As red tide kills marine life, this Herald-Tribune story from 2010 documents a 40-year effort by Mote Marine Laboratory to unravel the deepest mysteries of the species.

Note from Executive Editor and General Manager Matthew Sauer: The tragedy of the toll that red tide is taking on dolphins and other higher order animals in Southwest Florida got me thinking about a terrific story the Herald-Tribune's Billy Cox did in 2010 about Sarasota Bay's resident dolphin population.

The bay has one of the most studied dolphin populations anywhere in the globe. These intelligent and playful mammals made their home here long before any of us arrived — think 12,000 years, since the end of the Ice Age.

They aren't just individuals representing the species Tursiops truncatus, they are Jimmy Durante, Riptorn, Sharkbait and Sawblade. They aren't strangers, especially to researchers like those Sarasota Mote Marine Laboratory, they are family.

Unique dorsal-fin scarring, the result of everything from playing to boat collisions, means scientists know by sight more than 90 percent of the bay's residents.

It makes the havoc wreaked upon our region's dolphin population by the red tide toxin Karenia Brevis — reminiscent of outbreaks in 2004 and 2005, when 190 dolphins died — all the more sad and impactful.

Here is Cox's "A dolphin study like no other," so you can see exactly what I'm talking about.

As a rumbling thunderhead towers in from the north, the two oldest known dolphins in Sarasota Bay — Nicklo, 60, and BlacktipDoubledip, 57, are skirting danger in the flats off Mote Marine Laboratory.



The old females run so shallow their dorsal fins can’t submerge. It’s called sharking, and it could kill them. Their pursuit of mullet has lured them into stingray territory, and stingray wounds account for 10 percent of all dolphin fatalities in the bay.



We know this — as well as the hunters’ identities, their ages, who their families are — because they are catalogued in the largest scientific database on wild dolphins ever assembled.



Their histories reside in libraries of bones and DNA samples at Mote, in sighting maps, mortality graphs and prey distribution charts. Digital photo galleries of telltale dorsal fins compress the anonymity into serial numbers and nicknames like Riptorn, Sharkbait, Beggar and Sawblade. They have health charts and rap sheets and ever-expanding family trees.



Mote’s unparalleled project — it dispatches a fleet of five boats to collect water samples, study behaviors, eavesdrop on conversations via hydrophone and grab photos — is called the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program. A collaborative effort with the Chicago Zoological Society, the research has drawn inquisitive scientists from at least 23 nations.



This year marks the 40th anniversary of Mote’s campaign to part the veils of Sarasota’s dolphin society. Senior research scientist Randy Wells has run the show in its myriad incarnations since 1977.



Wells, 56, is considered one of the preeminent dolphin researchers in the world. He has directed or co-directed more than 150 marine mammal projects, penned or co-written four related books and completed 100-plus journal articles and book chapters.



But as Wells monitors what he calls “fish-whacking” from the helm of his boat, he admits his adventure has barely scratched the surface of the hidden world.



Like border collies, Nicklo and Blacktip work in tandem to steer their quarry into more negotiable depths, then break off in opposite directions. The darkening waters between them churn with panic and glints of piscine silver.



Wielding muscular flukes with surgical precision and the strength of archers, the dolphins pound the water and turn live mullet into projectiles. The dazed fish soar through the air, pinwheeling like cartoon characters. Too stunned to resist, the hunted go down one by one, vanishing in great gulps.



Variations of this ritual have likely been playing out in Sarasota Bay since the end of the Ice Age 12,000 years ago. (In fact, these Atlantic bottlenose dolphins are a long way from where their ancestors first began testing the water, somewhere in the India-Pakistan region, 50 million years back.)





Read more: Complete coverage of red tide in Southwest Florida

But even the most basic question — how long do dolphins live? — is a mystery. “I can’t tell you that,” replies Wells. “The best way would be to follow a cohort from the time they’re born to the time they die.”



After four decades of tracking the lives and deaths of an intelligent species that seems both ennobling and disconcertingly familiar, only one thing is clear:



We don’t know the half of what’s going down in our own backyard.



