Begun in 1982 in Shark Bay, Western Australia, Georgetown's Dr. Janet Mann leads the second longest running dolphin study in the world, which investigates questions about dolphin calf development, female reproduction, genetics, ecology and behavior. CNDLS helped Dr. Mann to assemble, organize, and analyze her data. The database CNDLS created now consists of over 870 animals, including 80 calves born to 50 females who have been observed from birth to weaning for over 1750 hours.

First, a member of the CNDLS team planned and executed the scanning of over 1500 dorsal fins, entered them in a Microsoft Access master database, and helped the biology team with the process of digitally tracing the dorsal fin images. Then, the CNDLS web development team designed and wrote web-based programs to organize the data in summary tables for analysis, presentation and storage of the information collected from the field.

Prof. Mann is generally interested in why bottlenose dolphins have such slow life histories, why females invest substantially in each calf, and what factors predict female reproductive success. These questions have both theoretical and applied value, i.e. studied for both conservation and management purposes. A large quantity of data continues to be collected from the field and so it was essential to have a consistent strategy when merging the raw data into a user-friendly format that allows for easy retrieval. CNDLS' resident statistician, Rusan Chen, provided statistical assistance in cleaning and merging the data, as well as analyzing the data for publication purposes. Dr. Chen also worked with Dr. Mann's graduate assistants in the project lab, providing guidance on data management, statistical analysis, and results presentation.