Research on coastal bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus), including a photo-identification catalog, following the 2015 Refugio Beach oil spill in Santa Barbara County, California

"Bottlenose dolphins are one of the most commonly encountered cetaceans in the nearshore waters off California and Baja California, Mexico. Two distinct bottlenose dolphin ecotypes occur in these waters: a coastal form that is typically found within 1-2 km of shore (Carretta et al. 1998, Defran and Weller 1999) and an offshore form that is distributed in deeper waters, typically greater than a few kilometers from shore (Defran and Weller 1999, Bearzi et al. 2009). Differentiation of these two ecotypes, which are managed as separate stocks by the National Marine Fisheries Service (Carretta et al. 2015), is supported by morphological (Walker 1981, Perrin et al. 2011), photographic (Shane 1994) and genetic data (Lowther-Thieleking et al. 2014)"--Introduction, Page 1. R.H. Defran, David W. Weller, Nicholas M. Kellar, Susan J. Chivers "November 2017." Includes bibliographical references.