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When people think of dolphins, they probably recall their cute faces, which look as if they are smiling at us, and amazing performances, which show their remarkable intelligence. When I look at a face of dolphin, I feel peace and tranquility even if it is just a picture. I have been fascinated by dolphins for years and decided to study marine biology at college, hoping that someday I could do some research on cetaceans to deepen knowledge of these marvelous creatures. However, I did not see dolphins as such special animals from the beginning. I love animals in general, and dolphins were just one of many cute and smart animals. It was a story that changed my attitude toward dolphins forever a story about a dolphin interacting with a child who suffered from autism.
Autistic people usually do not express their emotion nor hardly respond to what others say, so did not this child on TV. However, to my surprise the child actually smiled and showed eagerness for more physical interaction with a dolphin after the moment he swam with the dolphin. When I watched this story first, I was skeptical about that dolphins had a special power to heal people. But it is more or less true even though science can not give a complete explanation yet. It is now called dolphin-assisted therapy, and many case studies have shown evidently dolphins, especially by means of swimming with them, have a profound impact on those with disabilities (Blow 0; D'Aulaire and D'Aulaire 5).
This is how I was dragged into the dolphin world. After that, I read all kinds of books about dolphins from trustworthy scientific books to fantastic novels to dubious spiritual and healing books. I watched TV programs and movies and of course went to see these great creatures with my own eyes at aquariums and marine parks as well as in the wild. The more I knew about dolphins, the more mysterious I saw them. Then, I noticed there are so many others like me, fascinated with dolphins. And they are not only in Japan or the States but almost all over the world. There are also people to hold in awe of dolphins as god-like quantities, angels, holly spirits, or healers, and even some people identify them to extraterrestrials. Although dolphin popularity has explosively increased for last several decades as represented by a main attraction at marine parks and a character of popular TV series like ¡§Flipper,¡¨ yet interestingly this is not something that happened just today or yesterday. Dolphins often appear in mythology, folklore, legends, arts and other literatures. For thousands of years, dolphins have fascinated people with their gentleness and friendliness to men and human-like intelligence and as respect as animals living in ocean realm that we never know.
Men have kept a relationship with dolphins since the ancient era when they did not have any written languages to record the encounter with the animals. Instead, they told stories generations to generations, drew and curved their objects of interests on rocks and walls in caves.
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We now find hundreds of dolphin stories in many cultures around the world. Mark Carwardine, a conservation officer of the World Wild Fund for Nature in Britain, says that dolphins along with whales ¡§have long been the stars of mythology, folklore, religion, and most recently, popular entertainment¡¨ (). Unlike whales which had received bad reputations as sea monsters in the Bible and many other legends and folklore, dolphins have always been viewed as gentle and kind friends of humans (Carwardine 4-5).
Among many episodes on dolphins, ancient Greek mythology is definitely a classic. Greeks often associated dolphins with the gods and goddess. There is a legend in the Homeric hymns, which explains how dolphins were created and why they are so kind to humans. Antony Alpers, the author of the book, Dolphins The Myth and the Mammal, writes that the Greeks believed that dolphins were once men who plotted to abduct and sell Dionysos, the god of wine and frenzy (also known as Bacchus), as a slave in Asia. When Dionysos noticed their plot, he called on the divine power. Terrified pirates dove into the sea, then changed into dolphins. Since then, they became capable of doing no harm and were respected as a symbol of kindness and virtue in the sea (5-6; see also Stenuit 1). Alpers points out that this legend shows that ¡§the Greeks knew very well there was something different about dolphins, and that although they lived in the sea they were not the same as fish, but were in some way more like humans¡¨ (5). Therefore, they created this imaginative story as an expression of their affection and esteem towards dolphins.
As one can tell from the legend, dolphins were viewed as sacred fish with such a great respect by the Greeks. Thus, murder of a dolphin was considered equivalent to that of a man as Oppian declares in his long poem Halieutica
It is an offence to the Gods to hunt dolphins, and he can no longer approach the Gods to offer a sacrifice nor touch their altars with pure hands, who of his own will has been the cause of the destruction of dolphins. He makes impure even those living under his roof, because the Gods hold the massacre of the monarchs of the depths to be as execrable as the murder of a human. (qtd in Stenuit xv)
The Greeks' fascination and imagination for dolphins also created another form of dolphin Delphinus, a constellation in the sky. When Poseidon, the god of the sea (also known as Neptune), desired to get married with Amphitrite, she refused him and hid in Mount Atlas. He sent out many searchers, and it was Delphinus that found and brought her back to him. Poseidon eventually married Amphitrite and gave Delphinus the highest honors of placing its image in the sky (Alpers 5).
