Dolphin Saves the Whales
Saturday, March 15th, 2008
While I’m on the subject of life-saving miracles, the BBC reported this week that it’s not just humans who take an interest in whale conservation. A bottlenose dolphin, known in her local neighbourhood as Moko, is taking it as seriously as any dolphin can.
Mr Smith and his team of humans were getting nowhere fast in their attempt to save a pair of beached whales from the north east coast of New Zealand. Moko sped to the rescue just in time (maybe in a waterproof cape), uttered a few carefully chosen instructions to the whales (maybe in a Whalish accent), and they made it safely home in time for tea (or maybe a krill tisane).
“I don’t speak whale and I don’t speak dolphin,” Mr Smith told the BBC, “but there was obviously something that went on because the two whales changed their attitude from being quite distressed to following the dolphin quite willingly and directly along the beach and straight out to sea.”
He added: “The dolphin did what we had failed to do. It was all over in a matter of minutes.” [original article]
Tales of dolphins saving humans go back to ancient Greece. It was Plutarch, the Greek moralist and biographer, who said, “To the dolphin alone, beyond all other, nature has granted what the best philosophers seek: friendship for no advantage.” [source]
The best-known dolphin legends feature them forming a ring to protect surfers from sharks, or guiding stray swimmers back to shore. Incredibly dolphins extend their instinct for self-preservation to just about any species (except sharks), and seem to employ it with effortless brilliance.
Is it intelligence or just a natural benevolence? According to Douglas Adams in his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, they are much wiser than we are… but then he also insisted mice are secretly ruling the world. Even when I was hooked on the series at age 10, I wasn’t entirely convinced by that. Let’s see what the Ultimate Guide to Dolphins has to say instead:
Dolphins have large brains for their bodies — in fact, a bottlenose dolphin is second only to humans in the ratio of brain size to body size. Researchers have also pointed to the parallels in the organization of dolphin and primate brains as more evidence of high intelligence in dolphins. Some have gone so far as to suggest that dolphins actually have a language that humans simply cannot comprehend.
But others say that in our enthusiasm to anthropomorphize dolphins, we give them powers they just don’t possess. A closer look suggests that much of the dolphin’s large brain is taken up with echolocation and handling acoustical information — processes at which they excel. But dolphins tend to rank at about the level of elephants in “intelligence” tests and haven’t shown any unusual talent at problem solving.
So what is that unique quality that fascinates and charms us, if we cannot truly call it intelligence? In his book The Animal Kingdom, Sri Chinmoy calls it sagacity.
Dolphin : Sagacity
Dolphin, my dolphin,
Your advanced sagacity
Denies your inferiority
To forest animals.
You make man feel that your consciousness
Borders upon the extremity of human life
With ceaseless strife.—Sri Chinmoy
From The Animal Kingdom
sagacity (su’gasitee)
1. [n] the trait of forming opinions by distinguishing and evaluating
2. [n] the ability to make good judgments
The names of the two saved whales are not known, and Moko’s instructions have not been translated, but whatever she said, it seemed to the whales a very good judgment indeed.
It was an ordinary day in Ningbo, China, but an extraordinary miracle took place in a muddy 5-metre ditch.
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