AS IF ALIENS IN THE OCEANS
Jack R. Nelson
Copyright 2012 Jack R. Nelson
Smashwords Edition
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As If Aliens In The Oceans
Ever since the popular TV show “Flipper” in the 1960s, many think of the dolphins as a special case among the intelligent animals. “Flipper” like most of the genre (“Lassie”, “My Friend Flicka”), used the animals’ own natural behaviors to depict an anthropomorphized set of values and intellect that made them charming for the general public. Media presentations either romanticized the dolphins or focused on the scientific effort to understand them in captive study. But the dolphins are not cute nor are they merely clever animals.
Like in the novel by the late Douglas Adams, “So Long and Thanks for All The Fish”, the dolphins and cetaceans in general have always seemed to me as if some kind of alien intelligence. After you have been around them a little in the open ocean, you begin to accumulate anecdotes and sightings that hint of their extraordinary nature.
My father lied about his age and joined the US Navy in 1931. He was on an old-style destroyer with a canoe stern, so the propellers were visible from the afterdeck. On a dark night with lambent green phosphorescence roiling in the wake and outlining the rudders, propellers, and shafts, he watched two dolphins swimming just ahead of the propellers. Were they hiding themselves in the noise of the ship? Were they riding the pressure waves of the propeller shafts? The ship was at cruising speed, so the huge whirling propellers would be instant death in a moment’s error, yet the dolphins sported in front of them for a long time.
In the 1950s he was again at sea on tuna clippers of the era, when tuna were caught individually with fishing poles. The fishermen stood in a water-level rack hung over the side of the ship, while a bait-man chummed the school of tuna into a feeding frenzy, throwing scoops of sardines into their midst. Dolphins and tuna run together and eat the same small fish. As they lunged for the live bait tossed by the chummer, rarely a dolphin would get caught on the barbless hook.
My father said there was never any argument. Just put the pole on the deck and lead the dolphin over by the fishing line, reach in the water and the dolphin would open his mouth to let the man remove the hook. Dolphins have dozens of sharp conical teeth, and certainly have the strength to tear off a man’s hand. But that simply was not the issue.
Today’s tuna fishing is an industrial process with vast nets managed by auxiliary tow-boats and massive hydraulic reels. The tuna still run with the dolphins. Harassing speedboats herd the dolphins, and the schooling tuna stay under them, following into the compass of the net. There are special techniques and equipment that help prevent dolphin injury or death by spilling them out after the net is closed around them and the school of tuna. But it still happens even in the best-run systems; dolphins are tangled in the nets.
We may think that their getting encircled in a net at all proves their lack of cognitive intelligence, but there is more to it. Imagine yourself, your family, your children, and your community in the ocean. All you have is each other, literally naked in the formless volume of the sea. Staying together must be an absolute cultural imperative for them. They are very unwilling to leave any of their group behind in a net, even though the juveniles are jumping back and forth over the line of net floats. Dolphins drown if they get stuck in a net.
American tuna fishing regulations require biologist observers on board the ships to assure compliance with the dolphin-protecting techniques. One observer told me that insurance rules forbid anyone going into the net in the water, as the surge can wrap him in suffocating folds. The observers nonetheless don mask and flippers and go into the net to save trapped dolphins.
Imagine a six hundred-pound dolphin with a flipper snarled in a twist of the net, held under water and knowing it will soon drown. It is helpless, has no leverage, and cannot extract the flipper from the net. It thrashes in panic, flailing its huge weight about. And yet, as soon as the struggling dolphin feels the touch of human hands, it becomes calm, and lets the man pull the net away and lead it to escape. This is nothing like a sea lion in a net. Sea lions will attack and bite furiously, not understanding any attempt to save them.
The United States Government during many years ran a dolphin observation program. Small ships went to sea for 60 days at a time, covering a pre-determined search pattern and counting dolphins. One of the crew told me that in the heavily fished eastern Pacific the dolphins had around the mid-1980s devised their own tactics for avoiding the fishing ships. If a ship followed a pod of dolphins, they would divide into two equal groups heading away on both sides perpendicular to the ship’s course. If the ship followed one group, it too would soon split, and so on with ever smaller groups until there were no more dolphins to be seen. Meanwhile, the dolphins are regrouping far behind the ship’s wake, over the horizon.
I was on a 65 foot boat off the coast of Ecuador, the air balmy and very humid, the warm sea almost perfectly flat with the merest wriggle of ripples. At sundown the sky and clouds and water blended in brilliant gold and metallic purple. We came upon a pod of dolphins, the common dolphin colorfully marked with creamy fawn bellies below a deep blue-gray top. It was too impossibly beautiful, the brassy evening colors of the sky and water counterpoint to the dolphins’ deeper pastels.
Many many thousands of them, all massed together on the surface of the sea, ever so slowly sliding alongside and over each other. We drifted near, everybody hanging over the rail, speechless. Some of the dolphins rolled a little as they passed, big brown inscrutable eyes looking back at us as though in idle curiosity; their totally relaxed demeanor unchanged. The dolphins were singing, a heavenly choir, the music of the spheres, far louder than the idling Diesel, a continuous weaving harmonic like the chanting Tibetan Gyuto monks. An ecstatic ringing peal filled the air.
A friend was scuba diving in the Bahamas, and they came upon a dozen dolphins in clear water over a sand bottom about forty feet deep. The dolphins were in a circle, motionless, suspended vertically with tails down and their bellies toward the center of their circle. The scuba divers heard long strings of buzzes and trills. As they approached the dolphins, a few of them rotated to inspect the divers. My friend said he could see the big eyes looking him up and down. The dolphins turned back to their circle, continuing their colloquy, ignoring the humans. The divers felt they were perhaps invading the dolphins’ privacy, and swam away.
