¶ Intro / Opening
And welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck. Jerry's here too, And this is stuff you should know where we use a lot of up speak. So there you go.
Was that your dolphin?
Yeah, I hadn't practiced for a while, so it was a little rusty.
Hey, can I just very quickly mention the correction? Oh sure, I'm free wheeling it here. But we got a lot of emails from people that are in disbelief that we didn't know it's chassis.
Oh I knew its Chassie. I used it correctly.
Oh. Everyone said that we were saying chassis, and every time I said it, you were like, yeah.
I didn't I would. I just didn't correct you.
No, Well, I appreciate that sometimes you.
Don't like to be corrected, or else you're like, I know, I'm just saying it that way. So I just didn't not so to leave you out there twisting or anything like that.
Okay, interesting, if you.
Want, maybe we can retake this whole thing and I'll just I'll just take it with you. How about that.
No, that's all right. Anyway, I didn't know was pronounced chassis. Now that I hear it, I've heard that word. But I'm not a car guy, so I don't know these things.
Well. I feel really terrible. I mean, I feel terrible. I'm very sorry. I'll correct you every single time from now on. Okay, great, Okay, I'll just bring the podcast to a screeching halt and be like, no, that was wrong.
¶ Podcast Introduction and Corrections
Okay, that's really funny.
What a twist, man, I'm sorry, Chuck. So we're talking about dolphins. Is that how I was pronounced?
I think?
So, okay, that's that we should say it. Then. I'm pretty excited about this one, Chuck, because, as everybody knows, dolphins are awesome, and we're going to talk about all the reasons why they're awesome. It's pretty much the gist of this episode.
Yeah, I mean, you know, dolphins are marine mammals. I guess we should start there, and that entails a whole host of things that we're going to go over, not just some fish, but they technically are cetaceans, and that's a marine mammal, along with eighty other types of species, including whales. And if you think porpoises are the same, it's in that same species.
So relax, right, And I just realized, Chuck, I don't have any of my notes here, so I could try to wing it, or you can just wait a second and I can go get my notes, go.
Get your notes, and I'll just continue and no, it will be any the wiser, and.
Then you can fill me in when I get back.
Yeah, exactly.
Okay.
There are forty plus species of dolphin and they're in the family of oceanic dolphins or delphinity. And there's also river dolphins. So I know everyone's out there saying, hey, there's river dolphins out there. There aren't many. There's four river not just four, but four kinds of river dolphins, and each one is just one species. So those are
¶ Dolphin Biology and Evolution
the river dolphins.
Yeah, I've always found that so weird. I mean, I know that taxonomically you're supposed to really kind of stick to it, but there's got to be a better way, you know.
Yeah, for sure. But we're I mean, we're gonna talk a little bit about other kinds, but we're mainly gonna be talking about the bottle nose of which they're about six hundred thousand, because the bottlenose dolphin is the one that everyone is most familiar with and the ones that are on TV and unfortunately.
And dolphin aarians, uh yeah, where they keep dolphins as hostages.
Yeah, and make them perform tricks for dopes.
It's crazy. Yeah. So yeah, bottlenos are the money dolphins. It's everdvice talking about, and that's what we're gonna talk about. And they I think they're one of the more studied ones too, even though the common ones are so many more of them. But we know that dolphins bottlenose dolphins. And yeah, I think basically when we're saying dolphins, unless we specify, we're talking about bottlenose dolphins, how's that for some guardrails?
Yeah, for sure. And also speaking of guardrails, we might as well just go ahead and say, I know there'd be plenty of kids listening because they love our animal episodes.
Oh yeah, and the dolphin episode gets a little you know, a little blue not blue.
Necessarily, it gets a little sexy here in there, but you know that's just the deal with dolphins.
Okay. So so yeah, so I think that was a pretty good seahoey man, because it does get a little you.
Know, I mean, hey, we're I feel like this is all like scientific stuff, so we should be able to handle it and kids should be able to handle it. But if there are any adults that are like, what are you talking about, then do the little research first.
