Voices in the Ocean Read online

  In the annals of bad dolphin husbandry, Connyland had long been infamous. Previously, its owners built an underwater nightclub with windows that flashed lights and reverberated music directly into the dolphin pool, a feature described by one scientist as “a perversion of the highest degree.” In Connyland’s thirty-year history its dolphins had also suffered from skin lesions, pneumonia, brain damage, heart deformation, kidney problems, and mushrooms lodged in their intestines.

  It’s unclear how a dolphin ends up jammed with mushrooms, but dolphins are inquisitive about objects, and will often pick up and swallow things that get dropped in their enclosures. Scientists have puzzled over why this happens so frequently in captivity, why dolphins with their fine-tuned sonar might suddenly mistake a leather glove or a french-fry container for food. They suspect that when marine parks train dolphins to eat dead fish—in the ocean, of course, they hunt live prey—the animals become confused and start nibbling at anything they encounter. This is a dangerous practice for dolphins. It causes intestinal blockages, which are usually fatal. Pieces of plastic are a common killer, but dolphins have also died from ingesting bottle caps, coins, car keys, coffee cups, roofing tiles, cigarette lighters, balloons, rubber toys, jewelry, steel wool, nails, and chunks of asphalt. (A few years ago in Fushun, China, two dolphins ate strips of their tank’s vinyl lining and were saved by Bao Xishun, a 7′9″ Mongolian herdsman who appears in the Guinness Book of World Records as “The World’s Tallest Man.” When surgical tools failed, Xishun reached down the dolphins’ throats with his forty-two-inch arms and extracted the plastic.)

  The other likely culprit is boredom. If your entire world were a featureless swimming pool, you would probably take great interest in examining the stuff people tossed in too. For a creature as smart and creative and sociable as a dolphin, there’s an undeniable padded-cell quality to life in a blank white concrete tank. Behavioral biologist Toni Frohoff, who studies stress in captive dolphins, has watched the animals gnaw on cement enclosures until their teeth are ground down, and bang themselves repeatedly against the walls. Stressed-out dolphins, like stressed-out humans, develop ulcers, heart trouble, blown-out immune systems. They succumb easily to illnesses like pneumonia and hepatitis and meningitis.

  Some dolphins learn to tolerate captivity, but even the most spacious enclosures can never match the open water, where the animals range far in close-knit groups, hunting and playing and socializing in ever-changing conditions. Out there, in the depths and the shallows, they work as a team, devising ingenious fish-catching strategies on the fly. In Shark Bay, Australia, one group of bottlenoses uses sea sponges like protective gloves, covering the tips of their beaks with them when they forage in the rough sand on the seafloor, digging for burrowing fish. In other locations, dolphins blow bubble curtains or stir up mud plumes to entrap schools of fish. Orcas have been filmed lining up in a precise row and using their tails to generate waves that flush seals off an ice floe. In every environment, the dolphins will figure out a plan. In heavy surf, in calm bays, in gin-clear tropical seas and sediment-thick rivers, in kelp forests and eelgrass channels, in moonlight and sunlight and light swallowed whole by the depths, in the mercurial, bountiful oceans, they go about their business together.

  Only now are we beginning to understand what that word, together, means to a dolphin. In the wild, dolphins are minglers, gadabouts, flirts. Their existence revolves around relationships. Like us, dolphins form intense, long-term attachments with others and maintain them over time, even when separated for extended periods. Scientist Jason Bruck, from the University of Chicago, proved that dolphins recognize their friends’ signature whistles even after twenty years apart, and react with obvious excitement when they hear them. Their bonds are so strong, in fact, that when dolphins are in jeopardy they will not leave one another even if it costs them their lives. And when dolphins do lose a loved one, they behave in ways that suggest deep grief.

