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Lagoon study hunts ill dolphins
Tested animals show higher rates of maladies than their kin in S.C.
By Jim Waymer
Florida Today
23rd June 2004
Biologists hunted the lagoon's top predator Wednesday, searching for signs of emerging microbes and chemicals that make it, and us, sick.
Scientists from Fort Pierce and Charleston, S.C., plan to catch about 40 bottlenose dolphins this week to test their blood and stomachs for signs of diseases more common to people but increasingly found in dolphin.
In the second year of their five-year, $1.25 million study, they are finding that dolphin in the Indian River Lagoon suffer higher rates of stomach ulcers, lung infections, skin tumours and other health problems than their kin in cleaner waters near Charleston.
"Indian River Lagoon dolphins' immune systems are not functioning as well as dolphins in South Carolina, or as well as captive dolphins that were used as controls in the same study," said Greg Bossart, a marine mammal researcher at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution in Fort Pierce.
"That's very disturbing to me as a veterinarian," Bossart added. "We're sharing the same water supplies. We're sharing the same food supply."
Bossart and about 50 other researchers last summer captured 43 bottlenose dolphins in the lagoon. Then they caught a similar amount near Charleston, to compare the two populations. The study is the first in-depth health assessment of the lagoon's top predator.
In summer 2001, 35 dolphin died in two months in North Brevard, within about 25 miles of each other. Fifty-five ultimately died that year. A scientific panel's yearlong investigation found few clues to the cause. They suspected a new red-tide-like algae toxin never seen before in Florida may have released toxins that built up to fatal levels in the dolphin or caused immune suppression.
The same poison, saxitoxin, made more than 20 people sick when they ate puffer fish caught near Titusville that summer. The fish remains under a state ban for harvest and consumption.
In 2003, 36 dolphin died in the lagoon, down from 38 the previous year.
There are an estimated 400 to 600 bottlenose dolphins that spend most of their lives in the lagoon.
Contact Waymer at 242-3663 or jwaymer@flatoday.net
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