‘Dolphin Doctor’ Sam Ridgway, marine mammal research pioneer, remembered for ‘boundless curiosity’ (2024)

Over a more than 60-year career, Dr. Sam Ridgway created a legacy as a pioneer in marine mammal medicine and science and a foundation for their conservation, particularly with his discoveries about bottlenose dolphins.

Known affectionately by his colleagues as the “Dolphin Doctor” and as the father of marine mammal medicine, Ridgway continued that work up until his final days. The 86-year-old died in his Point Loma home, surrounded by family and friends, on July 10 from a chronic illness.

“Sam was a kind and gentle man with a genuine curiosity about everything and everyone around him. This boundless curiosity made him an exceptional scientist and also a wonderful friend,” said Dr. Cynthia Smith, the president and CEO of the National Marine Mammal Foundation, at a memorial earlier this month at First United Methodist Church in Mission Valley. The service honored Ridgway and his wife of almost 60 years, Jeanette, who died in 2020.

Throughout his career, Ridgway worked to understand the behavior, physiology and acoustics of marine mammals.

He developed dolphin anesthesia and other marine mammal medicines, as well as techniques to study the animals’ hearing where no data existed previously. He pioneered methods for studying them while they swam freely in the open ocean.

And it was Ridgway’s studies of the complexity of the dolphin brain that really made the world recognize them as intelligent animals, said Dr. Frances Gulland, who was appointed chair of the Marine Mammal Commission by President Biden in May.

Dr. Sam Ridgway and his wife Jeanette at their wedding in the summer of 1960.

(Courtesy of the National Marine Mammal Foundation)

Ridgway’s interest in veterinary medicine blossomed at an early age as he grew up surrounded by animals on his family’s farm in Bigfoot, Texas.

After graduating from Texas A&M University with both his undergraduate and veterinary degrees, Ridgway joined the Air Force and became a veterinary officer for military service animals. He would later earn his doctorate in neuroscience from Cambridge University.

After moving to California, he became the attending veterinarian for the Navy’s marine mammals. In the early 1960s, he helped found the Navy’s Marine Mammal Program — a classified program to study the complexity and intelligence of dolphins, their sonar skills and their ability to descend to dizzying depths.

“We started back in the early ‘60s and found we could take dolphins into the open ocean, and they would stick with us and very happily work with us,” Ridgway told the San Diego Union-Tribune in 2001. “We established the concept of human/dolphin teams.”

By the time the Navy’s program was declassified in 1992, it was a multimillion-dollar project not only studying dolphins, sea lions and whales but also training them to aid Navy divers by detecting mines, experimental weaponry and enemy swimmers, as well as recovering hardware and weaponry fired or dropped into the ocean.

During that time, Ridgway had formed a bond with an Atlantic bottlenose dolphin named Tuffy, the Navy’s first domesticated dolphin, which he had worked closely with and which would later become the subject of his book “The Dolphin Doctor.”

Over the years, Ridgway’s studies were published in more than 350 peer-reviewed papers in various scientific journals and books. His book “Mammals of the Sea,” published 50 years ago, remains one of the most comprehensive and widely taught textbooks on marine mammal physiology.

Ridgway remembered each and every one of those papers, many friends and former colleagues said — including Gulland, who recalls Ridgway’s incredible memory of events and research.

“I could email him a question about anything, and he would have both an entertaining response but also have some insight into something that had happened 40 years ago that was helpful to know,” she said.

Dr. Sam Ridgway, founder of the National Marine Mammal Foundation.

(Courtesy of the National Marine Mammal Foundation)

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‘Dolphin Doctor’ Sam Ridgway, Point Loma marine research pioneer, is remembered for ‘boundless curiosity’

As a leader in his field, Ridgway founded various organizations and served on the boards of numerous scientific committees.

In 2007, he helped establish the National Marine Mammal Foundation, a San Diego-based nonprofit recognized as a leader in mammal science, medicine and conservation.

The nonprofit’s team of marine mammal biologists, veterinarians, conservation experts and scientists work directly to impart the science to some of San Diego’s youth, something Ridgway valued doing with his own students and colleagues.

Smith recalls meeting Ridgway at a 1996 event for the International Association for Aquatic Animal Medicine, of which he was founding president, where he was talking one-on-one with students.

“I was so impressed by how engaged he was with the students, because at that time … he was already a legend,” Smith said. “It was just very Sam, as I learned.”

Over the years, Ridgway mentored hundreds of veterinarians, conservationists and scientists — including, most recently, Brittany Jones.

“When he looked at you, he thought, ‘How can you change the world?’” said Jones, now a scientist at the nonprofit her mentor founded. It’s “the kind of potential most of us don’t see within ourselves, but being around Sam, he sort of made you believe that about yourself.”

For Jones, it was Ridgway’s creativity and innovation that stuck out most.

“He was always pushing the envelope,” she said. “He was always coming up with these unique ideas to solve big problems, and he never thought a problem was too big.”

Now even after his death, students and colleagues can have a virtual one-on-one chat with him using an interactive online tool created in 2020, where he answers hundreds of questions about his marine mammal experience.

“Sam’s passing perhaps marks the end of the beginning of marine mammal care, but we are well on our way into what comes next,” Dr. Mark Xitco, the current director of the Navy’s Marine Mammal Program, said at the memorial. “In addition to being the principal author of the first chapter, he made so many contributions to our now and our future, both directly and through all of us who shaped.”

Ridgway is survived by his brothers, Don and Sid, and their families.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to the National Marine Mammal Foundation’s Ridgway Fund at nmmf.org/donations/ridgway-fund to support marine mammal research and conservation.