Carefully, we climbed, each step choreographed not to anger the tiny beings of which we were, I realized, rather absurdly afraid. (“But they are not poisonous!” Moises would have reminded us.) Actually, I was less worried about being bitten than about my reaction to them if I were; if I let go my handholds, it would be a long, swift trip down. Of this, Dianne was acutely aware. Her other fear, besides spiders, turns out to be heights. Neither of us had suspected that our dolphin expedition would feature so many fist-sized spiders and vertical ascents. “I know, I know,” I said to her below me, “this wasn’t in the brochure.”
“We’re almost there,” Miriam said encouragingly. She had climbed this tower many times, to download data from her manatees’ telemetry. On rare occasions, she has stood on the platform and watched manatees pass into the lake, their blunt, cloud-shaped forms floating up through the dim waters to nibble water hyacinth. “There’s something about their gentleness,” Miriam had said to us when we’d asked her what drew her to these unlikely creatures, “being so big and so gentle.” In English, these huge, placid grazers are often called sea cows; in Portuguese, they are similarly perceived, and called peixe-boi, which means “fish- bull.” The word is pronounced “peshy- boy,” a trusting, childlike sound we loved. Certainly, it had fit the manatees we had met back at the Project office. We had watched a staffer feeding one of them, a two-year-old orphan named Boinha, a process both man and manatee obviously enjoyed. Wearing a red cap, the staffer lay on his belly on a board over the tank house, holding the outsized baby bottle for the outsized, six-foot baby. Idiosyncratically, she had nursed upside down, her square, gray tongue pressed against the roof of her mouth over the nipple. She had let him cradle her stubbly snout in his hand. As she sucked, her slitlike nostrils opened and closed, and she had shut her small eyes in total trust, as if in ecstasy.
That trust was heartbreaking. All three species of the world’s manatees have been ruthlessly hunted for meat, oil, and pelts. As recently as 1950, over 38,000 Amazonian manatees, the smallest of the world’s three species and the only completely vegetarian aquatic mammal in the Amazon, were hunted commercially in the state of Amazonas alone. And in Mamirauá, despite federal protection outlawing their slaughter since 1967, the killing of manatees is still sanctioned here in accordance with the reserve’s unusual management plan.
We were glad the manatees had Miriam in their corner—and ours. If we had to be climbing a tree full of biting ants, we were glad to be following in the footsteps of this strong, beautiful, competent woman. Miriam had the muscled physique of an athlete, which she maintained with a regular training program at the local gym. With beautiful light brown eyes and glossy black hair, and a ring or two or even three on every finger—mostly in the shape of dolphins (few rings were available in the shape of manatees, she explained)—she was the sort of woman men literally fought over. We later heard rumors about Miriam’s jealous suitors that sounded like Wild West stories, involving knives and guns.
But Miriam had other loves. “I was always in love with the sea,” she had told us back at the floating house. Growing up in the town of Pôrto Alegre, she had read about a profession called oceanography, and had gone to the University of Rio Grande in southern Brazil, 250 miles from home, to study it. Few people from Pôrto Alegre ever leave their hometown, she said, least of all young women; but Miriam is a maverick, like Vera.
There was no program of study for marine mammals at the time. But Miriam heard about these creatures from Argentinian researchers visiting her school. “I just couldn’t believe such things existed here,” she had told us earlier at the floating house. “Manatees! And a pink dolphin—that was just unimaginable. I knew then what I wanted to study: aquatic mammals in the Amazon, that’s got to be it.”
Miriam had traveled further, earning a Ph.D. at the University of Florida at Gainesville, studying Florida’s manatees. She saw her first whales— humpbacks—on a trip to Cape Cod. She had loved America and Americans, and treated us as if we had been personally responsible for all she had loved and learned in our country. Perhaps this was why she was so patient and encouraging with us; and also, she knew what it was like to be a woman traveling in a strange land.
“Look— we’re here,” she announced. But as my head cleared the top of the platform, I froze. I felt eyes on me. I turned my head slowly and stared into the red eyes of two hoatzins sitting on a nest perhaps ten yards away. They erected their strange orange crests and hissed at us like lizards.