  Often, marine parks tout captivity as a luxurious setup for dolphins because it saves them the trouble of finding their own fish in our increasingly ruined oceans. “Be wild, be free, is just not a valid premise any longer,” Tom Otten, the former director of the Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium, declared in a newspaper interview, summing up that line of reasoning. But even if the dolphins are being served tuna sashimi in suites at the Four Seasons, the truth remains that in captivity their lives are hollowed out. In a concrete tank none of their expertise is needed, none of their exquisite adaptations developed through eons in the ocean, not their sonar or their hunting skills or their communication abilities. The pods that sustain them are no longer part of their world. Instead, their social groups are determined by marine park staff. Their behaviors are dictated by what audiences want to see.

  No wonder dolphins get sick, neurotic, depressed, and anxious. No wonder marine parks mix antibiotics and Valium and Tagamet into their food. Like us, dolphins express their emotional states in personal ways. Some dolphins mope and despair. Others become fixated on sex, trying to mate with dolphins of the opposite sex, the same sex, their trainers, and even inanimate objects. When it comes to partners, they are willing to experiment: Marine Studios had one dolphin that continually tried to mount an eel.

  They also vent their feelings through aggression. As Alonso succinctly put it, “They fight.” In a 2008 issue of Soundings, the International Marine Animal Trainers’ Association magazine, Steve Hearn, head of the “dolphin department” at Dolfinarium Harderwijk in the Netherlands, described the process of introducing young dolphins into an existing group of male bottlenose adults: “This has to be one of the most exciting and fragile training and socialization procedures we have taken on, because (to be honest) we have absolutely no idea how the dolphins will react to one another…Eventually, there is no way around it, at some point you are going to put these dolphins together.” Though Hearn and his trainers may be in the dark, as Herman the pilot whale discovered, this type of dolphin mixer often ends badly.

  The list of dolphin-on-dolphin injuries and fatalities is impossible to tally—every marine park contends with this and none are too keen to publicize it—but you do not have to look very hard to turn up brutal accounts. Tooth raking, jaw clapping, tail lashing, head butting, biting, and high-speed chasing are common behaviors among agitated dolphins; animals have died from skull fractures after leaping out of their tanks to escape the beatings. In China, a bottlenose had her dorsal fin amputated after what the Dalian Laohutan Ocean Park referred to as “internal strife.” At SeaWorld San Diego, Kandu, a 5,000-pound female orca from Iceland, slammed into Corky, a 7,000-pound female orca from Canada, fracturing her own jaw and rupturing an artery in the process, causing blood to spurt through her blowhole like a geyser. While thousands of people looked on from the bleachers and the water in the tank turned crimson, Kandu bled to death. SeaWorld described the incident as a “normal, socially induced act of aggression.” Scientists from the Humane Society disagreed: “It should be noted that two orcas from different oceans would never have been in such proximity naturally,” they wrote in a report, “nor is there any record of an orca being killed in a similarly violent attack in the wild.”

  It’s not only captive dolphins who get hurt by captive dolphins: people are set upon with some regularity. At SeaWorld Orlando’s Dolphin Cove, a bottlenose chomped down on a seven-year-old boy’s hand, clamping tenaciously even as two people tried to pry his jaws apart. One man had his sternum cracked during a dolphin encounter at another facility; in Japan, a woman had her back and ribs broken. Elsewhere, swim-with-dolphins clientele have had their teeth knocked out. In one recent episode in Curaçao, a bottlenose breached above a group of tourists, landing on them purposely. The more time you spend around pissed-off dolphins, the likelier your chances of trouble: in a survey conducted by the University of California, a full 52 percent of respondents who worked with marine mammals claimed to have been traumatically injured by them.

  I came across a paper by a Russian s
cientist, G. A. Shurepova, that spelled out in graphic detail how these altercations can occur. He recounted one trainer’s experience with a male bottlenose whom he had just separated from a group of ten other dolphins:

  Trainer R first entered the pool to work with the animal. The dolphin swam up to him and took fish from his hands…The animal then abruptly veered to the side, it made two swift circles under the water, came up to the trainer, and plunged its snout in his side…Then followed a rain of gentler blows…The animal quickly turned about, hit the man painfully with the pectoral fin…It overtook the man and then turned to face him. The trainer halted, the animal rose vertically, put its head out of the water and dealt the trainer’s body a blow with the caudal peduncle. The blow was very heavy and landed on the stomach, almost causing the man to lose consciousness.