Right. Oh, so, I think I was talking about how bottlenose dolphins are pretty well studied that we know that they live for about forty five to fifty years. Yeah, pretty good, that's in the wild. Yeah, of course, I know. We've talked about plenty of animals over the years where they actually live longer in captivity, usually because they're just food for other larger animals. That's not true with dolphins. Their lifespan is usually much shorter, and that's controversial. We'll
talk about that later. But we know that in the wild fifty years that's a pretty aged dolphin if you think about it.
No, agreed, that's a nice long life I think for a sea creature.
Yeah, well more can they ask for? Stop complaining dolphins?
There was one supposedly that was sixty seven years old, presumed dead in twenty seventeen, But my friend, I like to think that that dolphin is seventy five right now.
Nice. I think that's a great way to look at things. Yeah, so do you kind of see dolphins closer to shore? Sometimes they are basically just out to see. It depends on the species. I think common dolphins stay fairly close to shore. Bottlenose will get right up on you essentially the place where you mean. I used to live kind of along the coast in our backyard. Dolphins would swim
there's like a lagoon. And now that I know a little more about dolphins, I always assumed they were bottle nose, but now that I know a little more, I think that they were probably common dolphins.
Well there's a lot more. There's like millions and millions of those, and about six hundred thousand bottle nose. So yeah, statistically, you're probably right precisely.
And then the other reason that I think that is because they would basically put on a show chasing fish. They'd jump out of the water and they chase the fish backwards. It was really something to see. And apparently the common dolphins are more acrobatic than bottle nose.
Okay, and they might have been playing, as we'll see, you never know, that's possible.
They might have been teasing them poor fish.
If you are somewhere where you can look up safely on the computer and image, you should look up pa ki Ce t u s the I guess the pacasidas.
You nailed it, Chuck.
That is the common ancestor that dolphins share. That was around about fifty million years ago. And if you look at it and say, well, wait a minute, Chuck, this thing's walking around on four legs with fur. That's because that's where dolphins came from. It's pretty remarkable when you look at it. It looks like when you see the head of that thing, you can see the dolphin in it, you know.
Yeah, So dolphins are more closely related to hippopotami than they are like sea lions or otters or anything like that that are also aquatic or semi aquatic. And it's because this this pacasidas basically moved to the water little by little by little, and it's one of those rare evolutions where we have like a complete fossil record from pecasidas to dolphin. We know all of the iterations that went through over the tens and tens of millions of years.
But that's I mean, that's where dolphins came from. They were basically these wolf size creatures.
Yeah, and one of them, I guess spent a little extra time in the water and it was like, you, guys, this is fantastic, Like you should come in here, we should all just stay a little longer. And then before you know it, their legs turned into flippers exactly two or three days.
What's cool, too, is there when dolphins are in the embryonic stage, they actually start to develop limbs. Yeah, before the jeans kick in and we'll actually kick off, I guess, and they stop developing and then get absorbed. But they're like in a stage of development they start to grow limbs. So that's I mean, it's a pretty good indication they used to be land mammals.
Yeah, they have vestigial ears, as we'll see too, but I'll just just kind of tease that out, right.
And then so the speciation from land mammal to semi aquatic mammal to fully aquatic mammal. The dolphin was complete when somebody mentioned being wet to a dolphin and the dolphin said, what is wet?
Really?
Yeah, this was my that was my understanding from the National History Museum.
So like we said that, you know, they're gonna share some characteristics with land mammals, but they have a lot of really cool traits and some of these are like you may know, and some of these are just I mean, if you're wondering why people are obsessed with dolphins, it's not just because they go to a dolphin show and think they're awesome, or maybe that's why you might be obsessed with them, listener, But there are so many remarkable,
amazing facts about dolphins. They just kind of stack up, like usually when we do anamal episodes or like one or two like Factor the episodes, but this is just riddled with them.
