Voices in the Ocean

by Susan Casey

  I had heard rumors of Fungie, a male bottlenose who had forsaken the open sea to live inside the mouth of the Dingle harbor, a placid, shallowish inlet bordered by low verdant hills that are speckled with sheep. According to local legend, he had been swimming around in this area, not much bigger than a few city blocks, since October 1983. It did not seem like an auspicious place for a dolphin to settle. Though Dingle’s bay is sheltered from snarlier North Atlantic conditions—churning seas, huffing winds—dolphins are well equipped for these things and seem to revel in the action: surfing down the faces of waves, leaping through the wakes of ships, playing in the maelstrom. By comparison, the Dingle harbor is a pond. After the dolphin, the next wildest animals in Dingle are cows.

  Living inside the harbor would also expose Fungie to heavy boat traffic, the town’s fleet of fishing trawlers motoring in and out, and the bay’s tranquil appearance belied its extreme tides—some days its depth fluctuated as much as fifteen feet, a draining so drastic that if he wasn’t careful a dolphin might easily end up beached in the mud. Dingle harbor couldn’t be mistaken for a marine sanctuary either: it had been known in the past for its abundant reservoirs of trash. So what was a full-grown bottlenose with an entire ocean at his disposal doing in this fish tank? And where was his pod? Whenever Fungie was spotted—almost every day, apparently—he was always alone.

  Despite the fact that Fungie has his own Facebook page and Twitter feed, I wasn’t sure if he was quite so ubiquitous as I’d been led to believe. Somehow, the stories I’d read about him seemed more apocryphal than true. He struck me more as a town mascot than an actual animal, a kind of Gaelic Disney creation intended, most likely, to drum up tourism. For one thing, if the same adult bottlenose had resided in Dingle for the past thirty years, that would make him at least forty-two or forty-three years old, and though a fortysomething dolphin is well within the range of possibility, his uncommon living situation made longevity a long shot. Being part of a pod means protection, hunting success, society, sex, kin—the fundamentals of dolphin existence. A solitary dolphin is like a floating oxymoron. So how did this one survive?

  The tales of Fungie the loner dolphin seemed improbable. But surprisingly, there are others like him. In fact, there are many accounts of dolphins who break away from their mates for reasons unknown—or are cast out or lost or orphaned or otherwise marooned—and end up seeking human companionship instead. These animals are typically bottlenoses, but there have also been instances of solitary orcas, spotted dolphins, common dolphins, dusky dolphins, Risso’s dolphins, beluga whales, and even the rare tucuxi—a pink-bellied South American species—dwelling in a small area and community of people on a constant basis.

  Scientists don’t know why it happens, but tales of dolphins befriending humans reach far back into history. Aristotle wrote offhandedly about the dolphins’ “passionate attachment to boys,” as if everyone just knew this as a fact. In the year AD 77, Pliny the Elder, the early Roman naturalist and philosopher, recounted the story of a dolphin named Simo who formed a bond with a boy who fed him bits of bread: “At whatever hour of the day [the dolphin] might happen to be called by the boy, and although hidden and out of sight at the bottom of the water, he would instantly fly to the surface, and after feeding from his hand, would present his back for him to mount…sportively taking him up on his back, he would carry him over a wide expanse of sea…This happened for several years, until at last the boy happened to fall ill of some malady and died. The dolphin, however, still came to the spot as usual, with a sorrowful air and manifesting every sign of deep affliction, until at last, a thing of which no one felt the slightest doubt, he died purely of sorrow and regret.”

  Pliny goes on to chronicle more of these human-dolphin pairings, including the story of a dolphin who had frequently played with a Roman proconsul named Flavianus, only to refuse later to let the man ride on his back; for this snub the dolphin was put to death. In another instance, Alexander the Great had been so taken by the bond between a boy and a dolphin who followed him around, that he appointed the child High Priest of Neptune at Babylon.

