New Jersey holds 345 occurrence records for Tamanend’s bottlenose dolphin, all logged through GBIF rather than citizen photographs, evidence of a species that turns up close enough to shore to get counted in organized surveys even when it isn’t showing up in casual sightings.
Following the bays, not just the open coast
New Jersey’s dolphin records concentrate around estuary mouths and bay entrances: Sandy Hook Bay at the Gateway National Recreation Area unit on Sandy Hook, and the inlets feeding Barnegat Bay near Island Beach State Park and Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge. That pattern lines up with the species itself, a coastal dolphin that favors bays, estuaries, and sounds over the open continental shelf where the larger common bottlenose dolphin tends to range.
Gone from New Jersey waters every winter
Not one of New Jersey’s 345 records falls in December, January, or February, while May through September together account for the overwhelming majority. Coastal bottlenose dolphins along the mid-Atlantic are known to shift south for the colder months and move back north as water warms, and New Jersey’s near-total winter gap fits that pattern closely. The dolphins that fill Sandy Hook Bay and Barnegat Bay’s inlets in summer are largely somewhere else entirely by January.
Status in New Jersey
Tamanend’s bottlenose dolphin is treated as native to New Jersey’s coastal waters, and the US Geological Survey’s nonindigenous species database doesn’t list it as introduced here. The species was only recently split out from the common bottlenose dolphin, so it carries no separate state conservation rank yet, and its global IUCN status hasn’t been evaluated either.
