By WILLIAM M. HARTNETT
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

FORT PIERCE – Nearly one out of every three dolphins in the Indian River Lagoon has come down with mysterious and sometimes grotesque skin disorders.

Eager to find out what’s going on, alarmed scientists from Harbor Branch and other marine institutions in recent weeks have started using cutting-edge methods to conduct “remote biopsy sampling” of about 30 dolphins in the lagoon, which stretches 156 miles from the Jupiter Inlet to the Ponce de Leon Inlet in Volusia County.

Researchers use a modified .22-caliber rifle equipped with a digital video camera to fire small darts at the dolphins, said Patricia Fair, head of the living marine resources branch of the Center for Coastal Environmental Health and Biomolecular Research in Charleston, S.C.

The free-floating darts collect a 1-gram sample of a dolphin’s skin and fat. The video camera allows researchers to identify each sampled animal by matching the image of its dorsal fin against a database of more than 500 dolphins catalogued in the lagoon over the years by Steve McCulloch, head of Harbor Branch’s dolphin program.

With the tiny amount of tissue collected from each animal, the researchers will analyze the pathology of the skin lesions and the genetic code of each dolphin, looking for environmental contaminants and other factors that may contribute to the diseases.

Greg Bossart, director of marine mammal research and conservation at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution, said University of Central Florida scientists will even use the samples to determine what the dolphins have been eating through a technique known as fatty acid analysis.

“We get a tremendous amount of data from a very tiny piece of tissue that doesn’t harm the animal at all,” Bossart said. “It’s very exciting because it’s cutting-edge science applied to Indian River Lagoon dolphins. It’s never been done before.”

The tissue samples will lay the groundwork for future studies that researchers hope will one day pinpoint the origin of the skin lesions, Bossart said.

Whatever is causing the illnesses could threaten the more than 4,000 species of plants and animals in North America’s most diverse estuary – and humans are no exception.

“That’s the key here,” said Bossart. “It’s in our best interest to look at these problems in the dolphins.

“If we don’t, they’re going to come right behind us and kick us in the rear end.”

The disorders fall into several categories. The origins of those preliminarily identified through photo surveys, Bossart said, appear to range from infectious diseases with protozoal or fungal origins to contact skin conditions caused by some unknown toxic substance in the water.

Other conditions include dolphin pox, a viral disease that Bossart said is “not life-threatening in itself but indicates some sort of stressor in the environment,” and skin slough, in which the animals literally begin shedding skin.

The diseases range in appearance from skin color irregularities to considerably more pronounced conditions, McCulloch said.

“In those cases we’ve seen large cutaneous skin lesions that have the appearance of barnacles or cauliflower-like growths,” he said.

In one dolphin’s case, McCulloch said the size of these growths quadrupled in a little more than six months. When the dolphin, JAGG, was spotted for the last time in December 2000, its breathing was severely labored, taking six to 10 breaths per minute instead of the usual one.

“It was obviously under a great deal of stress,” McCulloch said.

Just a year before that last sighting, the dolphin appeared to be fairly healthy, he said.

Bossart said the skin growths that afflicted JAGG likely were fungal in nature and as harmful as their sprawling, wart-like appearance would suggest.

“Once you break the integrity of the skin you open your body up to all sorts of infections,” he said. “The thing that’s kind of alarming is that there appears to be somewhat of an increase in seeing these lesions, especially in the south part of the Indian River.”

In cooperating with Fair and other marine science investigators from the Charleston area, McCulloch said Florida researchers will be able to compare the lagoon’s dolphins to a similar population in South Carolina’s Stono River, where dart biopsy sampling has already been conducted.

“These two locations provide an ideal setting to undertake a comparative project,” McCulloch said. “A photo identification study has been underway on the Stono River dolphins since 1994, and skin lesions have not been observed in those dolphins.”

The joint study, started this month, is a precursor to a more comprehensive research effort for which McCulloch hopes to obtain the necessary federal permits and, more importantly, money. That project would entail capturing and releasing as many as 20 dolphins in different areas of the lagoon during a two- to three-week period each year for five consecutive years.

Temporarily capturing the dolphins would allow researchers to conduct more through health examinations, McCulloch said. Some of the animals also might be tagged to learn more about their movement and behavior.

Once the scientists have all that information in hand, McCulloch said the next step will be to pass it along to not just the local public, but to “our state legislators and government officials charged with management and protection policies.”

And from there, Bossart said, scientists must figure out what, if anything, can be done to preserve the lagoon’s dolphin population.

“Hopefully, if it’s something that’s man-related, it’s something that can be changed.”

Copyright 2002 Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
January 30, 2002 Wednesday
FINAL EDITION
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