  When you consider how risky it is for dolphins to spend time in close proximity to people, it is all the more intriguing that so many human-dolphin stories have similar themes: dolphin seeks out man, dolphin wants to play with man, dolphin assists man, dolphin rescues man. If dolphins didn’t already have such a well-established reputation for showing up like Superman in the third act, zooming in when people are in trouble, it would be impossible to put their behavior into context. But there are centuries and even millennia of tales of their generosity and kindness toward the awkward two-legged creatures they encounter who are so out of their element in the water. Dolphins have been known to respond like highly skilled lifeguards, saving people from all manner of aquatic peril. Occasionally they perform small kindnesses like retrieving lost diving gear or helping fishermen catch fish. It’s hard to believe that dolphins actually care about us—“us” being the ones who ensnare them in nets and contaminate them with chemicals and make them do silly tricks and, in certain parts of the world, eat them—but at least some of them act like they do.

  In the book Beautiful Minds, biologist Maddalena Bearzi recalls tailing a pod of bottlenoses on one grim, foggy morning along the coast of Los Angeles. The animals were hunting, ignoring her research boat as they searched for fish. Finally, they found a huge school of sardines and began herding them. If there’s anything that commands a dolphin’s attention it is a mother lode of fish, so Bearzi was surprised when one of the dolphins suddenly broke away from feeding and headed out to sea, swimming at top speed. The rest of the pod followed; so did Bearzi and her crew. The dolphins arrowed about three miles offshore and then they stopped, arranging themselves in a circle. In the center, the scientists were shocked to see a girl’s body floating. She was a teenager and barely alive, her suicide attempt only moments away from succeeding. Around her neck, the girl had strung a plastic bag containing her identification and a farewell letter. Thanks to the dolphins, she was rescued. “I still think and dream about that cold day,” Bearzi wrote, “and that tiny, pale girl lost in the ocean and found again for some inexplicable reason, by us, by the dolphins.”

  Tales like this are remarkably common: famously, when rescuers pulled five-year-old Cuban refugee Elián González out of the water three miles off Florida’s coast, adrift and alone for forty-eight hours after his boat capsized and everyone else aboard had drowned, some of his first words were about how dolphins had surrounded him and kept him from slipping off his life ring in thirteen-foot seas. After a 9.1 earthquake shook the waters off Phuket, Thailand, on December 26, 2004, seven boats full of scuba divers were startled when a pod of dolphins began to leap theatrically, right in front of them, attention-getting behavior that none of the veteran captains or divemasters had witnessed before. The ocean was roiled from the earthquake and the captains had decided to return to port, but the dolphins seemed to be frantically beckoning them offshore. Out of curiosity, the dive boats followed them. At that point no one aboard the vessels could have known that massive tsunami waves were rolling beneath them, thundering toward the shoreline where they would cause epic death and destruction. The divers soon learned that by steering them out to sea, away from the breaking waves, the dolphins had saved their lives.

  Surfers, in particular, seem to benefit from dolphin intervention; accounts of dolphins aiding their fellow wave riders are the most plentiful of all. When surfer Todd Endris was bitten three times by a great white shark near Monterey, California, dolphins drove off the marauder, formed a ring around Endris, and escorted him to the beach. Even before the attack the dolphins had been circling Endris with unusual focus. When the shark approached for its first pass they made a visible ruckus: thrashing their fins at the surface, slapping their tails on the water, and in general acting so aggressively that another surfer, Wes Williams, floating fifteen feet from Endris, wondered, “What did he do to piss off the dolphins?” Wh
en he got the full measure of what was happening, Williams paddled toward Endris to help. While Endris flailed in a pool of blood, the shark returned—twice. Williams watched one ninja dolphin vault out of the water and lash at the attacker with its tail, Bruce Lee style.

  As a guest on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, actor Dick Van Dyke recounted how dolphins had once pushed him back to shore after he fell asleep on his surfboard at Virginia Beach, accidentally drifting so far out into the ocean that he could no longer see land; Australian pro surfer Dave Rastovich, straddling his board waiting for a wave, was astonished to watch a dolphin hurtle itself at a shark that was torpedoing toward him, sending it fleeing. (Coincidentally, only two days earlier Rastovich had launched a nonprofit group, Surfers for Cetaceans, to protect dolphins and whales.)

  What to make of these stories? One point worth noting is that dolphins often behave toward us in the same ways they do toward one another. It’s standard dolphin operating procedure, for instance, to fend off sharks, or hold an injured mate at the surface so he can breathe, or steer the pod away from danger. In the dolphins’ nomadic undersea world, solitude equals vulnerability, so a lone human in the water must seem to them direly in need of assistance. Their consideration of us isn’t limited to emergency situations, either: at the Tangalooma Island Resort in Australia, where wild bottlenoses are regularly fed fish by people standing in the shallows, biologists have documented—on twenty-three occasions—the dolphins reciprocating, swimming up to offer freshly caught tuna, eels, and octopi as gifts.