Yeah, so let's let's start. And also a big shout out thanks to Kyle for helping us out with this one.
Oh Kyle, Okay, thanks mate, or.
No, it's probably key Lay, now that I think about it, I feel I feel terrible, Chuck. I'm so sorry, man.
So that's okay. So they are placental mammals, so they're gonna they're not gonna lay eggs like you might see a fish stew in the water. They bear live young and it depends on the species, but their pregnancies are going to be between about ten and eighteen months. I don't think I mentioned while you were gone that orcas are part of this group or species family family. Okay, I knew it was.
Yeah, them, they're actually dolphins, they're not real whales.
Yeah, exactly. So I think the orcas have the longest
¶ Dolphin Life and Reproduction
gestation period of about eighteen months. But it's very cute because they're going to nurse those calves sometimes up to two years, at a minimum of six months, and those little babies stay with mama for up to five years.
Yeah, like toddlers. Isn't that adorable?
Yeah.
One thing that I hadn't considered is that so dolphins nurse underwater? Wait, do you think.
After your child passes toddlerhood they're just sent out to the wild.
That was my understanding from the National History Museum. Again, Okay, great, they're really misinforming me.
Apparently.
So one thing I hadn't thought of as I was saying, is that that dolphin is to nurse underwater, which it could be kind of hard. And then adding to the fact that they don't have lips that they can kind of latch onto a nipple with. It's a puzzler. And it turns out that the way that they nurse is by rolling their tongue into essentially a straw. Yeah, and
that's what they latch onto. And apparently we know that it's not the tastiest milk as far as a human palette is concerned, thanks to a scientist named Lillian Eichelberger, who, I guess on a dare drank some dolphin milk and was like, it's fishy, oily, it lacks sweetness, No, Sarah, I don't like it.
Yeah, And if you think that's a weird thing to do while studying dolphins, just strap in, because it's true. Things get much weirder. That was for sure nineteen forty. Things got weird in the seventies, as we'll see, but this got like a milkshake consistency, which is why I guess the straw shaped tongue kind of fits.
I guess, I guess.
So.
Yeah, So they have to swim. Obviously, they don't have to swim to survive because they breathe air, so it's not like they need air to pass across gills to survive.
Right, good point.
They do swim quite a bit. They're known for it. Their bodies are actually streamlined to help them swim even more. One thing I also didn't know is that the pectoral fins, the ones that stand up off the back where you're like shark and then your friend says, no, it's dolphin. You go, oh, a dolphin. They have no bone. I believe there's just cartilage and those are they use those to help to steer.
Yeah, for sure, it's like a little steering unit. They have a layer of blubber. You associate blubber with whales, but the dolphin has blubber too, which is going to provide a little bit of buoyancy if they haven't had food in a while, you know, just like humans do. They can sort of devour their own fat, helps out with body heat. And then besides that steering, they have two horizontal flukes on the tail, so they move vertically.
So that's another great way to tell a shark from a dolphin, aside from just opening your eyeballs, because right, I think they look quite different. But the shark, you know, has that vertical tail that sort of goes from side to side. The dolphins is flipped and to me looks like a more efficient system.
But that's just a guess you'd think. So the sharks seem to do pretty well for themselves though.
Yeah, and real quick inshow correction, I guess the dorsal
¶ Physical Anatomy and Movement
fin is the one on top, right, Yes, yeah, that's for the stability. The steering comes from those little side flippers, the pectoral fins.
Yeah, okay, I definitely got that wrong. So to like reimagine it, just imagine a kid running around with their arms sticking out like they're pretending to fly, except dolphins do it for real and in the water. Those are the big differences.
That's right, Or like a kid running with their arms to the side, like in the terrifying new movie Weapons.
Oh, don't tell me anything about it.
That's funny that you always say that, even though I've never told you anything about anything.
Well, you just told me that. I just want you to stop right there.
Yeah, yeah, it's on the poster, okay, all right.
