Twenty Years with the Dolphins Page #2

---

with little to do,

the captain ran the outboard

just for fun,

and the dolphins immediately showed up.

It gave us a first clue about what we

needed to do to attract them.

And it wasn't long before they were

hanging out, waiting for some

action from this new toy.

A second breakthrough

came when I dropped my swim fin to test

how the dolphins would react.

The results were astonishing.

The dolphins came in, sonaring the fin,

circling, and ultimately touching it.

This is the same way

they respond to anything

new in their environment.

First, as they approach,

they sweep their heads

back and forth, sonaring.

When very close,

they examine with their eyes.

You can feel the sonar directed at you,

resonating through your body, especially

in your chest and sinuses.

Dolphin sonar ignores water.

So it can penetrate

body tissues and literally

see inside other animals,

a form of X-ray vision.

Because visibility in the sea

rarely exceeds 100 feet,

this sonar also enables them to detect

distant objects, such as a shark,

from a quarter of a mile

away.

Using their jawbones as receivers,

the dolphins pass sound

signals to their brains,

where they are transformed

into three-dimensional imagery.

So when I took off my fin, I knew

they could easily discern the difference

between the rubber and my body.

But I hoped that pulling off

the fin would make them curious,

and it did.

As we spent time with the dolphins,

we began to recognize their

individual signature whistles.

We named the female with the remora Didi

because she always approached us making

the same up-down whistle.

While making these signature whistles,

the dolphins emit a stream of

bubbles from their blowholes.

So it's easy to spot which

animal is identifying itself.

Didi was a constant companion

of Chopper, the young dolphin

with a blunted dorsal fin.

During the first encounter in 1979,

his skin was a pearly gray,

with no spotting at all, indicating

he was less than two years old.

By the third year, he had begun

to develop some spotting.

Between the ages of three and five,

he was often seen with

a younger sibling,

perhaps acting as a baby sitter.

As he reached adulthood,

he began to form

alliances with other males.

With each passing year,

Chopper developed more spots.

But the unique dorsal fin

made him always identifiable.

I'm not certain how old Chopper was when

we first encountered him,

since no human had

observed his birth.

But he was certainly in

the first year of his life.

Indeed, no one had

ever observed the birth

of a dolphin in the open sea.

And it took me 20 years before

I even came close to witnessing

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes