By: Dan Reiter
Article Category: Dan Reiter 9 Comments
My fascination with dolphins started on a small, sand-dredged mound of muck in the Mosquito Lagoon, somewhere off Canaveral National Seashore, where I camped the night of New Year’s Eve, 2000 along with twelve of my closest friends, a group of lonely wonderers in the dark, starlit river.
After shuttling back and forth over the slick stingray shallows in a canoe crammed full of burgers, beers, and blankets, we discovered that no one’s cell phone worked on the island, and we then resolved to be completely detached from society when the millenium began its slow, groaning turn.
Why should a huge pod of dolphins decide to gather around our island on that particular night? It’s still a mystery to me. It is possible, looking back, that the island was their home, and that they were actually wondering the same thing about us.
It was cold, and some of the boys got to drinking and foraging through the scrub brush. Before long, we had a glorious bonfire. I can’t say what else was burned that night, but it is worth mentioning that some of the group were not acting quite themselves. In truth, no one knew what was going to happen. It was a big moment for mankind, and it was a long time coming — two thousand years, to be exact. Some of us were afraid. Perhaps most of us, subconsciously, were afraid, although some of us had already lost the capacity for fear.
What happened that night? I don’t profess to know any more about it than anyone else, but some of the facts are intriguing. At around 11 o’clock (a most fashionable hour to appear at a New Year’s party), a pod of at least 30 dolphin came to the island, swimming right up to our muddy little banks. They seemed to be singing, whistling, breathing, or (depending on who you talked to) crying or laughing. As they circled the island, every one of us felt a connection to each other — an almost telepathic oneness. The dance proceeded through the sparkling night and onward into the orange glow of the morning. Not a soul slept.
When we returned to the mainland, we found it in much the same state as we had left it. Everyone had expected an explosion, a small revolution, or even a few house fires. It was a letdown in a mundane sort of way, but a great relief in another. The world would be okay (or so we thought), and we began to steel ourselves for a new beginning. Everyone took separate paths — one moved to Santa Monica, others to New York, Boston, Miami, San Diego, Costa Rica, or Australia. I packed my bags and moved across the country to Central Florida. We all agreed on one thing: the dolphin had changed us in a permanent way, though no one could explain what had happened in any intelligible manner. Of the thirteen people on the island that night, not one moved further than five miles from the ocean.
Research suggests that a dolphin’s brain contains a component the human brain never developed, something called the paralimbic lobe, which “might be used for sensory processing.” Scientists are not decided on the exact function of the paralimbic lobe; they still don’t seem to understand it fully. We know that dolphins have the uncanny ability to create sounds, and through the process of echolocation, can form a picture of an object in their minds. It is not quite the same as seeing something, however. Instead of a visual image, the dolphin perceives an “acoustical” picture of an object. Their sonar is cause for concern among the scientific community; no one can fully explain how dolphins separated by steel walls, in tanks 50 feet apart, can communicate with each other, as certain studies have shown them to do. Another curious fact: bottlenose dolphin have been heard mimicking human music and even creating their own songs in arrangements ranging from bass thrums and alto whistles to silent realms of high-frequency sonic vibrations — full, soaring symphonies played above the range of human hearing.
Though the dolphin’s brain is not as advanced in some areas as the human’s (for example, the area responsible for panic and anxiety), the dolphin’s frontal lobe, located directly behind the forehead, is the same size as a human’s. Dr. Andrew Newberg, a prominent neuroscientist and pioneer in the emerging field of “neurotheology,” suggests that this part of the brain helps to focus attention on prayer and meditation. It might stand to reason, then, that dolphins have at least the capacity for religious thought, if not in a strictly human sense, at least in an auditory one. While some humans think they know what God looks like, could it be conceivable that dolphins know what God sounds like?
If dolphins can hear God, is it possible, then, that their society may be more advanced than we are led to believe? After all, dolphins, like humans, exist in a world without natural predators in which food is harvested with ease and where there is no shortage of any of life’s necessities. Instead of working most of their days for brief respites of leisure, like humans, the vast majority of a dolphin’s day is spent playing, singing, hunting, or exploring the wide seas. When you bear in mind that dolphins have no borders, no great wars, and no politicians, is it not completely foolish to consider that their society may even be superior to ours?
Living beachside, we are fortunate enough to share some of our finest moments with these magical creatures. Some of us may have encountered the ocean-going breed while out surfing. Funny how they always seem to appear to us on the glassiest days, when the water is clearest and the vibe is at its most mellow. They emerge from the oil-slick surface like a band of mermaids, surfing set waves with unimaginable speed, or performing graceful aerial maneuvers in the rainbow spray behind the billowy crests. You might see the smaller, grayer variety of bottlenose dolphin in the river playing against the pastel backdrop of the sunset as you haul your trout or redfish into to the boat. Dolphins are always an omen of good tidings as the water is most likely clean where they are, the fish plentiful, and the energy serene.
Why did dolphins, once a land-dwelling animal like us, decide to evolve into the water? Was it global warming or global cooling, or was it something else, something borne not from necessity, but from desire alone? Perhaps the better question is why, given the extraordinary abilities of our own species, we haven’t evolved into something more harmonious with our own nature, something flowing, crafted of pure song, beauty, and light, like the dolphins?
Dolphins remain a mystery to Man, but they appear to those who look for them — those who might, when they see them, comment how beautiful, how majestic an animal the dolphin is, or who might even momentarily fall into a trance, as if in the presence of angels; those who seldom stop to think that the dolphin might actually be trying to tell them something terribly important.
