Voices in the Ocean Read online

  Now, decades later, I had come to this Ocean World to find out what life was like for a dolphin inside “the largest man-made dolphin enclosure in the world,” because it is impossible to talk about dolphins without considering this fact: people will pay a lot of money to be with them. What other animal could entice a family of four to drop $800 in one afternoon? Certainly, no one here was spending $199 to kiss a stingray, or buying $120 photo packages on account of the toucans or the sea lions or even the plexiglass-encased tigers. It was only the dolphins who commanded these fees.

  The weather in the Dominican Republic was searingly hot, and the unshaded walkways and dolphin pools baked in the tropical glare. I stopped by the sea lion tank and took a long pull from my water bottle. Much concrete had been poured here, contributing to the fiendish temperatures. Beneath the peppy samba music, Ocean World had a vaguely militaristic feel, with armed security guards posted around the property. NO GUNS OR WEAPONS ALLOWED WITHIN OCEAN WORLD PREMISES, warned a sign on the side of a building.

  The park’s sixteen dolphins were housed in a lagoon divided by a lattice of pathways and docks. There were one or two dolphins in each pen; below the docks, wire fencing separated the enclosures. Most of the dolphins hung at the surface, barely moving, a resting behavior scientists refer to as “logging.” One of the dolphins trailed alongside me, staring up while I walked. Another nudged halfheartedly at a floating red ball.

  Every dolphin here was a bottlenose, which was not surprising. Marine parks rely on this species because they tend to fare better in captivity than other types of dolphins, and learn quickly to perform the requisite tail-walking moves or synchronized leaps. (Orcas and beluga whales are popular attractions too, though their size makes them more difficult to keep; when removed from the wild, both species die at alarming rates.) Occasionally, the parks have also exhibited less familiar species like Amazon river dolphins, Risso’s dolphins, pilot whales, white-sided dolphins, melon-headed whales, spinner dolphins, Fraser’s dolphins, Commerson’s dolphins, pantropical spotted dolphins, striped dolphins, common dolphins, and false killer whales—but none of them lasted too long. History has shown that dolphins of every species, bottlenose included, live fretfully in tanks, and though some individuals adapt better than others, many fall short—and often far short—of their natural life expectancies.

  I knew this fact and I found it upsetting, and I’m not a big fan of canned tourist experiences, especially when they are as transparently craven as this one seemed to be. As a rule I don’t enjoy watching tigers caged behind a casino, or dolphins conscripted to tow kids on boogie boards around a fake lagoon. At the same time, I wanted to find out what was going on in these tanks, if there was any possible benefit for humans or dolphins in this arrangement. I am a fan of top-notch facilities like the Monterey Bay Aquarium in Northern California, where every exhibit is rooted in the latest marine science, and where admission profits are funneled right back into important ocean research—but trained dolphins are not part of their mandate. Dolphin shows and dolphin petting zoos and big-ticket dolphin encounters are another business entirely, probably because each new finding about dolphins reveals them to be even more astute and self-aware and socially advanced than we previously realized, and this in turn calls into question the ethics, and the research benefits, of keeping such sophisticated creatures penned up, making them do our bidding in order to eat. Science, in other words, does not coexist easily with the Royal Dolphin Swim.

  But people don’t always concern themselves with the details, and they come to marine parks like this one and bring their children and plan vacations around dolphin captivity—and I would imagine that these people are well intentioned and would insist that they absolutely cherish dolphins, even as the animals orbit their teacup pools as endlessly as lost satellites. Relentless public relations’ efforts support this schism, and the idea of dolphins as happy ambassadors to all humanity. To hear the marine parks tell it, they are providing a vital educational service, one that aids dolphins and engenders love for the ocean and helps ensure the long-range conservation of the animals that live there. All of which are worthy endeavors, of course, and I was prepared to upgrade my impressions if any of these claims were true.

  I had opted for the thirty-minute dolphin swim, so I changed into my bathing suit and followed the signs to a snack bar called the Dolphin Hut. There, I was issued a yellow lifejacket and herded in with a group of seven other people. We bunched together in a patch of shade while an Ocean World employee laid out the rules, holding up a stuffed dolphin for demonstration purposes. “Do not hit them or smack them,” he said in Spanish-accented English. “They don’t like that. And don’t touch them in the blowhole. That is their private area.”