Finally, we stood atop the telemetry platform in the treetop and gazed over Lake Mamirauá. From this height, the radio antenna can pick up radio signals from three miles away, Miriam explained. Every twenty seconds, the receiver scans a different VHF frequency; if it receives three signals in a row, it stays with that transmission and records it, tracking the animal’s path. A solar-battery-powered microprocessor records the strength of each radio signal (giving an idea of how far away the animal is) and its direction. The black box next to it, about the size of a tool chest, was the receiver.
Gleefully, we lifted the lid on its hinges, like pirates opening a treasure chest. Inside, we saw two sets of frequencies listed: one for Vera’s dolphins, one for Miriam’s manatees. Eight of the nine dolphin frequencies were clearly marked. I copied them carefully: 272, 424, 439, 575, 726, 769, 871, 891. These were the combinations that would unlock the secrets that I had sought for so long. Finally—having combed rain forests and rivers, having climbed up trees and plunged into lakes, after consulting biologists and shamans—now we would be able to accomplish what we had come for. Finally, we could follow the dolphins.
Or so I thought.
The Waters Open
We didn’t have much time. We had only three days to try to locate three radio-tagged dolphins among a population of 150. They could be anywhere in waterways that coiled and threaded for uncounted thousands of miles through forests that stretched over 2.5 million acres.
Dianne and I set out anxiously the next morning. As I plugged in the earphones and cables and erected the antenna, an Antonio steered us toward Boca. We knew we would find dolphins there, at the intersection of two waterways; and besides, over the following two days, when we joined Andrea and Miriam again, we would be heading in the opposite direction. We wanted to cover as much ground as possible.
Almost immediately, long before we even approached Boca, our boat was surrounded. Antonio cut the motor so we could watch them. The waters here were murky, and we could not see below the surface. But this time, the pink dolphins almost seemed to be showing us their bodies: we could see the dorsals clearly, as well as the tops of their heads. And unlike at the Tahuayo and at the Meeting of the Waters, here the botos often surfaced side by side, as do tucuxis, which made them easier to count.
There were eight, Antonio confirmed. It seemed, for the first time, that each one was distinctive. One of them was very large and pink. Two were gray youngsters, and another, despite the fact that all babies are supposed to be gray, was, like one we had seen in Peru, a very bright pink. One of the adult dolphins had an L-shaped scar on the dorsal ridge—one of fourteen dolphins that Vera had come to recognize by natural marks, a male named Scar to whom she had assigned the momentous Number 1. On the paper where Vera had drawn pictures of those with natural markings, the scars and blotches had looked obvious: Number 8, Meia-lua, had a half-moon-shaped chunk missing from the dorsal; Number 3, Ruffles, was marked by a series of frilled scars on the back side of his; Number 13, Riscos, had two deep notches in the skin behind the head. But Vera had told us she had spent entire afternoons among groups of dolphins that never gave her a good look at their dorsals. We were extremely lucky. Another dolphin, we noticed, had a hole in the fin—likely where the metal pin holding a transmitter or a plastic tag had fallen out. And another, Antonio recognized as Shika: she had an X on her dorsal, the first female Vera had freeze-branded. She blew at us loudly.
They approached us closely, some within ten yards of the boat. It wa
s as if they had rushed to greet us—and perhaps they had. They surely recognized project boats. Dogs and owls, with hearing far less exquisite than that of the boto, know the sound of individual automobile engines on suburban streets. Perhaps the dolphins also knew the boats by sight, and even recognized the people normally in these boats; perhaps they realized we were strangers. We saw several of them spy-hopping to get a better look.
Their boldness amazed us, given their experience. To freeze-brand or equip a dolphin with a transmitter, the animal must be subdued with nets, hauled from the water for perhaps twenty-five minutes, and subjected to minor surgery. No dolphin has ever died from these procedures, Vera had told us, but it is surely painful and terrifying. It is frightening and dangerous for the researchers, too. The dolphins are easier to catch in the dry season, when the water is low, but this is also when the piranhas are most concentrated. “Nobody wants to jump in that water!” Vera had told us.
