I ask Dr. Randy Wells if he ever gets bored of the same routine.

Since 1970, Wells has skimmed across Sarasota Bay in a small powerboat to survey our famous bottlenose dolphin population as part of the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program, the longest-running wild dolphin study in the world. Wells, a marine scientist and the 71-year-old director of the dolphin program, now white-haired and sun-spotted from all his years on the water, has been a part of this program since the beginning. 

He answers my question with what I learn is his minimalist approach—speaking in short phrases with clinical precision. “No.”

I am on a boat with Wells on a sunny June morning, idling near the recently reopened Midnight Pass, watching two of Sarasota’s 170 resident dolphins chasing prey in the shallows by some mangroves. We’re on a photographic identification survey trip. The water is unusually clear for these typically murky estuarine waters. It takes just moments for Wells and his two-person crew to identify the dolphins based solely on the markings on their dorsal fins, which are marine mammal fingerprints. From the unique shape of indents, the crew identifies the larger dolphin as 47-year-old FB25 and the smaller one as her 10th calf, nine-year-old C250. On average, calves stay with their mothers for three to six years, Wells tells me. He’s known FB25 since 1984, when she was about six, and has known C250 since he was born. These two hadn’t been seen together in years. We’d happened upon a happy reunion. The crew takes photos and jots down coordinates to add to its massive database.

Even after more than half a century, thousands of surveys and over a million photographs in Sarasota’s waters documenting our native dolphins, Wells’ fascination hasn’t waned in the slightest. “We’ve been at this for 55 years,” he says. “They’ve been around for 25 million years. They have figured out a lot of different ways to make a living and survive in the aquatic environment that’s right at our back door. Uncovering the variability in what they do and how they’re able to find solutions is endlessly fascinating.”

Humans have been mesmerized by dolphins for millennia. Back in 1500 B.C.E., the artifacts of Minoan seafarers of the Mediterranean showed murals of people riding on the backs of dolphin-like creatures. Poseidon, the Greek god of the sea, was often depicted as being surrounded by dolphins who did his bidding. Today, some of us compare dolphin brain size and abilities to humans’ brain capacity and treat them like intellectual equals. New Age evangelists believe that dolphins use their echolocation—a biological sonar system of sounds and echoes used to navigate and find food—to communicate with the fetuses of pregnant women and imbue them with magical healing powers.

But Wells does not entertain such foolishness. He never speculates on the mystical powers of dolphins, nor does he desire some kind of cartoonish friendship with them. He prefers his distant intimacy. His fascination is purely scientific and, try as I may, he refuses to anthropomorphize.

“You have no idea what’s going on in their heads,” he says. “Their brains are so different from ours. It’s easy to both care about the animals and maintain a level of scientific objectivity. The minute I lose a level of scientific objectivity, the data I’m collecting is suspect. Being able to collect data that is objective and has credibility is the most crucial thing for being able to make a difference for the animals.”

And what is the difference Wells wants to make? He wants people to understand dolphins­­—and to ensure their survival and the health of their ecosystem. It’s a tall order in our rapidly developing coastal area.

While we can’t know for certain, it’s possible dolphins began using Sarasota Bay as soon as it formed and became suitable habitat several thousand years ago. Their territory ranges from the southern edge of Tampa Bay to Terra Ceia Bay to the Manatee River to the north tip of Anna Maria, then southward to the Venice inlet.

The Sarasota Dolphin Research Program (SDRP) was founded by Blair Irvine, a dolphin trainer for the U.S. Navy. In those first two years (1970-1972), SDRP was a pilot study at Mote Marine Laboratory to answer questions about dolphin behavior, among other topics. Irvine saw Sarasota Bay as the perfect “natural laboratory” to study bottlenose dolphins. Sarasota Bay is enclosed and sheltered, which keeps it calmer, and it’s shallow–ideal for watching dolphins since so much of what they do is near the surface of the water.