Potentially Related posts:
- On Beauty
- Beneath The Sand
- Inquire of Romeo
- It Came From Another World … or maybe someone just dropped it here
- Paul Geremia
• Issue 1, Volume 5, March 2009
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I am compelled to write a response to Dan Reiter’s recent article on dolphins. I am a facultly member at a major research university and have studied dolphin brains, behavior and intelligence for twenty years. I have published over 70 articles on this and related topics. It is important that your readers are given the opportunity to separate the myths from the facts. Given that Reiter’s article is mostly myth, it is important to offer your readers the facts.
First, Reiter seems to have acquired knowledge of dolphin neuroanatomy that even seasoned scientists do not possess at this time. He states that the part of the dolphin brain that mediates anxiety is not as advanced as in humans. No one knows where that function lies in the dolphin brain. And so, neither does Reiter. Moreover, he claims that the dolphin frontal lobe is the same size as in humans. He is incorrect on two counts. First, no one has measured the dolphin frontal lobe. Two, the functional equivalent of the dolphin frontal lobe does not lie behind the forehead. This is because of the very different arrangement of the dolphin brain compared with primates.
Reiter also promotes the notion that dolphins live a carefree life free of worries or predators. Nothing coule be farther from the truth. Dolphins do have natural predators. These are killer whales, sharks and humans and all of these predators account for a high mortality rate in dolphins, and, especially juveniles. If dolphins lived such a benign life they would not need to carry around brains that are larger than ours. It is just indisputable biological sense.
I will not even challenge Reiters more fantastic claims about dolphins and religion. They are not worth responding to.
Why is Reiter’s message concerning? First, he is spreading incorrect information about these animals and the readership has a right to accurate information about them. Second, he is promoting unfounded claims about dolphins that have led to their abuse over time. People have always mythologized dolphins and, as a result, dolphins have been caught and confined for their “healing” abilities. The dolphin assisted therapy industry is responsible for a large portion of dolphin deaths and captures around the world. All of it is because the public is led to believe that dolphins are special beings with mythic abilities such as healing and, in Reiter’s terms, “talk to god”.
I implore the public to reject these fantasies about dolphins. Dolphins are fascinating creatures all on their own. They deserve our respect. And they don’t need the burden of our human projections onto their lives. They have suffered enough for it.
Wow… first off, I’d like to apologize to Dr. Marino for giving the wrong impression about my supposed knowledge of the cetacean brain. She is one of the preeminent scholars in the world in this field, and she has done much to promote the notion that dolphin intelligence works at levels comparable to the more developed primates.
My intention with the piece was not so much to promulgate myths about dolphin healing powers (although I must mention that I have witnessed, on more than one occasion, dolphins in the wild interacting with humans on what can only be described as a ‘spiritual’ level, and even changing the way these humans regarded their own lives… I should also qualify this by saying that the humans I spend much of my time with cannot claim a much higher level of intelligence than most upper-level primates), and I certainly do not condone holding these creatures captive for any reason whatsoever. My aim, instead, was to hint at the differences between two sapient species who took divergent paths, and the cultures they developed along the way.
It is only as of recently, since the invention of the telegraph, that humans can boast a method of communication as advanced as the dolphin’s, who have perfected theirs over the ages. Over the past century, people have developed a sense of connectivity to one another that we never possessed before, but we are still a work in progress, constantly mining untapped potential within ourselves. While we cannot know the extent to which dolphins, or any other animals, truly perceive and interact with the energies around them, I am sure Dr. Marino would agree with me on this much – there is still very much we can learn from them.
Poetry, allegory, prose, descriptive verse….these are obviously the biggest deadly threats to Dolphins everywhere.
Lori Marino, PhD, you may want to lift your gaze from the sterile confines of the analytical world of academia and experience for yourself a connection to the beauty in our natural world. It Was Allegory and a rather beautiful reflection an actual real persons ‘feelings’ and personal connections to these wonderful creatures that we live with daily, in our beautiful little barrier island home town. It Wasn’t A Science Term Paper, everyone gets that… but you.
You may want to steer clear of the library, I hear they have entire sections devoted to all forms of creative writing…It’s Terrifying!
I’m pretty sure the author is a fan of Dolphins…you should try to relax.
Fantastic stuff! Can’t stop laughing!!!
No worries about predators, huh? Mr. Reiter, I know you claim to be a “Cocoa Beach Resident” but you never had grilled dolphin with a touch of lemon? It’s my favorite dish ever. I say death to all dolphin everywhere and fillets for us all!!!
I love beer
I love nascar (8)
I love America
…and I LOVE Dolphins.
…get ‘er done.
Lori Marino, Doctor, lo primero que me da de pensar es que es una persona exeptica de Dios, mas que nada cientificamente los delfines son los animales mas inteligentes del reino animal sin comparar con los primates ni con los humano es como todo los animales los pajaros por ejemplos ellos tienen la capacidad de imitar los sonidos, los delfines van por el mismo genero en su inteligencia y en su raza lamento mucho su tanta inteligencia pero tiene que investigar màs sobre el tema antes de debatir, lo que si comparto contigo es que han sufrido por varias razon que pueden ser emitidas por los seres humanos que son la mayor amenaza para esas especies.
Fabricio,
Your profound words about the suffering of intelligent animals has led me to reevaluate my own life. I have since dedicated myself to a new cause — the extensive research of manatees.
Thank you,
Dan
Dolphins are obviously very special creatures and deserve to be treated as such. As they are 2nd in intelligence only to us humans then surely it is obvious that we should stop the carnage! There is still much to learn.