Besides, the big male dolphins—the only ones whose dorsal ridges are big enough to support a transmitter—will readily bite in self-defense, and, with 130 teeth strong enough to crush an armored catfish, are capable of inflicting wounds as bloody as a shark’s. “The males, it’s amazing the power in the jaws— plash! —like two boards crashing together,” Vera had told us in Manaus. She has learned—at the suggestion of her mother-in-law, whose husband was director of the Vancouver Zoo—to bind the jaws with nylon stockings. But even with jaws bound, botos are formidably strong. Thrashing his flexible neck, once a captured male hit Vera in the head with his beak and flung her across the boat. She felt lucky the animal had not cracked her skull. Her face was badly bruised for weeks.
After tagging and freeze-branding a dolphin, Vera waits two or three weeks without attempting to follow it. But at the end of that period, when she seeks out the marked animal, she finds it is just as eager to approach her as before—just as she has never hesitated, even after her injury, to approach them. Vera had told us that sometimes she attracts botos by circling the boat in a figure eight. “They come very close, and will follow you and play for half an hour. It’s a game, a game inside the lake,” she’d said.
Why would the dolphins risk playing a game with our dangerous species? They already have plenty to play with. Like the Duisburg Zoo dolphins, who grabbed scrub brushes as toys and constructed bubble rings, wild dolphins also play with toys: At least one observer has reported seeing a river dolphin tossing a river turtle in the air, like a ball. Why bother playing with people? Perhaps because, unlike a toy, or a turtle hiding in its shell, people will play with them, and in unexpected ways; in this game, the players interact, one species’s curiosity answering the other’s.
The botos surrounding our boat clearly wondered about us, as we wondered about them. Could they know the curiosity was mutual? I’d thought so with Atlantic bottlenose dolphins I’d met years earlier. On a magazine assignment, I visited the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory in Honolulu, where researchers were testing the dolphins’ ability to manipulate objects in response to an artificial language of symbols and sounds, to test whether they can understand both vocabulary and syntax (which the research now clearly affirms). I’d unthinkingly greeted the first dolphin I met as I would have a person: I waved my right hand at the fourteen-year-old female dolphin named Akeakamai, “Lover of Wisdom” in Hawaiian. To my surprise, she had waved back at me with her mirroring flipper. I held my leg up to the aquarium glass, and she had kicked her tail fluke in response. And when I would stand tankside, she and her female companion, Phoenix, would often rest their chins on the rail, out of the water, standing erect as I was, their tails on the floor of the tank. This was, I realized, a sort of conversation. It may have been a simple one: “Here I am!” and “Here, I am!” But the nature of their response—to mimic my movements—implied the possibility of a deeper understanding. Despite our enormous physical differences, perhaps they recognized the sameness that we shared, a cognitive kinship spanning 90 million years of divergent ancestries. Inside their flippers, dolphins and whales have five fingers, as we do; and inside their heads, they may suspect that we and they understand the world, and delight in it, in a similar way.
The botos surrounded us for forty-five minutes. We made 135 observations of them—and they, perhaps, as many of us—before we went our separate ways. We continued toward Boca, hoping to locate the radio-tagged dolphins. Already, though it was still early morning, the sun felt white-hot on our skins, the air a pounding haze. As Dianne rolled up her shorts and sleeves to enhance her California tan, I could feel my skin burning beneath my long-sleeved shirt. My ears clogged with sweat welling beneath the rubber earphones. I swung the antenna slowly, its arc my question mark, and strained to hear the answer. Still no signal.
But within ten minutes, we were surrounded by a new group: an adult mottled gray with pink, a dark gray youngster, a dark gray adult, one with a pink stripe on the back, a very large, very pink adult, and several smaller grays. “Mais que dez! ” exclaimed Antonio. (“More than ten!”) We couldn’t believe it; never before had we found two large groups in such a short span of time. Seldom had published researchers, either. The literature reports that river dolphins are usually seen alone, or just one mother with her child; only one study reported seeing groups of dolphins more often than solitary individuals—researchers studying botos at the Río Apure of Venezuela, who most frequently encountered botos in aggregations of two to seven.