  “We just did the shark touch,” a chipper blond woman told me. She pointed to her husband, a lanky man with sparse hair who was sweating profusely. “He went in the tank. I wouldn’t.”

  “They’re just nurse sharks,” the man said, looking exasperated. “They don’t even have teeth.”

  The woman shook her head. “I don’t care. They’re sharks.”

  Orientation over, we were directed down the dock to a semicircular enclosure, where two trainers awaited. The water in this pool was darker blue and intended, perhaps, to evoke an actual pond or miniature lake, with little visibility below. One of the trainers stepped onto a floating platform and set down a plastic cooler. The moment he did this, two bottlenose heads popped up in front of him. They had the excited, expectant vibe of Labrador retrievers, except they were twelve-foot-long, 1,000-pound wild animals, which became apparent when I saw them up close. These dolphins made the spinners in Hawaii look like bath toys.

  We sat in a row on the side of the platform, our legs dangling in the water. The dolphins dove, shot around the tank, and then reappeared in front of the cooler. The second trainer, a sturdy Latin guy I’ll call Alonso, began by introducing them. “This is Serena and Niagara,” he said, pointing to the dolphins. They had their heads out of the water and their mouths open and I could see their thick pink tongues, lined by perfectly spaced teeth that looked like sharpened pine nuts. Both dolphins had silvery bodies and the softest, palest pink tinge on their underbellies. “They like being together,” Alonso told the group, adding: “If they don’t get along, they fight.” He made boxing motions with his fists. The dolphins stared hungrily.

  Alonso didn’t seem like a bad guy. He just seemed like a guy who would have been happier behind the bar of a Carnival cruise ship, slinging daiquiris on all-you-can-drink night. What he was not, most obviously, was someone who would “exchange and disseminate current knowledge, research and other information” about dolphins, as the International Marine Animal Trainers Association’s Web site states as a mission. Opening the cooler, Alonso flicked two teeny translucent fish at Serena and Niagara. “Clappy, clappy!” he yelled, waving his hands spasmodically. The two dolphins rose out of the water vertically and beat their fins on the surface, soaking the people, who screamed in delight.

  During our allotted thirty minutes the dolphins performed a sequence of tricks, none of which seemed to engage them even slightly, and all of which seemed, if you stopped for half a second to think about it, depressingly dumb. Serena and Niagara vaulted over our heads in tandem, and dragged us around the tank, and pressed their beaks to our faces on command. Whenever they completed a trick, they raced over to the cooler and resumed their begging posture. Alonso barked instructions at the people; the dolphins responded to hand signs and shrill whistles.

  In the end, not even the concrete gloom of Ocean World could squelch the magic of Serena and Niagara, who seemed in all ways more interesting than their trainers, and who were obviously capable of feats on a completely different scale. As far as educational experiences go, however, this one had about as much substance as a dolphin-themed ride at an amusement park. The animals’ natural history, so rich and transfixing, was not part of the program. Not a whiff of an ocean conservation message was offer
ed. Even if you ignored the photographer sharing the platform with the trainers, Ocean World’s intentions could not have been clearer—and they didn’t involve illuminating the incredible real lives of wild dolphins for anybody.

  As Serena and Niagara completed their routine, I was struck by the glazed-over look in their eyes and the intensity of their focus on the fish, as though they had been waiting for that cooler to appear for a very long time. While I was thinking about this, I heard Alonso ask the group: “Do you know how long these dolphins live?”

  “Twenty years?” a teenage girl answered, guessing.

  “Yes!” Alonso said, grinning broadly and revealing a set of mismatched teeth. “But only in here. In the ocean they live shorter.” He held up a cautionary index finger. “In the ocean their life is very hard.”

  It was P. T. Barnum, the circus showman, who first exhibited dolphins back in 1861. Upon discovering that vast beluga pods congregated in northeastern Canada, he collected two of the animals and shipped them to his American Museum in New York. With their goofy Casper the Friendly Ghost appearance, their impressive size, and their sweet dispositions, the belugas were a huge draw in the hours they survived. They shared the second floor of the museum with a taxidermied elephant, an electric eel, a seal who played the harmonica, a fat lady, a one-armed, one-legged soldier, and a giantess named Miss Swan, who sat in an oversize, thronelike chair.