AT LEAST 4,000 DOLPHINS HAVE TROLLED THE waters from Fort Myers to St. Petersburg since 1970, according to Mote’s records. But only 150 have lingered long enough in Sarasota Bay, which spans Venice Inlet to southern Tampa Bay, to be considered residents.



Ninety-six percent of those residents “are recognizable to us,” says Wells, thanks to unique dorsal-fin scar patterns created by everything from horseplay to propeller blades.



Some broad observations:



Females can breed well into their 40s; Mote has charts on one family running five generations deep. The oldest female, according to a cross-section of tooth rings, is Nicklo, born in 1950. The oldest male, named Jimmy Durante because he has a dorsal shaped like the snout of the famous actor, was last seen in 2009 at age 51.



Also: It’s nasty in the bay. Stingray encounters are not the only danger; 31 percent of the dolphins carry shark-bite scars. The deadly morbillivirus, which wiped out an estimated 50 percent of the dolphin population along the mid-Atlantic seaboard in the 1980s, persists in the blood samples of some Sarasota Bay dolphins older than 28.



“It’s still out there and it’s still lethal,” Wells says. “The vast majority of bay dolphins are naive to the morbillivirus. If it were to flare up into epidemic proportions here it would be catastrophic.”



Furthermore, dolphins forage in water radically transformed from what their forebears knew a century ago, saturated as it is with heavy metals and other pollutants. Wells estimates speedboats capable of scrambling signature whistles and echolocation clicks pass to within 100 yards of a resident dolphin once every six minutes during daylight hours.



Decades after DDT pesticides and fire retardants called PCBs were banned in the U.S., those cancer-causing agents continue to lodge in dolphins’ blubber, milk and blood. Females apparently handle PCPs better than males. Males can accumulate up to 600 parts per million of those chemicals over a lifetime, while female levels drop to 15 parts per million after lactation. The bad news: That purge could account for the 75 percent mortality rate of first-born dolphins in Sarasota Bay, Wells says.



Then there was the disastrous red tide season of 2005, when 90 percent of the Sarasota dolphins’ prey was obliterated by the toxic algal bloom. The following year, apparently motivated by hunger, three of the resident dolphins suffered fatal ingestions of fishing gear.



Much more difficult to understand are the interpersonal relationships among dolphins themselves. Wells doesn’t call them pods; he describes “fission-fusion” societies populated with rotating memberships. Within that framework, Wells identifies three enduring social structures: nursing mothers with infants, posses of juveniles, and — curiously, perhaps — adult male pairs.



“Fifty-seven percent of the males will be in pairs,” Wells says. “In fact, males in pairs tend to exhibit the highest reproductive success.”



Homosexual relations between males are normal but not necessarily exclusive. “You see homosexual activity, heterosexual activity, sexual relations between relatives, everything,” Wells says.



But life for these dolphins isn’t one big romp in the bay. Blunt-trauma wounds to carcasses recovered locally suggest that, among many other things, dolphins will kill each other.



FOR WELLS, EMBARKING UPON THIS MASSIVE detective story required slogging through academic terrain that produced a Ph.D. in biology from the University of California-Santa Cruz and a post-doctoral fellowship at the prestigious Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. But Wells’ journey into the unknown was triggered by Sixties-era pop culture.



First there was “Flipper,” the TV series about a wild dolphin who busted crooks and submitted to pet-dog status as willingly as “Lassie.”



And then there were the books of John Lilly, the controversial psychoanalyst whose experiments with psychedelics and interspecies communication inspired the films “Altered States” and “Day of the Dolphin.” Lilly popularized public interest in dolphin consciousness with his contention that they could be taught English.



In 1970 Wells, then a junior at Sarasota’s Riverview High, applied to be a volunteer at Mote. More interested in sharks than in dolphins, the teenager wound up with an Office of Naval Research-financed, myth-busting experiment to see if dolphins could be trained to attack sharks.



A captive dolphin named Simo charged lemon, nurse and brown sharks upon command. But when penned up with a bull shark — a burly natural predator — Simo got rattled and shrank from its rival.



