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Total Energy Expenditure In Bottlenose Dolphins
Dolphin Research Center collaborated with researchers from Duke University and Dolphin Quest to study Total Energy Expenditure (TEE) in bottlenose dolphins. This is the first published study that uses the doubly-labeled water method to measure TEE with this species. This helps us better understand how dolphins, and marine mammals in general, use energy in their underwater environment compared to land mammals. It is critical to understand how much dolphins need to eat to support their energy needs, in order to determine how human fisheries and other environmental disturbances affect dolphin populations. It also sheds light on how evolutionary adaptation to different environments impacts an animal’s metabolism. Our findings were especially interesting because we found that like humans, as dolphins age, their body fat percentages increase and their energy expenditure decreases – an effect which surprisingly has not been found in other large mammals.
For the full study email research@dolphins.org.
Rimbach, R., Amireh, A., Allen, A., Hare, B., Guarino, E., Kaufman, C., Salomons, H. and Pontzer, H. (2021). Total energy expenditure of bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) of different ages. J. Exp. Biol. 224, jeb242218.