In 2013, 8 percent of the bottlenose dolphins living in Florida’s Indian River Lagoon perished. New investigations have revealed that the highly intelligent marine mammals may have starved because their hunting grounds were destroyed by a phytoplankton bloom produced by human activity, as the initial trigger. Crucial underwater habitats were killed off, leading to a crash in high-energy fish species that forced dolphins to eat less nutritious prey, ultimately resulting in starvation and the 2013 mass mortality event.
The findings have been published in Frontiers in Marine Science.