The stories above seem just fantasies created by people's imagination; however, there are many episodes based on stories thought to be true, which explain why dolphins were called friends of humans. In those stories, dolphins saved humans from drowning and protected from shark attack and rapid current. Alpers says that the most popular episode known today is probably the one about Arion, which was recorded later by an ancient historian Herodotos (6).
Arion was the greatest poet and musician of all Greeks in his time. When he was on the way to Corinth after he won at music competitions, the crew plotted to kill him to take his money. Although Arion begged them to take his money but not to kill him, they did not listen to him. Then, he asked them for a last wish to let him sing before dying. After he finished singing, he threw himself into the sea. However, a dolphin attracted to his beautiful music swam to him and carried safely onshore taking him on its back. The sailors were caught when arriving at the harbor, and Arion, in his gratitude, offered a bronze statue of a man riding on a dolphin to the temple at Tainaron. (Alpers 7-, see also Stenuit 5).
This story may also sound fiction, yet Robert Stenuit, the author of The Dolphin, Cousin to Man, claims that the same story was recorded by three dozens of Greek and Latin authors besides Herodotos (5). There are more trustworthy stories that dolphins rescue humans in the ocean, which have been told not only in ancient myths or legends but also in today's newspaper or magazines (Stenuit 1-1).
Dolphins are also known to have a great affinity to men and a compassion for the object of their affection. The stories that they made friends with humans especially boys have often been recorded. The Roman scholar Pliny the Elder wrote a story in Naturalis Historia. A child of Iasos, Hermias, made friends with a dolphin who carried him on its back, but one day a rapidly rising storm washed him off and he was drowned. The dolphin brought the body on the beach and lay down next to him to die. The people of Iaos concluded that the dolphin took responsibility and decided to share a death (cited in Alpers 1-1; cited in Stenuit 6-7). Although nobody knew if the dolphin had died indeed because of the reason that people thought, it was natural for the Greeks to think like that because they believed that dolphins were once men and that they kept the memory of it in their souls (Stenuit 16).
What interests me here is that not only Greeks and Romans viewed dolphins as special animals. Legends and folklore in other cultures also suggest that dolphins have been gentle friends of humans and sacred fish. They, like Greeks and Romans, somehow knew that dolphins were different from other animals, even though they hardly knew their nature. They are also fascinated with and esteemed the animals. Therefore, doing any harm to dolphins are thought to give rise to a bad luck or illness.
Michael Donoghue and Annie Wheeler report in their book, Save the Dolphins, that people in the Pacific have considered dolphins as messengers of the gods just like the Greeks and Romans. Ancestral spirits were thought to become guardian dolphins or sharks. An Australian Aborigine tribe, known as ¡§the Dolphin People,¡¨ is said that they have been able to communicate with the wild bottlenose dolphins for centuries. And there are some people on different islands, who have the power to call dolphins (-).
There have been many records of a mutual relationship between dolphins and fishermen, often found in Mediterranean and Australia and along livers in Amazon, China, and India. Stenuit describes that dolphins assisted fishermen chasing fish towards the land or the net, and the fishermen gave a share of the fishing to the animals in gratitude (154-157).
Besides telling stories, dolphins have been described in many forms of arts and crafts by the artists who were fascinated and inspired by them. Carwardine indicates that the ancient Greeks and Romans used figures of dolphins for cups, mosaics, sculptures, and decorations of the launches. They often engraved coins with the image of a boy riding on a dolphin, which is based on the episodes in myths and legends (4). Other dolphin sculptures and paintings have been found over the world where the stories have also been told (Iruka Kujira Odyssey 5).
Most recently, dolphins are found everywhere such as on paintings, T-shirts, and coffee mugs (Mager ). The painters of dolphins and whales such as Christian Riese Lassen and Wyland have earned their fame and a great profit. Seth Lubove, a writer of the Forbes magazine, states that those artists gained more than 100 million of the annual retail sales from their paintings and other products with the figures of dolphins and whales (17). This trend surely infers that dolphin popularity is extremely high.
While people were telling the stories about dolphins and drawing them, Alpers writes that there were some people who focused on the observation of the dolphin's nature and behavior. They rather sought the scientific explanation of things than just the stories and imagination. The first cetologist was the Greek philosopher and scientist Aristotle. He recorded his observations and discoveries in his Historia Animalium (0).
Aristotle clearly distinguished dolphins from fish. He knew that although they are living in the ocean, dolphins are warm-blooded and air-breathing mammals just like human beings. He knew that mothers bear a calf instead of laying eggs like fish and nourish them with milk. His investigations were so accurate that nearly all of his observations are still valid today (Stenuit 1-).
