Population and Distribution
The pantropical spotted dolphin, as its very name implies, is found across all tropical and sub-tropical waters around the world — roughly speaking all oceans and seas between 40° N and 40° S. The total world population is in excess of three million — the second most abundant cetacean after the bottlenose dolphin — of which two million are found in the eastern Pacific. However, this represents a decrease from at least 7 million since the 1950s.
Centres of highest population density are the shallow warmest waters (water temperature in excess of 25 °C). There is also a tendency for groups to concentrate where there is a high temperature gradient.
Read more about this topic: Pantropical Spotted Dolphin
Famous quotes containing the words population and/or distribution:
“What happened at Hiroshima was not only that a scientific breakthrough ... had occurred and that a great part of the population of a city had been burned to death, but that the problem of the relation of the triumphs of modern science to the human purposes of man had been explicitly defined.”
—Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982)
“Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)