That military exercise was supervised by a civilian named Blair Irvine, who has since left marine biology to become a research scientist with the Oregon Center for Applied Science in Eugene. Irvine recalls trying to dissuade Wells from pursuing his dream of being a dolphin biologist because a) no such jobs existed back then, and b) chronic budget problems would bedevil him in the event he could even find work.



“I’m amazed at what he’s accomplished,” says Irvine, who volunteers for Mote’s annual dolphin health care roundups. “And to do it continuously over that length of time is unparalleled in the marine mammal community. You need somebody who’s a closer, somebody who can go out and keep that money flowing. And I’m not that person, and Randy’s not that person. Yet ...”



Long since disabused of Lilly’s aspirations for a breakthrough in dolphin communication, Wells went on to discover that the creatures were profoundly more complex than he imagined during his “Flipper” indoctrination. But now, in the midst of a recession, he spends more time chasing research dollars than he spends on the water.



Wells says federal funding sustains 90 percent of the Dolphin Research Program, which operated on a 2008 budget of $1.2 million. The 2009 economy pushed the total beneath $1 million, and this year’s budget is $720,000, 30 percent of which still needs to be secured. Private donations are critical. The administrative headaches might be intolerable, were it not for the thing that drew him here in the first place.



“What I’ve learned is that the curiosity still exists that led me to do science fairs and to volunteer at Mote,” Wells says. “It keeps me fueled and motivated, even when we’re running low on money. There’s always something new to learn.”



THEY ALL LOOK ALIKE TO THE UNTRAINED EYE.



But Mote’s researchers prefer to judge dolphins by their character.



The most visible of the lot — at least, on Sarasota Bay’s south end — is a notorious freeloader named Beggar.



After the red tide fish massacres of 2005, scientists noticed a number of adult dolphins hounding anglers for handouts and teaching their young to do likewise.



But Beggar is the most persistent, and largely responsible for the signs along local shorelines warning that feeding dolphins is illegal.



“He’s extremely bold,” Wells says. “He’s bitten people before. Some had to go to the hospital. People forget that these are wild animals. You’d be amazed at some of the things we find in dolphins’ stomachs. One woman said she lost her diamond ring to Beggar. She said, ‘When he dies, could you get it back for me?’”



On the flip side are creatures like Rose.



Rose, whose mother, BlacktipDoubledip, chases mullet with Nicklo, raised two calves named Bud and Petal. Rose so impressed Mote volunteer James Thorson that he named one of his twins after her.



“Rose was different, she was distinctive,” says Thorson, a Minneapolis attorney who volunteers for Mote once a year with dolphin health inspections.



“She tended to do a lot of foraging and hunting along the seawalls. She was easy to identify, and she was a very calm dolphin,” he recalls. “I just took a liking to her — she’d come real close to people and slow down and check you out, like maybe she was as curious as you were.”



Rose was killed by a stingray in 2004 at age 14. She now resides amid Mote’s Ruth DeLynn Osteological Cetacean Bone Collection.



The centerpiece of the well-lit little room is a bare table. The deceased are deposited individually into catalogued boxes on floor-to-ceiling shelves. Some 250 boxes ring this room alone, with another 150 more in storage across the hall. According to Wells, only 16 percent of the bones belong to resident dolphins. The rest were as transient as interstate drivers.



For the record-keepers at Mote, the remains of a dolphin known as MML0535 laid out on a slab in the summer of ’08 hinted at a life that was vaguely heroic.



Greg Early, who managed Mote’s stranding department at the time, could tell you that MML0535 was sighted 176 times before her carcass was discovered on the banks of Palma Sola Bay in October 2005, that she was a mother, and that she’d been bitten at least twice by sharks, once behind her dorsal and once between the flukes.



The gaping corrosion of her right eye socket showcases the results of a gruesome wound connected to her death. MML0535 was speared through or near the eye by a stingray, whose broken barb migrated slowly through her system and delivered a fatal perforation to her aorta.



What’s remarkable, Early says, is how MML0535 lived so long. Parts of her spinal column are fused from congenital scoliosis.



“She stopped growing at age 4,” Early says. “She was three-fourths of her normal size.”



