STOCK DEFINITION AND GEOGRAPHIC RANGE

• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 1997
• Subjects: Indian; North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.294.8353; http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/pdfs/sars/ao1997dobn-wnco.pdf

Walker et al. in press) which correspond to a shallow, warm water ecotype and a deep, cold water ecotype; both ecotypes have been shown to inhabit waters in the western North Atlantic Ocean (Hersh and Duffield 1990; Mead and Potter 1995; Walker et al. in press). Bottlenose dolphins which had stranded alive in the western North Atlantic in areas with direct access to deep oceanic waters had hemoglobin profiles matching that of the deep, cold water ecotype (Hersh and Duffield 1990). Hersh and Duffield (1990) also described morphological differences between the deep, cold water ecotype dolphins and dolphins with hematological profiles matching the shallow, warm water ecotype which had stranded in the Indian/Banana River in Florida. Because of their occurrence in shallow, relatively warm waters along the U.S. Atlantic coast and because their morphological characteristics are similar to the shallow, warm water ecotype described by Hersh and Duffield (1990), the Atlantic coastal bottlenose dolphin stock is believed to consist of this ecotype. There are currently insufficient data to allow