Understanding Marine Mammal Facilities in Today's Conservation Landscape - IMATA 2015

Dr. Jaakkola opened her presentation by pointing out that marine mammal facilities like the Dolphin Research Center provide an opportunity to perform research that can’t be done in the wild, from perception, physiology and her specialty, cognition, to ways to assess dolphin health, from passive hearing to ultrasounds and diagnoses tests, to effects of stressors, noise pollution, bioaccumulation and contaminants.
“Before we had dolphins in zoological facilities, we didn’t know the basics about them, the fact that they have echolocation, what’s their hearing range, what’s their gestation,” Dr. Jaakkola says, in her presentation. “The vast majority of what we know about dolphin cognition, communication, physiology, perception, have all been learned from studies in zoological facilities.”
Not only is this critical for basic research, it actually forms the basis for conservation studies and enforcement.
Learn more about IMATA and the 2015 Conference at AwesomeOcean.com

[@koschkacat182]

Excellent presentation. It answers many questions and corrects many misconceptions of the general non-scientific public. Finally someone credible who reveals the fallacies spewed by activists and the folks at PETA.

[@Aethuviel]

Moar!

[@tinab.5169]

IMATA selected dolphins from the bloody Taiji hunt. .I am so sorry for the animals 😢

[@Aethuviel]

Go ahead and prove it. I've seen this before, you have no proof. And in any case, those animals aren't "more sorry" than other dolphins. They weren't captured cruelly, they were SAVED from being killed and eaten. If every dolphinarium in the world stopped buying Taiji dolphins, the only result would be that those animals would be killed and eaten, and nothing would stop the slaughter.