Nevertheless, she managed to overcome her deformity, give birth to two healthy calves — C991 and C992 — and eke out a living for 18 years in pitiless Sarasota Bay, partially blind at the end.



Mote’s biologists resist ascribing human attributes to their subjects, but dolphins can test clinical detachment. Take an unforgettable scene, years ago, involving a new mother named Saida Beth, whose calf died within one day of delivery.



Researchers noticed Saida Beth repeatedly nudging her lifeless infant to the surface, circling and whistling “in a highly agitated manner,” recalls Wells.



The accompanying dolphins moved on, all except for Saida Beth’s own mother, Melba, who hung back amid Saida Beth’s futile attempts at revival.



“It’s tough when you see a mother with her dead baby,” Wells concedes. “You can’t help but be affected by it.”



SCIENTISTS BELIEVE THE DOLPHINS’ LONG AND twisted odyssey to Sarasota Bay likely began 55 million years ago. That’s when an Asian carnivore the size of a wolf, with hooves and a long tapered head, began its forays back to the sea.



It was called Pakicetus; paleontologists didn’t recover a full skeleton until 2001. Genetic connections between dolphins and land-dwellers like pigs and giraffes have long been established, but Pakicetus proved the missing link.



Within that amphibious mammal’s skull lay an inner-ear bone structure attenuated to hearing underwater, similar to those found in many of the 78 species of whales, dolphins and porpoises known as cetaceans.



“The crossover from land to a fully marine environment is one of the best documented major transitions we have,” says University of Florida paleontologist Richard Hurlbert.



Some 20 million to 30 million years ago, the ties to land were irreversibly severed. The astonishing adaptive features of echolocation turned oceans into hunting grounds, and cetaceans’ brain size began to eclipse that of their forebears.



But 12 million years ago, at about the time that Miocene creatures resembling modern dolphins emerged, they reached their saturation point, says Jim Mead of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.



“They peaked out. There were 87 genera of baleen whales,” says the curator of the Vertebrae Zoology Department. “Today we find 33 genera of toothed whales and six of the baleen whales. And the overall diversity across the board has been decreasing ever since.”



Lately, that shrinking diversity is being documented in real time. The most recent disappearance: the baiji, a Yangtze River dolphin squeezed into functional extinction by pressures like dynamite fishing and the massive Three Gorges Dam project.



“In 2006, China sent a representative over here,” Wells says. “They wanted to learn our techniques and adapt them for use in the Yangtze, but by then it was too late. To lose a species like that in our lifetime is pretty painful.”



BRUTE STRENGTH, SPEED, THE CUNNING OF predators — nowhere are dolphins’ formidable survival skills more in evidence than when they are cornered. People who accept the challenge can wind up bruised, cut, fractured, exhausted ... and exhilarated.



“It is exciting,” says commercial fisherman Larry Fulford while relaxing beneath the oak shade outside his shorefront home at the southern tip of the Myakka River. “It’s just like hunting, or a rodeo. You’ve got to lead ’em, and anticipate several moves ahead.”



Three generations deep into his trade and a dolphin hunter for nearly 30 years, the 58-year-old North Port resident conducts surveys for the National Marine Fisheries Service from New Jersey to Mississippi. There are safer ways to earn a living than on a commercial boat.



Sometime in the 1990s, as Fulford attempted to snare a lemon shark for science, a 7-footer slipped its netting and took a 33-stitch bite out of his calf. Infection set in and nearly took his leg. But that was nothing compared with the horrific way he had to save his father’s life in the 1980s.



He and his father, Thomas “Blue” Fulford, were fishing with purse seine nets three miles west of St. Petersburg when a rope attached to a plunging anchor wrapped around the senior Fulford’s ankle. The weight upended the older man and the pulley severed the ankle — almost. His son had to finish the job.



“Well, it twisted the foot right off the ankle and took it on out about three feet off the boat,” Fulford recalls in his slow drawl. “It was just more or less a piece of meat hanging on by a few tendons. We all carry pocket knives, so I guess that’s what I used to cut away the last tendons.”



Blue Fulford wound up losing most of the leg, but he may be alive today due to his son’s quick thinking — the sort of intuitive response critical to catching dolphins.