By 1989 and after years of hopping from one “administrative home” to another, SDRP had established itself as a serious long-term research and conservation program, which required support beyond grants, contracts and philanthropy, Wells says. Brookfield Zoo Chicago (formerly Chicago Zoological Society) gave the dolphin project the support and home that it needed. SDRP now uses space at Mote and collaborates with Mote programs, such as Mote’s Stranding Investigations Program that rescues dolphins in distress.

In addition to research, conservation and rescue, SDRP trains other researchers. Sarasota Bay dolphins have become a reference population, and Wells and his team share the program’s data about this long-term resident dolphin community with other programs around the world. It’s especially important to at-risk populations of dolphins.

For example, the information collected in Sarasota Bay helped with conservation efforts for the dolphins impacted by the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe in 2010, when a BP oil rig exploded and 4 million gallons of oil flowed from the well into the Gulf. Wells and his team used the Sarasota dolphin data on health as a reference to evaluate the health of the impacted dolphins in Barataria Bay, Louisiana, close to the BP disaster. The Sarasota dolphin project numbers proved there had been a significant decline in the Barataria Bay dolphins’ health, survival and reproduction, which contributed to BP going to the negotiation table rather than carrying out a prolonged court battle that could have had terrible public relations consequences for BP and its oil executives.

Wells was a 16-year-old research assistant at Mote Marine in 1970, the year that SDRP started. His parents had moved to Sarasota from Illinois after years of vacationing here when Wells was in high school. “They came down and set up shop,” he says. “And I was able to pursue interests that I’d only been able to pursue on vacations and in books prior to that.” Even in the landlocked Midwest, Wells was always interested in the sea. “I guess there was always water in my blood,” he says.

Mote Marine was already one of the best shark research labs in the world. The first project that Wells was involved with looked at the interactions between sharks and dolphins. There’s a myth that persists to this day about dolphins: If you see a dolphin in the water, that means there are no sharks because dolphins and sharks are natural enemies, and the dolphins will chase the sharks away. Irvine was interested in the interactions between sharks and dolphins. So, from 1970 to 1971, he experimented with a wild-caught dolphin at Mote. He and his team put the dolphin in a tank with live species of sharks to see if they could train the dolphin to keep sharks away from divers. Not a success.

“What we found was that, no, dolphins and sharks are probably out [in the water] coexisting all the time,” Wells says, “which is not too surprising for animals that have coexisted for millions and millions of years.”

Irvine wasn’t the only scientist who thought dolphins might have powers beyond their means. In 1964, the American government spent millions of dollars and countless hours on a secret CIA program called Project OXYGAS, which imagined that dolphins could aid in Cold War subterfuge. Another CIA project proposed that two captured wild dolphins infiltrate enemy territory while carrying a payload of explosives that would attach to enemy ships, then return safely to base. A February 1965 CIA document suggested that dolphins might have been trained to use mini-nuclear bombs. Throughout the 1960s, NASA funded the work of American neuroscientist John C. Lilly, who studied the cognition and communication of dolphins. The hope was that we could learn to talk to dolphins—who were thought to have near human intelligence—so we could also talk to alien life we might encounter in space. When this project also failed, Dr. Lilly started giving the dolphins LSD in hopes that it might inspire some cognitive breakthroughs. It did not.

Wells, who is still interested in shark-dolphin interactions, although not in a mystical, psychedelic way, is among the most highly regarded cetologists (a scientist who studies whales, dolphins and porpoises) in the world. He also might be one of the humblest. When I suggest he is to bottlenose dolphins what world-renowned primatologist Jane Goodall is to chimps, he dismisses it. “I think Jane Goodall would probably be offended,” he says.

With us on the boat this day are staff scientists Katie McHugh and lab manager and senior researcher Jason Allen. Both have worked with Wells for almost 25 years—McHugh starting as an intern undergraduate at Stanford University, and Allen as an intern undergraduate at Eckerd College—and consider themselves lucky. Wells’ reputation in the marine mammal community was already known around the globe when they joined. “He devotes everything to this program. He gets the best team together that he can and gets the best out of us,” McHugh says. “He makes everyone feel like family.”

Scientific objectivity aside, Sarasota Bay dolphins are Wells’ family, too.