I was skipper on a charter boat in the Galápagos Islands. At daybreak we were westbound approaching Floreana Island. It was clear calm weather, with a negligible flat swell and no wind. As the light came up on the water I saw far ahead some kind of disturbance near the horizon. With a few minutes of watching as the day brightened I could see the disturbance in the water was moving swiftly, and would cross close ahead of us. It was a pod of perhaps 100 dolphins, the big bottlenose dolphins.
When at a relaxed cruising speed dolphins breathe in a rolling motion that brings just the blowhole at the top of the head above the water surface. But at top speed dolphins make a flat jump clear of the water to get a breath of air. It was very orderly. A phalanx, shoulder to shoulder, they jumped five, six, ten at a time, row behind row.
But the most curious part was that just ahead of the front row of jumping dolphins, the water was humped up in a pressure wave. The leading edge of the hump was one dolphin-length ahead of the visible front row of jumpers. Clearly, the ones who had just had a good breathe would advance to the front and swim strongly to create a low-pressure zone that would tow the others behind, much like race cars drafting on the track.
Had the sea been ruffled with wind I might not have seen the effect. They crossed some seventy yards ahead of us, and continued with speed and course unchanged, over the horizon to the northeast.
Dolphin frequently sport under the bow of a moving vessel. We see a curling wave as the boat’s sharp bow displaces the water. That same wave is moving invisibly under the surface, and provides a free lift to the dolphins. They roll from side to side, leaning their flukes against the pressure gradient. Watching them from above on the bow, we often hear their high expressive whistles and tweets as they chatter with companions.
It is well established that dolphins carry on complex and modulated conversations, not mere repetitive signals like birdsong. They are even able to focus beams of chatter out the side of the head to a nearby dolphin in a multiplexed conversation. We have no clue to the meaning of these exchanges, but we do know the data rate is hundreds of times higher than our own speech.
Sometimes we whistle to get their attention. I was on the bow about six feet above the water, whistling my best imitation of their voices as loud as I could. The boat ran at ten knots. The very large bottlenose beneath me rolled first to one side of the bow and then the other. I could see the eye turned toward me as he looked from each side, perhaps triangulating to fix my height and speed.
Then with a powerful surge he jumped high crossing the bow ahead of me. He timed the jump perfectly so that at the apex when the trajectory slows, his eye was level with mine a few feet away. Their eyes are quite large, and must process a lot of information very quickly. They are adapted for acute vision both in and out of the water. I saw this intelligent eye look at my two eyes, a quick back and forth, and then up and down. Only that fraction of a second and he was gone.
Other times whistling at them provokes a very different response. The dolphins will zig zag ahead and you get a feeling like they are looking over their shoulders at you. Then they drop back to just ahead of you, make a flat jump and stick their head in the water for leverage and cup the flukes for a slap that throws a neatly aimed splash in your face. And then they dart away giggling, perhaps mocking our own laughter just as we so clumsily mimic their trills. Several of my friends have reported this in Galapágos. I don’t know if dolphins do it in other places.
The sperm whale is the largest cousin of the dolphins. They are odontoceti, the toothed whales, like the orcas and pilot whales. We were crossing the Pacific from Galápagos to Marquesas, some three thousand miles of open water, on a fifty foot sloop. On the tenth day we were halfway, about as far from land as you can be.
It was a sparkling morning, a fresh breeze urging us on a very broad reach, steadying the yacht in lumpy crossing wave-trains. We were making seven knots with the wind-vane self steering gear saving us the drudgery of constantly handing the wheel. I stood on deck with the captain/owner, chatting, congratulating ourselves on a good day.
A movement in the water caught my peripheral vision. A sperm whale stuck its head out of the foaming wake right alongside the boat. Everything happened so quickly; seven knots is about bicycle speed. The first whale passed along the side and then more surfaced directly behind in our wake. At least seven whales nearly as big as the yacht. Obviously, we had passed right over them.
The largest of them was slate gray dark, much darker than the leaden gray of the others. He had many raised bumps on his skin the size of a cantaloupe. A viral pox. Dying with fever, his spout was weak, and he wallowed unbalanced on the surface as other whales put their heads under to cradle him from both sides.
By now the scene was rushing into the distance behind heaving swells. I leapt up to the backstay and climbed up hand over hand to get a better vantage, but in a moment even that was not enough, and I saw little more than their spouts. Then one jumped three times completely clear of the water.
Everyone I know who has been at sea for some time knows that the cetaceans, like us, are something special among the higher animals. We see their complex behavior, yet it remains enigmatic. We have witnessed indefinable otherness, so the stories are inconclusive. Like koans of a different spirit.
The dolphins and whales -- cetaceans -- lived in perfect harmony with their environment for millions of years before any interaction with humans. We are a calamity upon them in just the last few hundred years.
Imagine an alien race coming to our world, utterly different from us in values and abilities. At first they are just a curiosity, then a minor a nuisance. But they adapt and multiply out of any proportion, consuming and fouling the planet within a few lifetimes. For this new race, we are just part of the environment, and we are not equipped to find understanding with them. Some of their less fastidious kill us for food or even more ignominious uses. This is the plight of the cetaceans.
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About the author: Jack Nelson lives in the Galapagos Islands since 1967. He owns a SCUBA dive tour operation. Jack writes about Galapagos issues in Spanish.
Other ebooks by Jack Nelson:
Hitch Hiking From Panama https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/125974
Hot Rod Nova Track Day https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/126294
Highway Dinosaur https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/127462