For more than half a century, Dr. Randy Wells has been as much a fixture of Sarasota Bay as the dolphin population he studies. He was 16 years old when he joined Mote Marine Laboratory as a research assistant in 1970, the same year Dr. Blair Irvine launched the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program (SDRP), and helped shape the fledgling effort from its earliest days. He became its longtime leader, and over the years the project has grown into the world’s longest-running study of a wild dolphin population, right in our backyard. 

For 26 of those years, Wells has been mentoring the scientist who would eventually stand beside him to help guide the program's future, one who shares a remarkably similar trajectory: Dr. Katie McHugh. McHugh arrived in Sarasota in 2000 as an SDRP intern, and came to the SDRP “with the level of maturity and dedication that most interns don't have,” Wells says. “When she says she's going to do something, she's she's going to do it right and do it well." 

So when Brookfield Zoo Chicago—the institution that has overseen the SDRP since 1989—announced that Wells would retire as director, effective July 1, McHugh's choice as his successor came as little surprise. For the past quarter-century, McHugh has become one of the program’s key scientific leaders, contributing to long-term dolphin population studies, advancing collaborative research efforts, expanding the SDRP’s conservation reach well beyond Florida waters, and—coming full circle—helping coordinate its internship programs.

“I couldn’t have imagined when I was a kid growing up in Michigan or even when I first came here as an intern in college that I would be the one running it later,” McHugh says. 

It’s a fitting path for someone whose fascination with marine life traces back to early childhood. “I still remember going to the New England Aquarium and staring into the Giant Ocean Tank which, at the time, was the largest tank in America,” she says. That curiosity eventually guided her academic path to Stanford University, where she earned both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Earth Systems, followed by an additional master’s and Ph.D. in Animal Behavior at the University of California Davis. Fieldwork during her doctoral research brought her back to Sarasota—and into Wells’ orbit.

The transition has been years in the making, with Wells and McHugh working closely on a succession plan designed to preserve the continuity that has long defined the program. Through SDRP, generations of dolphins have been followed individually across their entire lives, creating an invaluable and unmatched record of behavior, health, social structure, reproduction, communication and human interaction. 

“There’s nowhere else with this depth and breadth of knowledge of a resident, multigenerational dolphin community," McHugh says. "There are animals here that were calves when I was an intern, juveniles when I did my Ph.D. observations, and now they’re moms. We've grown up getting to know their whole lives.” 

That dataset has transformed Sarasota Bay into what is often described as a natural laboratory. Wells has cultivated a global network of scientists, conservationists and students who came to Sarasota to learn research techniques and returned home to apply them elsewhere. Those collaborations have supported conservation efforts involving species ranging from South America's endangered franciscana dolphins to river dolphins in Southeast Asia and marine mammal populations in the Galápagos and Mediterranean.

One of the projects McHugh is looking forward to builds on a vision that Wells and Peter Tyack, a longtime collaborator and expert in bioacoustics, have pursued for decades.

"Back in 1985, Peter and I talked about wiring Sarasota Bay for sound," Wells says. Though the initial vocabulary sounds a bit antiquated today—"now it's all wireless," he says with a laugh—the technology has finally caught up to their 41-year-old dream. "The idea that we will be able to track individual dolphins based on their signature whistles from one site to another is really exciting and the culmination of that dream," he says.

Currently, the SDRP has been conducting acoustic monitoring through the Sarasota PALS (passive acoustic listening stations) Network, a twofold system that includes the Sarasota Bay Listening Network (SBLN) that continuously records underwater sounds, and the Sarasota Coast Acoustic Network (SCAN) that monitors signals from tags on animals. Researchers are working toward a public-facing platform that would combine and upgrade these networks, allowing users to locate, identify and hear dolphins in real time, ultimately encouraging better understanding of how sound shapes their world.

"It's a different way for people to engage with the local bay environment and the animals that are living there," McHugh says. "It will help people take that perspective of what it's like to be in a dolphin's world, and hopefully understand more about their needs and the threats they’re facing—and how we can help."

For Wells, retirement isn't really a departure. He will continue serving as director emeritus and remain active in marine mammal research and conservation through both the SDRP and the nonprofit Dolphin Biology Research Institute. Still, after 56 years spent leading a program that operates on a truly global, around-the-clock scale, the transition is a shift. As he steps back from the day-to-day administrative responsibilities, Wells hopes his legacy will be measured in the connections people have forged with the dolphins that share their home waters.

"I hope that during my tenure I was able to help people understand the dolphins in Sarasota Bay as their neighbors," he says. "They're residents in their backyard. They breathe the same air, swim in the same waters and eat the same fish. They live in complex family societies right alongside us. If I've helped move the needle on getting people to care in that way, then I feel like I can pass along the reins."