by Susan Casey
When it comes to partners: A note about the dolphin libido: dolphins are enthusiastic and aggressive about sex, and promiscuous, too. Scientists believe there are social reasons for this—bonding, or to establish a hierarchy—as well as the obvious ones: procreation and plain old enjoyment. Among males, displaying an erection is often a sign of dominance (though sometimes it might be a game, a practice session, or an invitation). Homosexual dolphin relations are common. So is masturbation: both male and female dolphins have been observed rubbing themselves against soft sand on the seafloor. Favorite dolphin pastimes include buzzing one another’s genitals with their sonar, presumably a highly pleasurable sensation, and engaging in plenty of brushing and touching. There is a courtship element to their pairings, but sometimes dolphin sex can get rough. Biologist Richard Connor, who has studied a bottlenose society in Shark Bay, Australia, for thirty years, discovered that the males travel in roving bands, forming alliances to corral females, sometimes against the females’ will.
“This has to be”: Steve Hearn, “Trainers Forum,” Soundings Q4, 2008. http://www.mydigitalpublication.com/article/Trainer’s_Forum/69098/8105/article.html (accessed in February 2014).
“internal strife”: Elizabeth Batt, “Taiji Dolphin Injured at Dalian Laohutan Ocean Park in China?” Digital Journal, March 18, 2012. http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/321391 (accessed April 13, 2015).
“normal, socially induced”: “Performing Whale Dies in Collision with Another,” The New York Times, August 23, 1989.
“It should be noted”: Naomi A. Rose, E. C. M. Parsons, and Richard Farinato, “The Case Against Marine Mammals in Captivity,” report from the Humane Society of the United States and the World Society for the Protection of Animals, p. 31: http://www.humanesociety.org/assets/pdfs/marine_mammals/case_against_marine_captivity.pdf.
52 percent: Tania D. Hunt, Michael H. Ziccardi, Frances M. D. Gulland, Pamela K. Yochem, David W. Hird, Teresa Rowles, and Jonna A. K. Mazet, “Health Risks for Marine Mammal Workers,” Diseases of Aquatic Organisms 81 (2008): 81–92.
“Trainer R first entered”: G. A. Shurepova, “Aggressive Behavior of Captive Tursiops Truncatus,” in K. K. Chapskii and V. E. Sokolov, eds., Morphology and Ecology of Marine Mammals: Seals, Dolphins, Porpoises (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1971), 150–53.
“aggressive manifestations”: Bruce Stephens, as quoted in Erich Hoyt, “The Performing Orca: Why the Show Must Stop” (Bath, U.K.: Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, 1992), 31.
While other SeaWorld employees: United States of America Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission, Secretary of Labor, Complainant v. SeaWorld of Florida, LLC OSHRC Docket No. 10-1705, June 11, 2011: 1–47. This tragedy has also been chronicled extensively by journalists David Kirby (in his book Death at SeaWorld: Shamu and the Dark Side of Killer Whales in Captivity, published in 2012 by St. Martin’s Press) and Tim Zimmermann (in articles that appeared in Outside magazine, available on his Web site: www.timzimmermann.com).
Daniel Dukes: The official cause of Dukes’s death was found to be hypothermia leading to drowning, but the coroner’s report made it clear that while he was still alive, Dukes had been thoroughly mauled by Tilikum.
his semen used: Tilikum is SeaWorld’s most prolific orca stud, having sired at least twenty-one calves, approximately eleven of whom remain alive as of this writing. It is estimated that 54 percent of the whales in SeaWorld’s collection carry Tilikum’s genes.
CHAPTER 4: THE FRIENDLIES
“I still think and dream”: Maddalena Bearzi and Craig B. Stanford, Beautiful Minds: The Parallel Lives of Great Apes and Dolphins (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2008), 24–27.
When surfer Todd Endris: Marcus Sanders (as told to), Norcal Shark Attack Update: Firsthand Account of Monterey Bay Surfer Badly Bitten at Marina State Beach, SurfNews, Surfline.com, August 29, 2007. http://www.surfline.com/surf-news/firsthand-account-of-monterey-bay-surfer-badly-bitten-at-marina-state-beach-norcal-shark-attack-update_10788/ (accessed July 2014).
