sarasota dolphins the most documented cetaceans in the world, its archives filled with hundreds of volumes of massed research and 150,000 archived photos. For visiting scholars, it is a priceless resource.
“Randy’s program is the best situation I know of, because of the background information they have amassed on the individual dolphins,” said Peter Tyack, a researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts who is the leading authority on whale and dolphin vocalization and communication.
Though Wells and his staff catch the dolphins briefly once a year for blood samples and physical examinations, most of their program’s research is conducted by almost daily visual observations from boats.
The female bands they watch generally remain in relatively small portions of the bay, never venturing far afield from the few square miles where they hunt and forage.
The males travel all over the bay and into the gulf, usually as pair bonds. They’re looking for food as well as female companionship. When a pair of males spot a female who is sexually receptive, they cull her out of her band and spend hours or days with her, one wooing her while the other guards against any other males getting too near.
Serious mating takes place in April, May and June, when females are most fertile. If they become pregnant, they give birth almost exactly a year later.
Just-for-fun mating takes place all year long.
“Sex to a dolphin is what a handshake is to humans,” the late Ken Norris, dolphin savant and Wells’ mentor, used to say.
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Though Wells works for and is paid by Brookfield Zoo, he lives and works most of the time in Sarasota, continuing to base his research from Mote. But he does come to the Chicago area every other month to work with the bottlenose dolphins at Brookfield’s Seven Seas facility.
The founding members of the Brookfield dolphin colony are from Sarasota. Indeed, most of what was known about dolphin physiology and social behavior prior to the Sarasota program came from studying captive dolphins.
But now information gathered in the wild by Wells and his colleagues is used to better look after the zoo colonies. It has helped to boost captive-breeding success rates to the point that zoos no longer collect wild bottlenose dolphins.
In the late 1980s, Brookfield director George Rabb, a renowned international leader in the cause of species survival and conservation, was so impressed with Wells’ work that he hired Wells and took on some of Wells’ operational expenses.
“It has meant everything to us,” said Wells of his Brookfield connection. “It is very, very difficult to get funding for cetacean research. We get help from others, too, but Brookfield allowed us to do it right.”