  Trainer R finally made it out of the water, but the dolphin wasn’t finished. In subsequent training sessions, the dolphin “hit the man in the rib cage with its dorsal fin”; “thrashed vigorously in the water with its tail near his face”; “hit at the man’s neck with its dorsal fin”; “struck him in the femur with its nose”; “hit him strongly in the stomach with its dorsal fin”; “lashed out at his arms with a sharp upward movement”; “gnashed its jaws menacingly, turned abruptly and gave a blow with its tail, but missed.” The dolphin then “began to take bites at him.”

  An irate bottlenose can do some serious damage, but the dangers escalate with the animal’s size: orcas, the largest species of dolphin, have their own, terrifying record: “Any person who has trained these animals has been thumped, bumped, bruised, bitten and otherwise abused over the course of time,” one trainer told the San Diego Union. “It happens to everyone.” A widely consulted training handbook listed “aggressive manifestations” of orcas as “butting, biting, grabbing, dunking and holding trainers on the bottom of pools and preventing their escape.”

  Not long before I visited the Dominican Republic, a harrowing incident had occurred in Florida, at SeaWorld Orlando, illustrating the ultimate hazards of dealing with a bored, frustrated, and manhandled whale. Tilikum, a 22-foot, 12,000-pound male orca, killed his trainer, Dawn Brancheau, during the “Dine with Shamu” show. As the audience watched in horror from a poolside café and through underwater viewing windows where families had gathered for a “Photo with Shamu,” Tilikum seized Brancheau’s arm in his mouth, pulling her from the deck into the water. While other SeaWorld employees did everything they could to save her—including dropping a net on the orca, and raising the bottom of the tank—Tilikum evaded them for forty-five minutes, shaking Brancheau, pinning her to the tank floor, breaking her neck and jaw, tearing off part of her scalp, severing her left arm, ending her life in a way that was hard not to see as completely intentional. This wasn’t a freak occurrence, either. Only two months earlier, at a Canary Islands’ facility called Loro Parque, trainer Alexis Martinez had been bitten, crushed, and drowned by an orca named Keto.

  Though there has never been an instance of orcas fatally attacking humans in the wild, Brancheau was the third person who had been killed in Tilikum’s tanks. During his earliest years as a captive, he was owned by Sealand of the Pacific, a marine park in Victoria, British Columbia. In 1991, one of his trainers there, twenty-year-old Keltie Byrne, had slipped while carrying a bucket of fish and fallen into his sea pen; Byrne died in much the same way Brancheau did. Although it is unclear whether Tilikum was solely responsible for her death—he shared the enclosure with two other orcas—he certainly participated. Tilikum was so reluctant to give up Byrne’s body that it took rescuers almost two hours to retrieve it.

  After Byrne’s death, Sealand sold Tilikum to SeaWorld, which wanted a male orca for its captive breeding efforts, and he was moved to Orlando. Early one morning at his new home, security guards noticed Tilikum swimming around with something white flopped across his back; looking closer, they realized that it was a man’s naked body. The man’s name was Daniel Dukes. He was twenty-seven years old and a bit of a drifter, and he had made the ill-advised decision to sneak into Tilikum’s tank for a dip one night after the park had closed. Divers were dispatched to pick up pieces of Dukes’s body from the pool, including one of his testicles.

  Even the most ardent fan of marine parks must see Tilikum’s confinement as a tragedy, one with savage repercussions. He is an Icelandic orca, taken from his pod when he was two years old, and he has spent thirty years in captivity since then, at Sealand of the Pacific for seven years, and then at SeaWorld Orlando for the remainder. At both places, despite his moving-truck size, Tilikum was battered so badly by female orcas that he was often sequestered for his own safety.