Their consideration of us: Bonnie J. Holmes and David T. Neil, “Gift Giving by Wild Bottlenose Dolphins (Tursiops sp.) to Humans at a Wild Dolphin Provisioning Program, Tangalooma, Australia,” Antrozoos 25 (2012): 397–413. 85 “He swam alongside”: Anthony Alpers, “The Story of Pelorus Jack,” in Eleanore Devine and Martha Clark, eds., The Dolphin Smile: 29 Centuries of Dolphin Lore (New York: MacMillan Company, 1967), 200.
In a 1991 documentary: The Dolphin’s Gift, directed and written by Kim Kindersley, Zari Productions, London (video), 1991.
“You could sense”: Ibid.
When two drunken men: Marcos César de Oliveira Santos, “Lone Sociable Bottlenose Dolphin in Brazil: Human Fatality and Management,” Marine Mammal Science 13 (April 1997): 355–56.
“Slidell Memorial Hospital’s press secretary”: David Freese, “Slidell Teen Was Third in a Week Bitten by Dolphin,” St. Tammany News, New Orleans, LA, May 23, 2012.
They worried aloud: Alas, The Dolphin’s story does not have a happy ending. After heavy rains diluted the canal’s salinity, Slidell residents observed that the bottlenose had developed skin lesions and lost his characteristic swagger. He died in June 2014, his body found washed up onshore. “It was a sad day for the entire neighborhood,” one resident told a local newspaper reporter. “We all felt like we had a pet dolphin. He will be missed.”
A 2008 global census: Lissa Goodwin and Margaux Dodds, “Lone Rangers: A Report on Solitary Dolphins and Whales Including Recommendations for Their Protection,” Marine Connection (London, England), March 2008.
“with increasing frequency”: Kathleen M. Dudzinski and Toni Frohoff, Dolphin Mysteries (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2008), 136.
CHAPTER 5: WELCOME TO TAIJI
a watchdog initiative started in 1990: In the past, the tuna fishermen’s preferred method for locating their quarry had been to track rowdy pods of feeding dolphins—who are, of course, the real tuna-finding experts—and then winch up every last creature using giant purse seine nets, later discarding the dolphins and any other animal that wasn’t a tuna. This onslaught, which began in the fifties, had killed untold millions of dolphins, sharks, and other fish. Now, any tuna company found setting its nets around dolphins is flagged, publicly identified, and prevented from displaying the Dolphin Safe insignia on its cans.
The world had acted: Though commercial whaling was banned by the International Whaling Commission in 1986, Japan, Norway, and Iceland have continued to hunt minke, sei (endangered), fin, humpback, Bryde’s, and sperm whales. Norway and Iceland simply ignored the ban; Japan found a loophole and exploited it. Under the guise of “scientific research,” its whalers continued to kill roughly a thousand whales each year, mainly in the Antarctic and the Northern Pacific. In 2014, noting that Japan had not produced any scientific papers or research that would have justified the death of even a single whale, the UN’s International Court of Justice ruled the country’s actions illegal. Japanese government officials expressed “deep disappointment” with the court’s decision, and told reporters they were determined to continue whaling. Defiant, the men encouraged photographers to take pictures as they ate from a lavish whale meat buffet.
Scientists now know: Joe Roman, James A. Estes, Lyne Morissette, Craig Smith, Daniel Costa, James McCarthy, J. B. Nation, Stephen Nicol, Andrew Pershing, and Victor Smetacek, “Whales as Marine Ecosystem Engineers,” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 12 (September 2014): 377–85. http://www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1890/130220.
“this killing method”: Andrew Butterworth, Philippe Brakes, Courtney S. Vail, and Diana Reiss, “A Veterinary and Behavioral Analysis of Dolphin Killing Methods Currently Used in the ‘Drive Hunt’ in Taiji, Japan,” Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 16:2 (April 2013): 184
–204.
“This is a small town”: Martin Fackler, “Mercury Taint Divides a Japanese Whaling Town,” The New York Times, February 21, 2008.
“But they do it”: Mark Willacy, “Unlikely Allies Attempt to Stop Dolphin Killing,” Australian Broadcasting Corporation, February 2, 2012. http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2012/s3421925.htm.
Though all dolphin meat: Andy Coghlan, “It’s Madness,” The New Scientist, June 8, 2002: 17.
other than advising: Andy Coghlan, “Shops in Japan are Selling Mercury-Riddled Dolphin as Whalemeat,” The New Scientist, June 14, 2003: 7.
“There is a real danger”: Fackler, “Mercury Taint.”
In 2012, for instance, marine: “Drive Fisheries: Capture Results and Information,” http://www.ceta-base.com/drivefisheries.html#20122013. These statistics are also compiled annually in an official document titled “Japan. Progress Report on Small Cetacean Research.”