So yeah, I can't wait to see that movie. I'm very exciting. And you said to see it in the theater, right, I.
Mean, I recommend it. I was at a sold out ten thirty a m. So people are pretty hyped about it. But it was also kind of neat that there were at least twenty local Atlanta crew as it turned out, because when the credits started rolling, they were all hanging out and like clapping for each other.
Oh neat that's very supportive. Did you know any of them?
I did, but I didn't know until afterward when Emily said that my friend Stephanie worked on it, and I was like, oh, she might have been one of those people.
That's very cool. So yeah, I want to see that movie.
Yeah, Act to Dolphins.
Yeah, So, dolphins are also known for as far as they swim, they kind of jump in and out of the water and can go quite fast doing that. It's called porpoising, much to dolphins chagrin. And it turns out it's not just porpoises and dolphins that swim like that. Penguins do too, And I was like, no way. This came from the National History Museum, so I had to go double check, and by god, I saw a video of penguins swimming super fast, faster than dolphins, and they
were porpoising in and out of the water. It was really something to see. Have you not seen that before? Not that I know of. I mean, I forget stuff, so it's possible, but it seemed pretty shocking to me when I saw it.
Dolphins are also pretty good smellers. They have a blowhole it's basically like nostrils in it's above the frontal skull bones, and it's kind of cool because it connects right to their lungs. They're not mouth breathers, even though apparently they did find a mouth breathing Hector's dolphin, which are dolphins near New Zealand in twenty fifteen. Yeah, so I don't know what that says about that guy, but he was
a mouth breather. But that blowhole, like I said, is connected directly to the lungs, and they can open it and close it with a nasal plug and they can fill that thing up very very fast. Like in afraction was second, they can fill up their lungs through the blowhole. They only breathe five or six times a minute, and they can't stand or water all day. But they can stay down there for a few minutes at a time.
Yeah for sure. But if they say down there too long and they run out of air, they can't drown. They are air breathing mammals. Yeah, don't forget that.
The saddest thing I could imagine.
Yeah, which we'll get to that later. Yeah, the blowhole also does a really good job of expelling air, because again this is like it's like our mouth breathing in and out except on the top of our head. So when they breathe out, especially having been underwater for a little while, they're breathing out warm air into usually colder air because the sea temperature is usually warmer than the surface temperature in a lot of cases, and it'll condense
and that's what their their spout is. It's like you can see it.
Yeah, it's pretty cool. And apparently you can tell like different species apart by the like kind of spout they have.
Right, Yeah, from what I understand, I couldn't, but I think scientists can.
Why don't you take the una hemispheric sleep because that's pretty remarkable and you haven't had a wowie.
Oh thanks. Also, I have a correction that I want to put in too. Okay, okay, So we're talking about what dolphins do is uni hemispheric sleep, which is because they are in danger of predation because they don't stop and like you know, follow the bottom of the ocean. They actually have to keep going while they're sleeping. So what they do is shut down half of their brain and the other half just kind of keeps an eye on things. And then when the one brain, one side
of the brain has had enough sleep. It's which is over to the other hemisphere, and then that one takes its turn to sleep and the other one takes over to kind of stand guard.
Yeah, that sleeping with one eye open is kind of an old like Western trope. But that's like so funny that dolphins literally do that.
Yeah. Sure, and that actually ties in, chuck you ne hemispheric sleep to our Zizzeyan's episode because they were trying to figure out how to do that themselves, which seems to be impossible for humans from what I can tell. And by the way, stay tuned for listener mail because I have a correction related to the Zizians episode. So this is like a correction loused episode.
Okay, all right, should we take a break?
Yes, I think so.
Okay, we'll come back with correction fest right after this.
