Common bottlenose dolphins are Florida’s most widely recorded marine mammal after the manatee, with nearly 5,900 sightings split between Everglades National Park’s 34 named records and the wider Everglades region at 25, a South Florida stronghold that St. Marks and Gulf Islands extend up into the northeastern Gulf.
Records peak in March but don’t fall off sharply the rest of the year, staying above 300 a month even in the leanest late-summer stretch, a pattern that fits a resident, year-round coastal species rather than one tied to a narrow migration window. NatureServe hasn’t assigned Florida a numeric rank for this species (SNR), and the record here likely reflects boat-based survey effort and shoreline visibility as much as true dolphin abundance offshore.
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