  “In August last I succeeded in bringing to the Museum two living white whales from Labrador,” Barnum wrote. “One died the first day and the other the second day. Even in this brief period, thousands availed themselves of the opportunity of witnessing this rare sight. Since August I have brought two more whales to New York, at enormous expense, but both died before I could get them into the Museum.” Undeterred, Barnum returned to Canada to snatch up more belugas from a seemingly limitless supply, their commercial potential diminished only by the troublesome logistics of carting around an eighteen-foot-long, 3,000-pound animal in a tub of saltwater. At least nine belugas rotated through Barnum’s exhibit, all of whom died promptly. Then, in 1865, the museum burned to the ground, taking another two belugas with it. In a lengthy article about the fire, The New York Times mourned the loss of the whales and their “fearful death by roasting.”

  Other enterprises took to exhibiting belugas—the animals were easy to catch—including the New York Aquarium on Coney Island, at the time run by a circus manager and an animal dealer; the Boston Aquarial Gardens; and the Royal Aquarium in London, which was able to keep its beluga alive for four days. Barnum continued as well, building a new museum and restocking it with whales until a fire consumed it, too, along with yet another pair of belugas. In 1897, the New York Aquarium relocated to Battery Park and hauled in two fresh belugas. One died in less than a week. The other beluga lasted for a heroic twenty days before choking to death on his food.

  Bottlenose dolphins leaped onto the scene in 1938, with the opening of Marine Studios in St. Augustine, Florida. Billed as the world’s first “oceanarium,” Marine Studios was originally built as an underwater movie set, stocked with photogenic marine creatures who could be filmed through two hundred portholes—situated for optimal camera angles—in two half-million-gallon steel tanks that hunkered on the beach like twin spaceships decorated in snappy Art Deco style. It was a grand project, optimistic and expensive; someone came up with the idea of selling tickets to the public to offset operating costs.

  From the start, the place was a hit. Thirty thousand people showed up on opening day to peer through the portholes at the gleaming coral reef, the schools of jewel-colored fish, the sea turtles and moray eels and manta rays and tiger sharks gliding by. In 1938, America was limping out of the Great Depression, scuba had yet to be invented, and no one had ever seen such a vista before. A helmeted diver walked the tank floor feeding the barracudas and tarpon and goliath groupers by hand. Sun-dappled seahorses tipped in the current; moon-colored octopi jetted under rocks. It must have been hypnotic and wonderful, like a submarine dream of the ocean, now available on land.

  Marine Studios’ creators included Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, heir to the Vanderbilt and Whitney fortunes and one of the founders of Pan Am Airlines; his cousin William Douglas Burden; and Count Ilya Tolstoy, Leo Tolstoy’s grandson. The men had ties to Hollywood, and also to the American Museum of Natural History. They were explorers and adventurers themselves, and alongside the oceanarium they built a research lab where scientists could come to study the sea’s unknown inhabitants. (Demand for the lab was so high that it was booked a year in advance; John Lilly’s first dolphin experiments took place there.) Movie stars and beauty queens were frequent guests, posing for publicity photos. Ernest Hemingway arrived to drink at Moby Dick’s, the onsite bar that rocked like a ship at sea.

  Marine Studios’ most crowd-pleasing feature was its lone dolphin, who swam around carrying a sign in his mouth that said I AM A BOTTLENOSED DOLPHIN. This wasn’t the bottlenose’s premier public appearance—the New York Aquarium had some as early as 1913—but it was here that dolphins were first seriously trained to do tricks. To everyone’s enthusiasm new animals were constantly added to the tanks, including more bottlenoses and spotted dolphins and, in 1948, four pilot whales, the survivors of a forty-six-whale stranding that occurred on the beach in front of the oceanarium.

