John Day

Interdisciplinary Master's Program: Boat-based behavioral research studying the diurnal and nocturnal movements and behavior of Pacific coast bottlenose dolphins

Education

• B.A. in Biology, St. Olaf College, Northfield, MN, 1992
• M.S. in Animal Behavior, San Diego State University, 1998

Research Interests

The college I attended in Minnesota was a long way from any marine mammal research. I went from studying captive dolphins in the Minnesota Zoo to tracking dolphins along the San Diego coastline from a boat. I had never driven a boat before I came to San Diego, but I learned quickly. Successfully conducting boat-based behavioral research during the day was challenging, but tracking dolphins at night became my greatest challenge! Carrying out nighttime observations of wild bottlenose dolphins (with the aid of light enhancing night vision equipment) has been a big accomplishment. Very few people have made actual direct observations of cetaceans at night.

While working towards my Master's degree I worked part-time at a local biotech company. I discovered that I also enjoy biomedical research. Upon completion of my Master's at SDSU I went full-time at Hybritech (a subsidiary of Beckman Coulter). In 1999 I began a Ph.D. program in the biology department of UC-San Diego.

Publications

Day, J. R., and R. H. Defran. 1995. Nocturnal activity of Pacific coast bottlenose

dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) in California. Paper presented at the Eleventh

Biennial Conference on the Biology of Marine Mammals, Orlando, FL, USA.

Day, John R. 1998. Nocturnal movements and behavior patterns of Pacific coast

bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus). Master's Thesis, San Diego State

University, San Diego, CA. 128 pp.

Last updated on October 25, 1999.