“The plaintiff, Ocean World”: In the Circuit Court of the Seventeenth Judicial Circuit in and for Broward County, Florida. Case No. 11-17871, Ocean World, S.A., Plaintiff vs. Earth Island Institute, Inc., and Richard O’Barry, Defendants. Page 5, Section 28, of General Allegations.
still no end in sight: By January 2014, all four suits brought against O’Barry (and others) by Ocean World had been either dismissed or settled, some confidentially and some not. Details are not available for the confidential settlements, but in the others, the settlements were made for nominal amounts. (Currently, a single related lawsuit remains in progress and it’s a brand-new one: Ocean World is now suing its former lawyers, the ones who represented it throughout all of these cases.) Reading through reams of court transcripts, the circuitousness of which would have impressed Franz Kafka, I felt a deep sense of admiration for O’Barry’s lawyers, Deanna Shullman and Rachel Fugate from the Lake Worth, Florida, firm of Thomas & LoCicero. Their years of work wrangling with these matters—and thus defending the First Amendment—much of it done pro bono, struck me as nothing short of heroic.
CHAPTER 6: A SENSE OF SELF
“While they don’t build rockets”: Bruce Dorminey, Researchers Closer to Decoding Dolphin Speak, Forbes.com, http://www.forbes.com/sites/brucedorminey/2012/10/18/dolphin-speak-bustin-the-code-on-flippers-rhymes/ (October 18, 2012).
But what happened during: Lori Marino, Mark D. Uhen, Nicholas D. Pyenson, and Bruno Frohlich, “Reconstructing Cetacean Brain Evolution Using Computed Tomography,” The Anatomical Record 272B (2003): 107–17.
In 2000, she and another: Diana Reiss and Lori Marino, “Mirror Self-Recognition in the Bottlenose Dolphin: A Case of Cognitive Convergence,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences for the United States of America 98, no. 10 (May 2001): 5937–42.
Marino examined: Statement of Lori Marino, PhD, Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology Program, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, to the House Committee on Natural Resources Subcommittee on Insular Affairs, Oceans and Wildlife, regarding educational aspects of public display of marine mammals, April 27, 2010.
down to the lowly earthworm: For an eye-opening essay on the consciousness of earthworms, please see: Eileen Crist, “The Inner Life of Earthworms: Darwin’s Argument and Its Implications,” in The Cognitive Animal: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition, eds. Marc Bekoff, Colin Allen, and Gordon M. Burghardt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 3–8.
“The body of scientific evidence”: George Dvorsky, “Prominent Scientists Sign Declaration that Animals Have Conscious Awareness, Just Like Us,” io9.com. http://io9.com/5937356/prominent-scientists-sign-declaration-that-animals-have-conscious-awareness-just-like-us/ (accessed August 23, 2012).
Years before The Cove hit theaters: For more drive hunt footage, please see Hardy Jones’s Web site, http://www.bluevoice.org/webfilms.php. Jones has also written a compelling book, The Voice of the Dolphins, about his time in Taiji, and in Futo and Iki Island, two other Japanese dolphin-hunting towns. His site is a trove of information about dolphins and the threats they currently face.
Like O’Barry, Marino was: Erik Vance, “It’s Complicated: The Lives of Dolphins and Scientists,” Discover, September 2011, 62–76.
“the communal self”: Harry J. Jerison, “The Perceptual Worlds of Dolphins,” in Ronald J. Schusterman, Jeanette A. Thomas, and Forrest G. Wood, eds., Dolphin Cognition and Behavior: A Comparative Approach (New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986): 160–61.
Jerison’s work is absorbing, if pretty heavy sledding. I was particularly taken by his willingness to mix scientific inquiry with philosophical questions. His definition of intelligence, a concept famously tough to pin down, is one example: “The mind and conscious experience are constructions of nervous systems to handle the overwhelming amount of information they possess,” Jerison wrote. “Intelligence is a measure of the capacity for such constructions.”
“The human brain is the most unsuccessful”: Diane Ackerman, The Moon by Whalelight (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 144.
“My thought was, ‘Okay’ ”: Virginia Morell, “Minds of Their Own,” National Geographic, March 2008, 36–61.
“An important finding”: Louis M. Herman, “What the Dolphin Knows, or Might Know, in Its Natural World,” in Karen Pryor and Kenneth S. Norris, eds., Dolphin Societies: Discoveries and Puzzles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 349–63.