The oldest recorded bottlenose dolphin in Sarasota Bay was 67 years old. She disappeared in 2017 and is presumed dead. The current oldest living dolphin in Sarasota Bay is 56—nearly as old as the program itself. Because Wells has been working at the SDRP for 55 years, he knows all 170 dolphins—their childhoods, their tragedies, their friends and their families.

Wells, of course, would never describe a dolphin’s personality like he would a human being’s.

Here’s what he will say. “We observe the transmission of knowledge [and] skills from one generation to the next through maternal lineages,” he explains. “It is especially obvious watching mothers teach feeding behaviors to their calves, just as they were taught by their mothers. In some cases, this transmission of knowledge is not optimal, as when mothers teach their calves to approach boats and humans for food. Certain lineages have lost most of their members across three or more documented generations due to those adverse human interactions.”

Some mothers have apparently done better. Wells has witnessed dolphins “de-heading” catfish—“a great adaptation for being able to take advantage of an otherwise dangerous potential food,” he says.

But certain ordeals can make dolphin individuals stand out, even if Wells won’t assign them personalities. In 2010, the SDRP caught FB25 (the same dolphin we’d seen in Midnight Pass and has been seen 1,041 times since 1984) and her 9-month-old calf Nellie and removed a plastic line that had embedded in Nellie’s head. FB25’s older son, Bill, was with her that day in 2010. “Six years to the day after that, in 2016, we rescued Bill from an entanglement in a crab trap float line off Venice,” Wells says. “Nellie has gone on to produce her own calves, thanks to the rescue. These stories make these animals ’pop’ as individuals for us.”

What makes Sarasota Bay “pop” is just how much is known about the dolphins that live here. “No place else in the world has there been such a focus on learning about these animals and about their lives,” Wells says. “So the idea that you have a long-term resident community of dolphins, one that’s been present across generations—across decades of animals that have very long lifespans—provides you with opportunities to learn a great deal from this well-known cast of characters.”

Wells and his team have established that males form “a strong pair-bond, an alliance upon reaching sexual maturity, and the pairs often remain intact for as long as they are alive,” he says. The SDRP has also discovered that each dolphin has his or her own signature whistle, which serves as a name for that individual.

Knowing them as well as they do, all members of the SDRP want to protect the well-being of these dolphin families. So when we were gently cruising to the next survey area and a sleek speed boat with twin engines piloted by a group of young people whipped in front of us, Wells shook his head. He told me that a week before my trip with the dolphin team, they’d found a dead young male dolphin in Palma Sola Bay. They were still waiting for the necropsy, but all signs pointed to a blunt collision to the head, likely from a personal watercraft—or, as most of us know it, a jet ski.

According to Mote Marine Laboratory’s Stranding Investigations Program, between 1985 and 2020, 5 percent of dolphin deaths were due to being struck by vessels. A 2001 study concluded that dolphins in Sarasota Bay are subject to a powerboat passing within 100 meters of them every six minutes during daylight hours.

Another 20 percent of all dolphin deaths are due to interactions with fishing gear. The three kinds of fishing activities that most impact dolphins are recreational hook and line angling, crab pots, and, to a much lesser extent, gillnets. Dolphins accidentally consume fishing gear, get entangled and drown, or the fishing gear cuts into the dolphin’s soft skin and causes infections.

“That’s 25 percent of all deaths caused by preventable human interaction,” Wells says.

The number of dolphin deaths as a result of interactions with humans should be zero.

Wells says people need to understand that there are no identifiable conditions under which dolphins would leave their long-term community home range. “They ride out whatever situation they encounter,” he says. “These animals are learning to deal with our development of new technology, such as new boating craft. They are learning to compensate in the wake of severe red tide events, where we have measured losses of greater than 75 percent of the primary prey fish they eat.”

Humans, he says, are having fun. We don’t need the bay for survival. “There should be degrees of freedom available for [people] to watch out for the animals in the ecosystem, the animals that are around them, and not put them at risk,” he says.

