Fun in the Sun at Turtle Fest 2024
Saturday was a beautiful day at Loggerhead Marinelife Center for the 19th annual Turtle Fest. Thousands attended the free family-friendly event. Turtle Fest focuses on promoting ocean conservation through educational interactive exhibits, music, art, shopping and games. Attendees strolled among booths filled with local artists and conservation groups. Guests were
Dolphin Research: Studying Family Trees
At the Wild Dolphin Project, we track individual animals throughout their entire lives and their family trees — who is related to who. Knowing how animals are animals are related allows us to understand more about their social structure, behavior, communication and more. On addition to our formal database, on
Research from the Sky: Drones and Dolphins
We’ve got new research out, in the journal Southeastern Naturalist. Our team analyzed drone video footage to help document the first-known case, to our knowledge, of two species of dolphins interacting off the Southeast coast of Florida, which highlights the value of drones in helping scientists collect previously-unavailable data, including
Animal Behavior: interspecies versus intraspecific interactions
In the Bahamas, the Wild Dolphin Project led by Dr. Denise Herzing, studies both the common bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) and the Atlantic spotted dolphin (Stenella frontalis), who coexist on the sandbank. This means they are sympatric — occurring within the same geographic range. While the two species eat
Save the Dolphins: Looking Ahead to 2023
It’s almost the end of another year. Goodbye 2022. But, as we look to the new year, we want to be inspired about the ways we can help save wild dolphins and other marine mammals. We know the whales, dolphins, manatees, and polar bears are in trouble. Manatees are dying
Meet the Team: Captain Pete (Returns!)
After 7 years away, Captain Pete has returned to the Wild Dolphin Project! Captain Pete returns to the project with decades of experience, both with us and other vessels, holding a U.S. Coast Guard 1600-ton master license, open oceans. He filled in for our last two trips of the 2022
Dolphin Detective
Much of our long-term work studying dolphins in the Bahamas relies on identifying individuals in the population. By tracking individuals we can understand patterns in relationships, communication, and behavior differences between sexes and age classes, among many other things. To do this, sometimes requires a bit of detective work. We
Another Fourth Generation!
For 36 years, researchers with the Wild Dolphin Project have studied generations of dolphins in the Bahamas. As many of you know, it was founded in 1985 by our current research director, Denise Herzing, Ph.D. In 2016, the project reached a major milestone when the first fourth generation calf was
Meet Amanda, She’s One of a Kind.
In 1985, Denise Herzing founded The Wild Dolphin Project to study a community of wild Atlantic spotted dolphins in the Bahamas. That’s a long time to study one group of animals, which means that since time, Denise and other staff members, graduate students, colleagues, interns, and participants with the