CURRENT AND MAXIMUM NET PRODUCTIVITY RATES

• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.294.8097; http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/pdfs/sars/ao1995dosp-wn.pdf

Spinner dolphins are distributed in oceanic and coastal tropical waters (Leatherwood et al. 1976). This is presumably an offshore, deep-water species (Schmidly 1981; Perrin and Gilpatrick 1994), and its distribution in the Atlantic is very poorly known. In the western North Atlantic, these dolphins occur in deep water along most of the U.S. coast south to the West Indies and Venezuela, including the Gulf of Mexico. Spinner dolphin sightings have occurred exclusively in deeper (>2,000 m) oceanic waters (CeTAP 1982; Waring et al. 1992) off the northeast U.S. coast. Stranding records exist from North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida in the Atlantic and in Texas and Florida in the Gulf of Mexico. The North Carolina strandings represent the northernmost documented distribution of this species in the Atlantic. Stock structure in the western North Atlantic is unknown. POPULATION SIZE The number of spinner dolphins inhabiting the U.S. Atlantic Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) is unknown and seasonal abundance estimates are not available for this species since it was rarely seen in the CeTAP (1982) study area. Minimum Population Estimate Present data are insufficient to calculate a minimum population estimate.