Day 13 - Your Environment

Day 13: Your Environment

Look around you. What is in your environment that shouldn't be? It's important to remember that every action we take has the potential to harm or benefit our environment. Choose to be environmentally responsible by cleaning up your surroundings, reducing, reusing and recycling whenever possible, and tell others about the importance of keeping our environment and oceans clean - not just for us but for our animal friends too!

#iHeartDRC #DolphinResearchCenter

Day 12 - Learning

Day 12: Learning

As a marine mammal education and research facility, Dolphin Research Center is dedicated to learning as much as possible about our animal family. This is done via our research, observations, and interacting with the dolphins and sea lions. Additionally, we believe it is imperative to give our guests learning opportunities. The biggest threat to wild animals is people. Direct experience with animals inspires people to connect with and care about them, and to conserve the environment in which they live. The number of marine mammals that live in human care is a tiny percentage of the population that lives out in the wild. However, the impact of these “ambassadors” is huge.

Day 1 - #Selfie

Day 1: #Selfie

Dolphin Research Center is a nonprofit marine mammal education and research facility located in the fabulous Florida Keys and home to 27 dolphins and four California sea lions. Every day, we promote the peaceful coexistence, cooperation and communication between marine mammals, humans and the environment we share, through education, research and rescue, with the well being of the animals taking precedence. DRC started this challenge to share our mission with our members, donors, guests, and the world. #IHeartDRC#DolphinResearchCenter

Show us your daily challenges on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Dolphin Research Center Photo-A-Day Challenge

_{Dolphin Research Center's Photo-A-Day Challenge starts January 1, 2016!}

Start the new year with Dolphin Research Center by participating in our very first Photo-a-Day Challenge. To continue teaching, learning, and caring for marine mammals and the environment, we’ve created a new way for our supporters to become ambassadors for our flippered family members. The best part is that you can do it from home!

The Photo-A-Day challenge starts on January 1st. There will be 31 challenges, one for each day of the month, and all you need to do is share a photo or video that relates to the daily subject on your Facebook, Twitter or Instagram pages. Use the hashtag #IHeartDRC so that everyone’s images and posts will be united!  If you don’t mind us reposting your images on our social media, go ahead and also add #DolphinResearchCenter. (We’ll always credit you for the photos we repost.)  Whether you use photos or video that you took while visiting DRC or creatively use something from your life at home, it will be fun to see how you connect your image to the each day’s challenge. 

This graphic shows you all of the challenge topics so you can start thinking about your photos. Don’t forget to post the challenge to your own pages, so we can follow your page and daily posts as well.  Whether you like, follow, or gram with us online, we cannot wait for this new venture and the chance to share DRC pride with you – our fintastic fans, friends, and family.

Go to our website, to learn more.

Why We Do Research

Talon correctly chooses the board with fewer dots in our "Less" research study.

We’re frequently asked why we do research. What’s the point? There are lots of different reasons. Some of our research is observational. By studying our resident pod, we learn things about their general behavior, their physiology, their development. Sharing this knowledge with other scientists is helpful. For example, we’re often lucky enough to be present when a new calf is born. We videotape and photograph that baby from birth, and track its progress with additional video and pictures for the first few months of its life.

When born, the calves have fetal bands that look like stripes of lighter gray skin around their bodies. The fetal bands are formed when the baby is still scrunched up in its mom’s uterus. Over time, those fetal bands fade – and we keep track of that timing. If a researcher in the wild spots a dolphin calf, he can refer to the data we’ve collected and, possibly, estimate the age of the baby according to the color of the fetal bands.

Dolphins in the open oceans have been observed behaving in ways that appeared to indicate that they understood something about numbers and quantity. However, until we did our study on Understanding of the Concept of Numerically “Less”, nobody could say for sure if dolphins could actually grasp numbers concepts. Now we know that they can!

Each research study contributes to the global understanding of these amazing animals, which brings us to another important reason for asking, and answering, research questions. We believe that people care more about animals when they perceive them to be intelligent. The more the people of the world care about dolphins and other marine life, the more likely they are to protect them and the ocean environment.

That alone is reason enough!

For more information about Dolphin Research Center's current and past research, visit our website at www.dolphins.org.