¶ Unique Sleep and Vision
All right, we're back with more on dolphins. No more corrections, I promise they have. And this is to me another like fact of the show. They have incredible eyesight. They see really really well within about a hundre and fifty feet and they do this because they have two kind of slightly flattened eyeballs on the sides of their head. When you look at a dolphin. They're kind of on the sides and they see from both simultaneously, and then like us with binocular vision, they stitch it together to
see one thing. But what that results in is a three hundred degree panoramic view nice where they can see basically anywhere they want except right above them.
Yeah, that's their one blind spot is above them. And apparently if they're trying to get a really good look at you, they'll tilt their head down and try to look at you like that. It's pretty cute. Yeah, So they actually do have really good eyesight underwater and above water. And the way that they can transition from a fairly dark environment to a bright, sunny environment because they have
a double slit in their pupils. So when their pupils are wide open and say they're kind of dive, they've dived deep and there's not a lot of light trying to capture all of it. It looks like they have two tiny pupils. But then as they come up to the surface and they get closer to the sun, one of their pupils or one of the slits closes in it narrows, so they don't take in quite as much light. So they can see pretty well and they're apparently up
to one hundred and fifty feet. They have just really great eyesight from what we can tell.
Yeah, and they you know, it's important that they can do that out of the water because when they porpoise and jump out, they want to see everyone going, oh my god, Larry. Look.
Then they give them a little wink nice yeah, and it makes a ding sound.
They have teeth, and they're not like, you know, big scary shark teeth. They're kind of cone shaped. They eat fish, of course, crustaceans, squid, and they use their beak. It's also called a rostrum, but we just call it a beak, and you know, they'll grip that prey and they swallow it hole. And they're smart enough to know and we'll get to how smart they are later, but they're smart enough to know that they got swallow this fish headfirst,
so they don't catch those spines on their throats. And if they come up against like a catfish or something that's got like really you know, spiky spiny things coming off their head, they'll bite those heads off and eat the rest of it.
Yeah, I'll bet that's the sight to see yeah, so they also have really good hearing, which makes sense because they use echolocation, which we'll talk about. But they have ear canals just like us, but they're totally useless. They're vestigial.
They don't connect to anything, and in fact, they're plugged up with some pretty serious ear whacks that everybody just kind of considered a curiosity of whales and dolphins that they have big ear plugs of ear wax in their ear canals that don't connect anything, and scientists realize like, oh, actually,
they put down layer after layer throughout their life. And you can examine an ear plug or a plug of ear wax of a dolphin or a whale and pretty closely estimate how old it is, like you'reing tree rings.
So cool.
I think so too.
I love that. And they can also, you know, get into that ear wax and analyze it and see what kind of like pollutants it was exposed to and stuff like that, maybe hormone fluctuations. So yeah, that's pretty awesome. And that's like fairly recent, right.
Yeah, I don't know exactly when, but it is a fairly recent finding for sure. So yeah, look for more talk about dolphin earwax in the future.
They don't listen exactly like we do, but they receive high frequency sounds through And this is a pretty good band named Acoustic Fats and their lower jaw and that's going to vibrate through their skull and they have these you know, I guess they're unattached internal earbones that pick up this sound from the acoustic fats.
Yeah, so they can hear sounds. But it's also really useful for echolocation too, where they send a click out and then wait for it to bounce off something and come back. It's received through that jawbone.
Yeah.
And apparently because the teeth are so close to the nerves that transmit this this impulse, they think that the teeth might actually act as amplifiers. And I wonder if that has to do with the cone shape too.
Oh maybe so maybe. Yeah, I mean a cone is a very common way to amplify sound.
It is like an old timey cheerleader.
Yeah, totally. Yeah, I mean that's just another amazing fact. They you know, navies use sonar, so it's and we'll get into this little bit more. But you know, everyone has sort of heard the stories about the damage that's done by you know, ships and navies and exploding things underwater.
Yeah, one of the largest dolphins strandings took place because of sonar. There's a big multi national naval exercise in the Arabian Sea in two thousand and nine. I remember that, Yeah, and two hundred dolphins just stranded themselves just trying to get away from the horrible sounds. So, yeah, we've talked about this before. It's a real issue. That's just nothing's being done about it.
