Meet and Greet the Dolphins

We went down to the keys this weekend to move Megan back home – and then back to college. Her internship is over and was a great success. Rob, Jo (the woman Megan stayed with) and I drove over to the facility for the meet and greet. What a wonderful experience it was. At the end of the post is a video of Rob doing his meet and greet. You can hear their clicks, their chatter.

We learned some interesting facts about dolphins. They have 88 teeth.  Their teeth are small, perfect, utterly ivory white. In the wild, the fish they eat hydrate them. But since these dolphins are fed frozen fish, they have to be hydrated daily. They are given cubes of Jell-O and also learn to swallow a hose (no gag reflex) so that several liters of water can be poured down their throats. The dolphins we met were a mother and baby. The baby is almost three, continues to nurse, but also eats frozen fish. The trainer said the baby will nurse until the mother decides enough is enough.

There are just 13 dolphins in this facility. To bring in fresh DNA, some of them are transferred to other facilities to mate. One dolphin is on birth control – yes, you read that correctly. She’s on birth control so that when she mates with her son, she isn’t impregnated. Dolphins aren’t discriminating in their sexual partners. Anyone will do. No one is allowed to touch this female because the birth control substance seeps into the dolphin’s skin and if you touch it, the substance seeps into your skin.

The water in the tanks comes in through the canal, through a wire mesh fence. This keeps the tank clean, fish often swim into the tank, so the dolphins sometimes get to eat actual live fish. There are many aspects of their lives as captive dolphins that struck me as bizarre and unpleasant – like that hydration hose. And the fact that they are trained to beach themselves on a platform for when they have to be moved to other facilities or taken out of the way of a potential hurricane. Pros and cons. Renee Prince, who has worked with captive dolphins, whose synchro  we posted last year, knows a lot more about this part of it than I do.

But today I also realized these dolphins are intensely  curious about people. As soon as we appeared four of them swam over to see  who we were and then hung out, watching us, as we videotaped them and took pictures.We, of course, talked to them like they were our pets and they probably were laughing at us. But I wondered if dolphins, like humans, choose their experiences. And does their knowledge spill into the morphic resonance of all dolphins, so that even dolphins in the wild learn about us?

Megan said that one day, a group of vets suffering from PTSD came to the facility to swim with the dolphins.  She said it was gratifying to see how happy the swims made the vets and that the dolphins seemed buoyed by the experience, too.  Does this information also get filtered into the morphic resonance of all dolphins?

The facility has just one sea lion, who is off by himself and allegedly quite happy that way. They used to let him in to the dolphin tank to swim with them, but he disliked it. I guess he’s a loner. He’s now going blind from cataracts and is supposedly going to have an operation to remove them.

I’m personally bothered by captive anything. I try to imagine myself in a human tank controlled by aliens (for lack of a better metaphor), who seduce me to do tricks because I know I’ll be fed. I try to imagine myself turning over on my back so tourists can see my underbelly, the internal nipple from which my baby suckles, the “slit” where my sex organs are. This is how that part of the meet and greet was explained to us. I tried to imagine these aliens explaining how I can make only three distinct sounds (most of which are audible on this video). But the trainer added these sounds are what these dolphins make, but there “may be more.”

Really? Has she read John Lily? 

Yet, I confess to a certain admiration for Dolphins Plus. Their intern program is well-organized, their trainers seem to be genuinely committed to the welfare of the dolphins, and the dolphins seem happy and well-adjusted to their situation. The vets and handicapped children swim for free. The trainers apparently love what they’re doing. The young woman who conducted our meet and greet had started off as an intern, like Megan, and had been there for four years.  Megan’s fellow intern, Erin, is majoring in marine biology at Eckard College and is a bright, articulate young woman who loves what she’s doing and whose knowledge of dolphins (she’s 20) is impressive.

During my meet and greet, I was astonished at how soft and smooth the dolphins’ bodies are, silken to the touch. The trainer showed me the track marks on the mother’s fins where blood is drawn once a month or so to determine the dolphin’s health. Their blowholes are much larger than I recall from when we swam with them years ago. When these two dolphins touched my face – the kissing part of this meet and greet – I felt I had been touched by a superior being who was amused at the whole spectacle. 

They are such magical and mysterious beings that all of us came away from the experience just sort of floating on air.