The solutions are relatively simple and already available. Just follow the rules. “The manatee speed zones are there for a reason,” Wells says. “Research we’ve done on manatees has shown that [speed zones] are a very good way of reducing manatee injuries and contact with vessels. Respect the speed limits. Don’t go high speed over shallow water habitat where you’re going to hit whatever is below you. Use some common sense and have some respect for the environment.”

Wells was instructed at the beginning of his career that he would lose scientific objectivity if he did anything other than give dolphins an identifying number, but still, he tells me, “We’ve learned enough over the decades to know that these are individuals, that they have individual histories that we’ve been able to document, that they have dramas in their lives, that they have families out in the area.”

He recounts one particular dolphin drama. Normally, rescues of imperiled dolphins require cutting through lots of red tape. When Wells and his crew see a dolphin tangled in fishing gear, they must document it and send in a report to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to get approval to put a large team together to rescue the animal, lest they violate the Marine Mammal Protection Act. But back in 1996, there was an early rescue that didn’t require such a large team.

“There was a seven-year-old female we’d known since she was born who was trailing fishing line behind her,” Wells says. “It was wrapped around her tail stock and her fluke, with several large balls of line dragging behind her as a sea anchor, and was cutting into the leading edge of her fluke.” Wells got quick permission from NOAA to rescue the dolphin and pulled the boat up close to her. He began to cut away the line and recover it, but some strands remained. He and his team spent the next half hour with her riding the bow of the small boat.

“She rode up there as we tried to use the boat hook to get the remaining strands [of fishing line] off,” Wells remembers. “She would roll on her side and look up at us as we were putting the pole into the water to try to get hold of the line. Typically, when someone does that with a dolphin riding at the bow, the dolphin goes away from the bow and won’t come back. But it was a very different response from what we had seen any time previously with animals that we had worked with.”

It was the most emotion I’d seen Wells display. Did he think the dolphin understood that Wells and his crew were trying to save her? Did he think the dolphin trusted them and was grateful? But after spending all this time talking with Wells about not speculating on the interior lives of other animals, I wasn’t about to make any assumptions about his private inner world. I remember he’d asked me earlier that day, “Why can’t we just appreciate dolphins for how well they’re doing, what they do, and how interesting it is?” Their unchangeable smiles are just a fact of their anatomy, not an indication of their frame of mind, he says.

It was time to head back to Mote Marine. We had been on the boat for five hours and spotted four different dolphins, fewer than an average expedition. Wells apologized to me for not seeing more. Did he think I was bored? I wasn’t.

Dangerous Times: Four Modern Risks to Dolphins

Boat propellers aren’t the only big threat to Sarasota’s dolphins. Here are four manmade events causing harm to our marine mammals.

Excessive Noise From Gas-Powered Watercraft

Noise from these vessels interferes with dolphins’ activities and disturbs them. Sound waves travel five times faster and much farther in water than in air. Since dolphins rely on echolocation to locate food and communicate with each other, this additional noise masks important sounds, like fish sounds and other acoustic cues.

Climate Change

As a consequence of rising water temperatures, some dolphins have thinner blubber layers. Because fat tissue stores energy and water, dolphins living in warmer water without this storage capacity may struggle during food shortages. Thinner blubber might also lead to higher concentrations of environmental contaminants and reduce the fatty protective layer that shields dolphins from predators.

Pollution

Residential, commercial and industrial chemicals that spill into waterways are found in nearly every organism. As top predators, dolphins feed on fish that have already ingested toxic pollutants. Over time, these harmful chemicals accumulate in very high concentrations in dolphins’ fatty tissues.

Red Tide

While dolphins appear not to suffer the toxicological effects of red tide to the same degree as other animals, they do suffer from “lagged ecological effects.” Two percent of our local dolphins died in 2006 on the heels of a severe red tide outbreak. During the 2018-19 red tide, more than 75 percent of all dolphin prey fish died. The loss of dolphin prey fish can lead to health issues (especially for young calves) and increased interactions with humans and sharks, who are also vying for the remaining prey fish in the bay.