For more than half a century, Dr. Randy Wells has been as much a fixture of Sarasota Bay as the dolphin population he studies. He was 16 years old when he joined Mote Marine Laboratory as a research assistant in 1970, the same year Dr. Blair Irvine launched the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program (SDRP), and helped shape the fledgling effort from its earliest days. He became its longtime leader, and over the years the project has grown into the world’s longest-running study of a wild dolphin population, right in our backyard.
For 26 of those years, Wells has been mentoring the scientist who would eventually stand beside him to help guide the program’s future, one who shares a remarkably similar trajectory: Dr. Katie McHugh. McHugh arrived in Sarasota in 2000 as an SDRP intern, and came to the SDRP “with the level of maturity and dedication that most interns don’t have,” Wells says. “When she says she’s going to do something, she’s she’s going to do it right and do it well.”
So when Brookfield Zoo Chicago—the institution that has overseen the SDRP since 1989—announced that Wells would retire as director, effective July 1, McHugh’s choice as his successor came as little surprise. For the past quarter-century, McHugh has become one of the program’s key scientific leaders, contributing to long-term dolphin population studies, advancing collaborative research efforts, expanding the SDRP’s conservation reach well beyond Florida waters, and—coming full circle—helping coordinate its internship programs…