After Aristotle, many scientists have been charmed by dolphins' amazing physical ability, human-like intelligence, and complex social behavior. Recent researches have revealed a lot of new facts about dolphin. Carwardine speculates that ¡§some people are inspired by their ability to explore places out of our reach, experience things we will never see¡¨ (15). Dolphins live in the ocean where most of sunlight is scattered or absorbed in several tens of meters (Pinet 14). Thus, sights are useless in the dark ocean. On the other hand, dolphins mostly rely on sound as their method of obtaining information from their surroundings. Ewan Fordyce and Peter Gill, zoologists and writers of the book, Whales, Dolphins, and Porpoises, explain that sound is much effective in terms of long-distance communication because it can travels faster and longer under water than in air (74). Donoghue and Wheeler point out that dolphins see the world using their sense of sound, which humans can not do since we obtain information of the surroundings using mostly vision, sense of light (7). Dolphins' sophisticated sense of sound has caught a great attention of many scientists.
Now, many researchers agree that dolphins can really do talk to each other using sounds - vocalizations and noise sounds made by tail slapping or leaping. They produce high frequency sounds, which are often classified into three types whistles, squeaks, and clicks (Fordyce and Gill 74). Peter Tyack, a scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, says that each of dolphin in a herd has its own signature whistle, which is identical to our name in human society (cited in D'Aulaire and D'Aulaire 57). They also mimic other's signature whistle and include more information in the sounds, changing the frequency or length of them (D'Aulaire and D'Aulaire 57-8). Dan Greenburg, the writer of the article ¡§The Dolphin Affair,¡¨ adds Clicks are used for communication of their emotion (45).
Fordyce and Gill claim that dolphins have a special navigation system called echolocation, in which they produce high frequent sound waves and receive the echo bounced by the object. They are able to locate objects in their surroundings within the vast ranges and able to find preys even if they are very small or hiding in sand (76). It is like our radar or sonar system. Donoghue and Wheeler suppose that dolphin can not hide their emotion from each other because they can see through things due to the property of sound waves penetrating objects (1). They also add, ¡§Telepathic communication. . . may be part of a dolphin's daily life¡¨ (1). There are still so much we have to figure out to understand them better, but this mysteriousness of dolphins fascinates people.
It is probably dolphin intelligence that attracts scientists most. But what does it mean by intelligence? According to Longman Dictionary of American English, the definition of intelligence is ¡§(good) ability to learn and understand.¡¨ Well, it is no doubt that dolphins have an impressive learning and imitating ability if you have ever seen dolphins' performance at marine parks. Donoghue and Wheeler say that dolphins have been known to possess very large brains, which are nearly equal to the size of human brain. However, brain size itself does not indicate its intelligence (8). Fordyce and Gill explain the ration of brain size to body size of dolphins, which is considered a measure of intelligence, are very large and complex. This is thought to correspond to their sophisticated hearing and communication (88).
Many scientists consider dolphins are among most intelligent animals on earth since they found their capability of comprehension of sign languages. Louis Herman, a famous psychologist and director of Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory of University of Hawaii, says dolphins can understand the word order and syntax (If Dolphins). For example, when Herman gives a command to his dolphin like ¡§person left Frisbee fetch,¡¨ he brings ¡§the Frisbee on the left to the person in the pool,¡¨ or ¡§surfboard person fetch,¡¨ then he pushes a person over to the surfboard. Herman also claims the grammatical comprehension of the dolphins is equivalent (or superior) to some chimpanzees, also known to show grammatical comprehension (cited in Linden 58). In the next several decades, we might be able to communicate with dolphins using sign languages. We might even be able to develop common language in the form of vocalization like the ones we speak today. But Donoghue and Wheeler say that we are likely to measure their intelligence on our terms, which is just a limitation of our own mind (). The key to the interspecies communication is to break though our own limitation. If we can do it, dolphins must be the ones who lead us to that stage.
Although recent science and technology have disclosed a lot of new facts about dolphins, Carwardine states that ¡§there is something special and particularly appealing about cetaceans. This is difficult to put into words, and impossible to prove, yet it is a feeling shared by a great many people¡¨ (14). The charms of dolphins that have kept us for thousands of years are their gentleness, friendliness and human-like intelligence. And they reflect our longing or respect for the creatures living in the ocean realm ? the unknown world that we never know. These feelings in our heart have stayed unchanged since the ancient era when Greeks and Romans viewed them as our friends in the sea.
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