New Days For The Dolphins

In March of last year, residents in the Jacksonville area noticed a juvenile dolphin foraging around the St. John’s river basin looking for food. Scarred and alone, the dolphin appeared to be the victim of a shark attack; he had open skin lesions and was fighting to stay alive, probing crab pots that dotted the river. There was also the concern he might become entangled and drown.

Stephen McCulloch, program manager of Marine Mammal Research & Conservation at the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution, now part of Florida Atlantic University, was part of a multi-agency team that was able to rescue the 8-month-old dolphin, dubbed “Jax.”

Ideally, McCulloch and the staff from Harbor Branch would have loaded up the wounded dolphin and transported him back to their campus in Fort Pierce, where Jax would have been examined and rehabilitated until he was healthy enough to be returned to the wild. But since Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne decided to remind Treasure Coast residents of the power that Mother Nature packs, Harbor Branch has been without a marine mammal rehabilitation facility since September 2004.

After Jax was safely secured by the collections team, he was examined by HBOI staff veterinarian Dr. Juli Goldstein, who determined that the dolphin was in urgent need of care and medical treatment. Rather than euthanize the animal, the rescue crew gently loaded him into Harbor Branch’s Marine Mammal Ambulance, a specially designed Ford-F450 cargo truck that has been transformed into an environmentally-controlled transportation system, for the four-hour trip to Panama City’s Gulf World Marine Park.

Read the entire article in the April 2008 issue