In Sarasota Bay, those spirited veterinary roundups are typically conducted in the early summer for the going charter rate, about $700 a day. Largely through Fulford’s efforts, “Over 85 percent have had health assessments,” says Mote biologist Jason Allen.



Physicals — which span blood work to dentistry — are usually completed within 45 minutes, and no dolphins under age 2 get hauled in. “Our number one concern,” Allen says, “is safety.”



But Fulford clearly loves the chase, when dolphins flag out at speeds of up to 25 mph to keep from being outflanked by his nets. “My boat, I’ll have to open it wide up,” he says.



Splitting two targeted dolphins from a larger pack and steering them into the hands of science also calls for finesse. Such operations can require nine to 11 vessels with anywhere from 50 to 100 scientists and volunteers to pull off. Fulford doesn’t always prevail.



“We’ve gotten right up on ’em and had ’em jump the nets three times before,” he says. “We’ve learned we had to give ’em more room.”



Fulford describes dolphins as “powerful, solid muscle” that can put up a fight “even when they know they’re beat.” In the Indian River Lagoon, for instance, he once saw a combative dolphin nearly drown a trapper after breaking her wrist and arm.



“I was standing in water ankle deep, not much farther away from here to that tree over yonder. That dolphin was beating her up and she was just a-hollerin,’” Fulford says.



He snaps his fingers. “It happened just that quick.”



But when it comes to roundups, the Sarasota Bay dolphins tend to be more compliant than those at other locales, maybe because they’re used to the drill.Fulford estimates he’s lost only three or four of the estimated 1,500 to 2,000 dolphins he captured over the years.



“Necropsies show they’ve had cancers or broken ribs or other pre-existing injuries,” he says.



“One of the biggest problems we’re seeing now, all over the place, is they’re eating food off bait hooks, or just plain old trash.



“The last one we caught at Harbor Branch in Melbourne had a fan belt that got around him on the outside and was cutting into him. We caught another one right here that had a full pair of spandex underwear slipped over his head.”



Although Fulford has spent years around dolphins, don’t ask him to get too analytical about their intelligence.



“I call ’em a fish, just to aggravate people,” Fulford says with a sly smile.



“Randy thinks there may be something more meaningful to them, but I think they’re just another fish, because that’s what the Bible tells us.



“They just happen to breathe air like us.”



SOME ASPECTS OF DOLPHINS DEFY CATEGORIZATION altogether. And some of the aesthetics— take Randy Wells’ acquaintance with everybody’s favorite dolphin, the tranquil, curious Rose — will never make it into the ledger.



His wife, Martha, knew Wells only through his books when she worked in public relations for the Chicago Zoological Society/Brookfield Zoo in 1998. She visited Mote on a fact-finding tour in July that year. Rose was the first dolphin she saw when he took her out for a scan of Sarasota Bay.



“Oh, it was a lot of fun,” she remembers. “An NBC crew was with us for an anniversary story about the program. Rose had just had a kid and nobody knew the gender yet. They were feeding south of the Siesta Key bridge and we all found out together — look! It’s a boy! They didn’t air that sequence.”



It was the beginning of a long romance. Martha and Randy designed their own wedding rings. In coded symbolism that only they would recognize, Randy custom-engraved his band with an image of Rose’s dorsal fin. It had a unique curve.



Today, Randy and Martha live on the mangrove-filtered shores of Roberts Bay. A blown knee on the ski slopes several years ago constricted his recreational options somewhat. But downtime is never more than a boat ride or a kayak plunge away.



Fluctuating sunlight, tidal changes, shifts in turbidity — the Wells’s proximity to the water has taught them how closely the dolphins’ natural rhythms follow the Earth’s cycles.



And as their worlds become increasingly crowded, he keeps an eye out for Rose’s mother as she flirts with stingrays in the shallows.



Because no matter how much science has been extracted from the most comprehensive study of its kind, and beyond all the bone-dry, peer-reviewed objectivity, he is linked to his aging neighbor in a way that resists detachment.



“BlacktipDoubledip,” he says, “was born the same year I was.”