  The four whales were scorched with sunburn by the time they were transferred to the tank, their skin a mess of blisters. They huddled together, even at night, with their bodies always touching. Three of the pilot whales died within eight days. The fourth, who had been named Herman, survived for nine months. Herman was a small pilot whale, probably a yearling, and after he lost his remaining podmates he was bullied by a gang of three male bottlenose dolphins. The bottlenoses were remorseless. The whale, for reasons of fear or temperament or inability, never fought back. Like all cetaceans, Herman was highly vocal, and his sounds were unusually plaintive. An observer described them as “the peevish whining of a young child,” and “the crying of young porcupines or beavers.” The whale had good reason to whimper. Herman was bitten and rammed and chased. His ribs were cracked. His tail was bruised so badly that he couldn’t use it properly and had to swim with a side-to-side motion, like a shark. One time, a bottlenose smashed into the whale with such ferocity that his body was ejected from the water. By the time the staff intervened, removing the assailants, Herman had suffered a broken jaw. He died soon after that.

  Dolphins came and went during the fifties, plucked from nearby waters by Marine Studios’ forty-eight-foot collecting boat, The Porpoise. In the continuum, it became clear that some animals were smarter and easier to manage than others. “Periods of accomplishment would be followed by periods of remission and bad temper,” read one account of Marine Studios’ dolphin training efforts. Eventually, a star emerged: a gregarious male bottlenose named Flippy. Advertised as “The World’s Most Educated Dolphin,” Flippy could shoot basketballs and throw footballs and push a dog around on a surfboard. He could fly through hoops. In 1955, he starred in Revenge of the Creature, the sequel to the movie Creature from the Black Lagoon.

  Flippy was soon eclipsed by Flipper, the charismatic bottlenose film and television star. Though Flipper was a male character, he was played by a rotating cast of five female dolphins, all of seemingly invincible talent. After the Flipper movie grossed $8 million in 1963, the dolphin, a kind of aquatic house pet on steroids, was given his own TV show. Each week, Flipper rescued his adopted human family from oceanic perils such as underwater explosions, crocodile maulings, and shark attacks. The show’s plots were cartoonish and fantastical but they struck a booming chord. “The dolphin does amazing things,” The New York Times enthused in its review. “It registers pathos and joy in its own way, and manages to upstage anything less than eight-feet long.”

  Flipper’s popularity tsunamied out from Coconut Grove, Florida, where the show was produced, to the rest of North America, splashing into even the most landlocked of places.
Suddenly, everybody wanted to see dolphins in action. In the dolphin-mania that ensued—which has only heated up since Flipper’s time—marine parks have grown into a multibillion-dollar global industry. Swim-with-dolphins programs are now being launched at the rate of two per year throughout the Caribbean, and can be found in such unlikely spots as Romania and Cambodia.

  Marine Studios, fallen from glamor and renamed Marineland Dolphin Adventure, is now owned by the Georgia Aquarium. For $99, its patrons can have a fifteen-minute encounter with a “dolphin artist” who will paint a picture for them, brandishing tubes of paint with his beak. (Trainer for a Day is available there, too, for $475, making Ocean World look like a comparative bargain.) In at least one instance, the dolphins even have shareholders: SeaWorld Entertainment Inc., the biggest brand in marine parks, went public on the New York Stock Exchange in April 2013, with a market capitalization of $2.5 billion. “Growing attendance is not our focus,” SeaWorld’s CEO, Jim Atchison, told The Wall Street Journal after the company’s IPO raised $702 million. “Our focus is driving our financial performance.”

  The enclosure emptied of people, and the trainers packed up their cooler and wandered off too. I stood on the walkway watching Serena and Niagara circling on autopilot, visibly aware that the fish were gone. Electronica pounded through speakers—it was inescapable on Ocean World’s grounds—loud enough to make the railings vibrate. I wondered what it was like for such acoustically sensitive animals to be surrounded by earsplitting music and shrieking people all day. Sound is a physical force; when we’re bombarded by it we come apart quickly (imagine being locked in a room with someone running a jackhammer or belting out karaoke or scraping over and over on metal). Excessive noise bugs us and hurts us; it damages nervous systems, circulation, mental health, ears. Dolphins, with their ability to hear across far wider frequencies, are especially vulnerable. After a sixteen-hour rave was held near their enclosure at Connyland, a Swiss marine park, two dolphins died.