  Orca society is matriarchal and extremely tight-knit. In the wild, Tilikum would have spent his life with his mother. She would have taught him to speak the dialect unique to her pod, one that had been passed down through generations. He would have swum up to eighty miles a day in the rich, cold North Atlantic waters, and learned to navigate and hunt with an orca’s masterful skill—they can take down gray whales with ease—and he would have sired calves out there too, mating with females from neighboring pods. Instead, he languishes in a solitary tank eating dead herring, and he is masturbated by SeaWorld staff wielding K-Y jelly, his semen used for the artificial insemination of other captives. Tilikum’s real orca existence has been preempted, replaced by the Shamu sound track.

  All attempts to domesticate the six-ton dolphin have failed. He is nobody’s cartoon character, and yet all the ocean’s magnificent possibilities are lost to him. So much of Tilikum’s life has been spent among humans that he could never survive in the open sea. Even if by some miracle he were reunited with his pod, his teeth have been destroyed by years of chewing on his metal cage bars. They are drilled out and hollow now and would not be much use to him. He is the wildest of creatures, who will never get the chance to be wild. So what definition is left for Tilikum, caught between worlds? He has been reduced to the craziest possible hybrid: a serial killer used for entertainment purposes.

  I stayed for a while longer watching Serena and Niagara looping aimlessly, alone in their pool. The sun backed down and the afternoon light glinted apricot gold and the water took on a metallic sheen as the reflections sunk into shadow. Over by the lagoon I saw trainers striding briskly down the docks to feed the dolphins who hadn’t performed in shows. The men all carried the same thrilling plastic cooler, and the dolphins leapt in their pens when they saw it. One dolphin rose out of the water and began to tail-walk, as if auditioning for fish. In a Jacuzzi-size enclosure, set off to the side, two Ocean World employees knelt next to a bottlenose who was floating quietly. A clear plastic tube ran from the dolphin’s blowhole into a metal canister that was in turn plugged into an electrical socket, as though the animal were being vacuumed out. When one of the men turned and saw me looking at them, he signaled at me angrily to get lost.

  I was startled by this frankly tourist-unfriendly gesture, and shifted so I was behind a sign and out of his line of sight. Serena swam over, idling in front of the railing where I stood. She lifted her head from the water and then rolled onto her side, as if trying to examine me from several angles. Unlike the chilled-out little spinners, these bottlenose dolphins seemed to be actively trying to breach the divide between their species and ours. I could see why the scientists who worked closely with them were moved by the experience, why John Lilly was so determined to find out exactly what was on their minds.

  As I turned to leave, Alonso walked by. I nodded at him and started toward the exit, but then I remembered a question I had wanted to ask: “Hey,” I called, getting his attention. “Where do these dolphins come from?” He stopped, and looked at me for a long moment. “Ah, that’s a good question,” he said. He was smiling, but his voice had an edge and his eyes were as hard as marbles. “We have one from Honduras, one from Cuba, and one from right over there.” He waved vaguely toward the ocean. This did not add up to sixteen dolphins, obviously, but I didn’t want to push i
t. I had asked a simple question, but, though I didn’t know it at the time, a highly loaded one. Alonso’s answer was an awkward attempt to evade it. What I also didn’t know was that months later, when I learned the real stories of how dolphins are captured from the wild, they would pull me like an undertow, deep below the surface, into a world of nightmares.

  On Ireland’s Dingle Peninsula, a dramatic finger of County Kerry that juts into the Atlantic Ocean, the signs bear names like LIOS PÓIL and BALLYFERRITER and FOILATRISNIG. There is Tralee, a musical-sounding place with sod-roofed hobbity houses and peaty bogs. Ballnavenooragh is known for its elaborate stone fort, abandoned in the thirteenth century. Riasc, a monastic ruin, is the site of beehive-shaped huts that are 1,400 years old. In Dingle, history lies in thick layers. The peninsula has Neolithic monuments and medieval castles, Bronze Age tools and Iron Age weapons, any kind of relic you can conjure, and there are mysterious rocks kicking around everywhere, carved with Celtic symbols and heaped into cairns and arranged in ritualistic ways like miniature Stonehenges. Every hamlet has its own ancient story, etched into the land. Every resident has a strong, proud sense of his past, commemorated daily with pints of Guinness. Then there’s the town of Dingle itself, which has Fungie the Dingle Dolphin.