UF study says hearing loss in stranded animals causes behavior changesApril 10, 2018Several years ago, University of Florida aquatic animal veterinarian Michael Walsh, DVM, a clinical associate professor of aquatic animal health at the UF College of Veterinary Medicine, noticed a concerning pattern of two stranded dolphins after they had been rescued. Both dolphins returned to the beach once they had been released back into the wild. While Dr. Walsh worked to rehabilitate the animals, he noticed they exhibited numerous behavioral problems. A hearing test at Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Fla., revealed one of the dolphins was completely deaf (the second dolphin couldn't be tested), which led Walsh to wonder whether the problem of animals adapting to new environments might be hearing related and more common than initially thought. When Megan Strobel, DVM, then a first-year UF veterinary medical student, went to Walsh, her faculty mentor, in 2013 to discuss a possible research project, he suggested that she might compare hearing capacity and behavior changes in wild and facility-housed dolphins. The result of their collaboration, which also involved numerous other individuals and organizations, was a study that appeared in the Journal of Zoo and Wildlife Medicine. The study found that stranded animals with hearing deficits showed markedly different behaviors than animals …
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