  In other words, dolphins do not always differentiate between us and them. At times they do not seem to care that we are not members of their species—they simply appoint us honorary dolphins. Maybe that was why Fungie had made his home among the residents of Dingle. To him, perhaps, they were just a slightly-peculiar-looking pod.

  I drove down to Dingle from Dublin, winding through green and peaceful country, through bustling little cities and quaint little towns, trying to get used to steering from the right side of the car and shifting gears with my left hand while driving on the left side of the road. It was automotive dyslexia, complicated by rain squalls, perplexing roundabouts, and narrow streets with mailboxes that all seemed to pop out at exactly the same height as my rearview mirrors. For six hours I managed not to sideswipe anything, and when I crested a final set of hills and dropped into the last valley before Dingle, I felt relief. Below me in the distance, I could see a platinum bay that changed color to bruised lavender as clouds lofted by overhead.

  Dingle is a harbor town and everything in it points toward the water. Its main street fronts the bay itself, a soldierly row of crayon-colored pubs and restaurants and inns. From there the village lanes, postcard perfect in their charm, branch off like river tributaries, running slightly uphill. Fishing boats of various vintages are moored at the docks, two and three abreast, loaded with buoys and ropes and skeins of netting, jumbles of rusty parts that would be useful for something, if you could only remember what.

  I parked my car near the town square and got out to take a look around. I knew I’d arrived at Dingle’s hub because I was in a plaza paved with herringbone brick, spacious and inviting, and in the center, cast in gleaming bronze, stood a life-size statue of Fungie. Two children sat astride the dolphin eating croissants while their parents snapped pictures with their phones; other families hung back, waiting for their own photo opportunities. A small girl in a fuchsia tracksuit ran rings around the statue chanting, “Fungie! Fungie! Fungie!”

  I stood there for a moment watching, then turned to a man holding a stroller next to me and asked if he had seen the dolphin in person. The man looked surprised. “Oh, yes. I’ve seen him many times,” he said, pointing to the harbor. “He’s always here.” The fuchsia tracksuit girl came galloping over and stopped in front of us. Up close, I could see that she had a blue dolphin tattoo on her cheek—temporary, I hoped. “Can you tell her what the dolphin did today, Clare?” the man asked brightly, with an aside to me in a lower voice: “Scared the living daylights out of her.” The girl nodded vigorously: “He nearly touched Daddy’s head!” I found this hard to visualize, but before I could ask for clarification the man had turned away and his daughter clambered aboard the statue, shoving aside a boy who was reclining on Fungie’s tail fin.

  Behind the dolphin there was a stone building that looked like a harbormaster’s office; its windows were plastered with Fungie posters and advertisements and press clippings. I wandered over to read them. An eight-foot cardboard cutout of the dolphin reared up behind the glass: FUNGIE IS FINTASTIC! COME SEE HIM TODAY! INFO@DINGLEDOLPHIN.COM. On an illustrated map of the surrounding waters, Fungie had been painted erupting from the center of the bay, labeled in Irish as “Doilphín.” A newspaper photo showed him lolling on his back next to a red skiff, while a woman leaned over the side to tickle his belly. DOLPHIN WHO JUST WANTS TO HAVE FUN, read the headline. So why had the “the big-hearted bottlenose” stayed in Dingle for so long? The writer had asked locals for their opinions. “Maybe he’s just very sociable and likes the Irish way of life,” one resident mused.

  Another article announced that “fun-loving Fungie the dolphin has somersaulted into the record books…as The Most Loyal Animal on the Planet!” To win this title, I read, Fungie had outdone a Risso’s dolphin named Pelorus Jack who spent twenty-four years, from 1888 to 1912, escorting ships through New Zealand’s Cook Strait, a tricky slice of sea between the North and South Islands. These waters contain every possible treachery: rough waters, submerged rocks, whipping winds, and a fierce current known as Te-Aumiti—Swirling Vortex—by the Maoris. Before the dolphin stepped in, the Cook Strait had hosted a number of New Zealand’s worst maritime disasters.