“wide-ranging intellectual”: Louis M. Herman, “What Laboratory Research Has Told Us about Dolphin Cognition,” International Journal of Comparative Psychology 23 (2010): 310–30.
CHAPTER 7: HIGH FREQUENCY
“Earth, to put the matter succinctly”: Edward O. Wilson, “Beware the Age of Loneliness,” The Economist, November 18, 2013.
“What, I wondered”: Allan J. Hamilton, “The Sixth Sense,” Harvard Medicine, http://hms.harvard.edu/news/harvard-medicine/sixth-sense (accessed April 2014).
“Dolphins play with the energies”: Joan Ocean, Dolphins into the Future (Kailua, HI: Dolphin Connection, 1997): 147–48.
“These tones can transform”: Ibid., 123.
she had coauthored a paper: Lori Marino and Scott O. Lilienfeld, “Dolphin-Assisted Therapy for Autism and Other Developmental Disorders: A Dangerous Fad,” Psychology in Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities 33, no. 2 (Fall 2007): 2–3.
“the cheetahs of the deep sea”: Natacha Aquilar Soto, Mark P. Johnson, Peter T. Madsen, Francisca Diaz, Ivan Dominguez, Alberto Brito, and Peter Tyack, “Cheetahs of the Deep Sea: Deep Foraging Sprints in Short-Finned Pilot Whales Off Tenerife,” Journal of Animal Ecology 77 (September 2008): 936–47.
“I was very interested in Sirius”: If you dive into the New Age dolphin world, it won’t be long before you hear talk of Sirius, the brightest star we can see from Earth. (Sirius is actually a system of two stars, Sirius A and B. A is the brilliant one, massively outshining our sun, albeit from 8.6 light-years away; B is a white dwarf, fainter and smaller.) As the lynchpin of the constellation Canis Major, Sirius is known as the “Dog Star,” but it is often rebranded by New Age dolphin lovers. Perhaps this is partly because it is one of the closer stars to us, and theoretically convenient for planet-hopping dolphins, or because of its alleged significance to ancient civilizations (the ancient Egyptians, for instance, based their calendars on it). Most likely, the star’s main dolphin affiliation can be traced to the Dogon people of West Africa. The Dogons believe their ancestors were dolphin-like creatures called Nommos, who, as their legends tell it, called Sirius home.
“I tell them”: The Chumash are joined in their philosophies by other Native American tribes. This passage from Luther Standing Bear, a Sioux (Oglala Lakota) chief born in 1868, is too gorgeous not to share: “Everything was possessed of personality, only differing from us in form. Knowledge was inherent in all things. The world was a library and
its books were the stones, leaves, grass, brooks, and the birds and animals that shared, alike with us, the storms and blessings of earth. We learned to do what only the student of nature ever learns, and that was to feel beauty. We never railed at the storms, the furious winds, and the biting frosts and snows. To do so intensified human futility, so whatever came we adjusted ourselves, by more effort and energy if necessary, but without complaint.”
Luther Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), 194–95.
250 decibels: Decibels are the units used to measure the relative intensity of sound. Explaining how they work requires some fierce math, but in essence the decibel scale is logarithmic, which means that as you progress up it, sounds get exponentially, not incrementally, louder. A 180-decibel sound can burst eardrums. At 250 decibels, underwater air guns approach the threshold of the loudest noise humans are physically capable of making.
“unavoidable adverse impacts”: Jason Dearen, “Officials Mull Seismic Tests Near California Nuke Plant,” Associated Press, October 1, 2012.
The vote was unanimous: Krista Schwimmer, “California Coastal Commission Silences Pacific Gas & Electric’s Airguns,” The Free Venice Beachhead, December 2012.
CHAPTER 8: THE WORLD’S END
“It is far better”: Eddie Osifelo, “Dolphin Debate Heats Up,” Solomon Star, January 20, 2013.
“a killing spree”: Ednal R. Palmer, “300 More Dolphins Slaughtered,” Solomon Star, January 25, 2013.
Video of the hunts: The Dolphin Hunters, produced by Drew Ambrose (Al Jazeera English, 101 East, 2014).
The Guardian also weighed: Suzanne Goldberg, “Solomon Islands Villagers Kill 900 Dolphins in Conservation Dispute,” The Guardian, January 24, 2013. “International Outrage Over Solomon Islands Mass Dolphin Slaughter,” ABC Radio Australia, January 23, 2013.