Space on Zoom is limited to the first 500 attendees. The talk will also be streamed live on the SMM Facebook page. 

Franciscanas are the most endangered cetaceans in the Southwestern Atlantic, where they are exposed to human activities such as artisanal gillnet fishing and coastal development.  A need for information on ranging patterns and behavior led to efforts to attach satellite-linked tags to franciscanas in three bays in Argentina and Brazil during 2005-2013.  Residency, with small home ranges, occurred at each site.  Movements were influenced by tides.  The dolphins used the entire water column, exposing them to gillnets regardless of net depth.  Definable ranges facilitate relating specific geographically based threats to appropriate population units, increasing the potential for effective conservation.

Randall Wells is a co-founder and directs the Chicago Zoological Society’s Sarasota Dolphin Research Program, which conducts the world’s longest-running study of a wild dolphin population.  He began studying bottlenose dolphins in Sarasota Bay, Florida, as a high school volunteer at Mote Marine Laboratory in 1970. Wells received his Bachelor’s degree in Zoology from the University of South Florida in 1975, his Masters in Zoology from the University of Florida in 1978, his PhD in Biology from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1986, and he was awarded a post-doctoral fellowship with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in 1987.  Wells joined the Chicago Zoological Society staff in 1989.  Wells’ current research program uses a collaborative approach to examine the behavior, social structure, life history, ecology, health, and population biology of bottlenose dolphins along the central west coast of Florida, with studies focusing on up to five concurrent generations of a locally resident ~170-member dolphin community.  Recent research topics include the effects of human activities on coastal dolphins, such as boat traffic, fishing activities, human feeding of wild dolphins, and environmental contaminants, and the impacts of other environmental disturbances such as red tides.  He has conducted research on a variety of marine mammals including Hawaiian spinner, Atlantic spotted, franciscana and other dolphin species, vaquita porpoises, bowhead, humpback, blue, and gray whales, and manatees. Wells has authored or co-authored 4 books and more than 285 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters.  He has been presenter or co-author of more than 700 presentations at professional meetings or invited public or university lectures.  Wells is past-President of the international Society for Marine Mammalogy, and received the society’s Kenneth S. Norris Lifetime Achievement Award in 2021.  Wells also serves on the Committee of Scientific Advisors on Marine Mammals for the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission, on the NOAA/USFWS Atlantic Scientific Review Group, and he is past-chair of the NOAA/USFWS Working Group on Marine Mammal Unusual Mortality Events.  Wells serves on IUCN’s Cetacean Specialist Group, and on the Steering Group for the national Animal Telemetry Network.

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