Within the next half hour, more dolphins came to us—there were now at least fifteen. We felt nearly certain they included members of the first group we had encountered. We had set out to follow them; and now they, instead, were following us.
Did they understand that we had come to see them? I wished I knew a gesture with which to greet them, as I had with Akeakamai. To wave seemed inappropriate. Instead, I knocked on the sides of the boat. I thought perhaps they’d simply rise in response: “What’s that? Let’s see.” But to my surprise, one chose to answer my sound with a sound: a loud, big bubble, a spoken explosion. I knocked again, and our conversation continued. We received six loud bursts of bubbles at lengthening intervals, all within five minutes. We named these “bubble bombs”; they were quite different from the champagnelike effusion of airy pearls the dolphins had cast around our boat that moonlit night in Peru. Much later, in a clear-water tank with glass sides, we would observe North America’s only living captive boto, an elderly male named Chuckles, producing similar bubble bombs at the Pittsburgh Zoo. Unlike the delicate bubble rings Wolfgang Gewalt had observed at the Duisburg Zoo, which were released from the side of the mouth, Chuckles’s bubble bombs were like giant burps expelled vehemently from the center of his gaping beak. And while the Duisburg dolphins made their bubble rings as toys, Chuckles’s bubble burps were clearly produced for a different purpose—to evoke a response, perhaps to instigate a conversation. Visitors always reacted. Children shrieked, laughed, and ran; adults gasped and pointed. To Chuckles, of course, the “zoo” was the visitors outside his tank, and he seemed to enjoy provoking them into doing something interesting for him to watch.
As the wild botos bombed us with bubbles, I laughed with delight; Dianne, however, was not amused. She was trying, desperately, to photograph the animals, and all she ever got was bubbles. “They are definitely playing tricks on me,” she said, “and now they’re laughing.” Perhaps they were. Cetaceans do seem to enjoy a good joke. I remembered an account of beluga whales who lived next to the dolphin tank at the John G. Shedd Aquarium in Chicago some years ago. As part of an experiment, a Pacific white-sided dolphin there named Kri had been trained to stick her snout through a ring and hold the position until a low-frequency whistle signaled her to swim away. When Kri began breaking her routine, the researchers were mystified—until they discovered the belugas next door, excellent mimics, were precisely duplicating the tone, duping the dolphin, baffling the scientists, and foiling the experiment. “You could almost picture the belugas laughing in the next tank,” th
eir trainer had said.
After six bubble bombs, the dolphins resumed their usual game of hide-and-seek: one would pop up, blow, and we would twirl to watch it vanish; two would surface on the opposite side, we’d cry “Look!” and they would sink. It reminded me of the game I had played as a child at the swimming pool: One child, eyes shut, cries “Marco!” and the others answer “Polo!” Trying to follow the sound, Marco tries to tag his tormentors, but after crying “Polo” the others dive or swim away, just out of reach. The botos, diving and blowing, were playing Marco Polo, and we were “it.”
This, of course, was not what we had come for. We were supposed to be working with the telemetry, in pursuit of a single electronic answer to a simple question: “Where are you?” “I am here.” Nonetheless, I put down the telemetry and unplugged the earphones, seduced by the pleasure of their game. I lost myself in their play, and let their motion flood my senses: wet skin gliding against wet skin, the kiss of air, wind and sun on arched backs, the embrace of the cool water. Over and over, they surfaced and plunged, sliding, timeless and weightless, between water and air. No wonder botos enter human story as lovers; they glide through the elements the way lovers slide through one another’s bodies, a tension of tenderness and hunger, poised on the threshold of joy. As the sunlight poured over us, heavy as honey, sweat drenched my hair, my bra, my shirt, my socks, my shoes. Sweat ran into my eyes and mouth and ears. But I never noticed until they left us, and then my mouth would water as if hungry, and I would feel tears stinging my eyes.
Journey of the Pink Dolphins Page 20