  Pelorus Jack’s job, as he performed it, was to guide boats to a safe crossing. Usually he would just materialize at the bow; if he didn’t immediately show up, captains would often stall their vessels and wait for him. For his navigational expertise and the joyful way he expressed himself—jumping across bow waves and rubbing up against ships’ hulls—the dolphin was beloved. “He swam alongside in a kind of snuggling-up attitude,” one seaman recalled.

  By all accounts Pelorus Jack was a handsome animal, about fourteen feet long and colored a mottled silver, darker at the tips of his fins. As he got older, he turned white and his countless scrapes and scratches and scuffs stood out in relief, as though he had been the target of intensive graffiti. Like all Risso’s dolphins, he had a large round head and a tiny snip of a beak, giving him a wry, brainy appearance. During his tenure, Pelorus Jack’s reputation spread far. Tourists flocked to see him. Songs were written about him. Rudyard Kipling and Mark Twain both watched him in action. Sometimes he appeared in gossip columns.

  When a passenger aboard a local ferry, the Penguin, shot at Pelorus Jack with a rifle, grazing him and causing him to disappear for weeks, the New Zealand government passed a national law specifically to protect him. After his gunshot wound healed, the dolphin returned to his post. But, numerous witnesses claim, he never guided the Penguin again. If he happened to see that particular ferry he would dive immediately and vanish. In a twist of history that might be described as karmic justice, three years after the incident the Penguin hit a rock and sank.

  The next morning I bought a ticket for the Lady Avalon, a sturdy blue and white trawler that departed at nine a.m. for a Fungie tour of Dingle Bay. It was an overcast day, windless and soggy with moisture. The air tasted like brine. I zipped up my raincoat and stood, as directed, on the boat ramp near a sign that said WAIT BEHIND LINE FOR DOLPHN FERRY. I had wondered if the weather would deter dolphin watchers, but nobody seemed to care or even notice the drizzle. Young families swaddled in Gore-Tex, and outdoorsy couples cradling cups of coffee, lined up beside me.

  When you consider the dolphin-themed economy of Dingle, with its stores selling dolphin postcards and dolphin T-shirts and dolphin earrings, its art galleries full of dolphin paintings and dolphin drawings, its pizzer
ias serving Pizza Fungie—the entire enterprise of greater Dingle—it is clear this is the town that Fungie built. According to Dingle’s tourist bureau, 75 percent of all visitors come for one reason: to see its resident dolphin. During the summer, that influx adds up to about five thousand people per day. Including the Lady Avalon, there are nine dolphin ferries, and every one of them makes multiple trips each day, seven days a week, an hour on the water with a money-back guarantee if Fungie does not appear. A single ticket costs sixteen euros and each boat holds at least thirty people. I did some quick math.

  In a 1991 documentary titled The Dolphin’s Gift, filmmakers interviewed the town’s elders about their impressions of Fungie, as if trying to gain insider information about what on earth the dolphin was doing there. One scene takes place in a pub. Watching it, I had the impression of peering into Dingle’s civic soul. An old man with a florid drinking complexion, alarming growths on his nose, and wild tufts of pale hair leans into the camera clutching his pint. “The dolphin is a gold mine,” he says, in a thick Irish brogue, as fiddle music wails in the background. “Do you know what this is? A gold mine.” He crosses his arms, and laughs throatily. “Ohhhh, yes. I’m very much in love with the dolphin.”

  A deckhand ushered us aboard and within minutes we were motoring slowly away from the dock. Dueling cormorants flew loops overhead. In the near distance I could make out the bay’s pinched entrance, flanked by sloping headlands. The water was a swampy olive color, flat as a bathtub, but when the light glanced off it a certain way it turned to an upbeat slate blue. A dinghy, a white Zodiac, and a trio of sailboats circled in the center of the bay. The sailboats were kid-size, barely big enough to hold two people; one of them had tomato-red sails that stood out like flags against the emerald fields and hills. Every few minutes the skipper of this sailboat leaned over the side to whap the water with something that looked like a spatula. I bent myself nearly double over the railing and stared down into the bay, but I saw nothing. If it were not for the knowledge that a large animal was hiding somewhere in here and that he might pop up at any minute, this harbor circuit would easily qualify as the world’s most boring boat ride.