Yeah, it's uh, yeah, there's a lot of sadness in this episode for sure. They do vocalize, you know, you just rewind and listen to Josh at the beginning if you want to hear exactly what it sounds like. Don't bother going to YouTube or anything. They vocalize with whistles and pops and brays. They make these sounds with something called phonic lips, and those are near the blowhole.
That's a good one too.
Did you say band name?
It's a good one.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sonic Youth and Flaming Lips got together for a Superman nice. I just saw the Flaming Lips and they were great. Hadn't seen them in years. Oh yeah, yeah, it's really really good.
I've never seen them. I'm sure their shows are pretty great.
Yeah, it's pretty fun. But they have a larynx at the base of the blowhole, and that larynx is going to be able to sort of move and modulate sound by letting air kind of go through at different rates of speed.
Yeah. And then they also have something called a melon,
¶ Advanced Senses: Echolocation & Hearing
which is a big, massive fat in their forehead, which pretty Yeah, it's pretty characteristic of dolphin's look, but that melon is actually able to focus sound like a lens. The little fatty lump moves around. They can move it, which is pretty cool. Like those people who can move their forehead up and down, right, I think that's essentially what they're doing, and it focuses the sound, including their echolocation.
Yeah, and get this, here's another fact of the episode. I'll take this one, you can take the next one. They can use this to basically name each other. They can broadcast their identity and their location to other dolphins because they have signature whistles, so they come up with their own whistle. They make that sound and everyone knows that's Josh over there, Josh the dolphin.
Yeah, my name sounds like in dolphin and.
Talk about what mommies do too. That's another wowie.
Well, they found that they use baby talk, They use higher frequency whistles and essentially use baby talk with their own calves, which is adorable.
Yeah, are we at echolocation? Finally?
I think? So this is a pretty cool This is the last fact. The rest of the stuff we're going to talk about is so dry you might as well to stop the episode.
No, not true, but you take this because it's a wowe. It's essentially just like bats, right it is.
And they figured out that bats and dolphins are essentially not at all related, so they developed pretty much identical forms of echolocation independently. Yeah, it's an example of convergent evolution. But what they do is they produce these clicks. They use the melon to focus those things like a laser, and they can not only so they're bouncing a sound wave off of something. It's coming back and then it
is translated into a mental map. So essentially they're seeing, they're experiencing a form of vision like we think of it, but they're doing it through through sonar, essentially their own form of sonar. Yeah, and they it's like really really accurate.
Right, Yeah. I mean they've done some studies and they found that they were able to distinguish different disc sizes by as little as one tenth of a centimeter or four hundreds of an inch.
Right, which is very small. And I thought that was weird. One tenth of a centimeter. I was like, that sounds familiar, and then I realized it's a millimeter. I don't know why anyone would put it like that. That's why you have the metric system.
Yeah, well you should ask Kyle.
Isn't that bizarre?
Yeah?
Huh So, their their echolocation is quite quite amazing. And I've seen also that they can they can see internal organs in other animals. That's how penetrative. I guess their their echolocation isn't just how nuanced it is.
I know Predator is heat based, but I just that's what I think of.
That's funny you say that I watched that two days ago the og Yeah, and I this is definitely tied with I guess Commando for Schwarzenegger's best movie.
I saw Predator, the original one, but I didn't like follow up with the whole Predator universe.
No, I didn't either. I just watched the first one again. I was like, man, this is good.
I think those new ones are supposed to be good. To pray and then that other one coming up.
Oh, really, they're supposed to be good.
That's what I heard.
Isn't there like a Predator versus Jason? Didn't it gets it like off the as off the rails as they.
Do Predator versus Alien. I think, Yeah, I didn't see that either, and I love the Alien universe.
Yeah, I guarantee Danny McBride's in that.
Yeah. Uh so. Dolphins are very social and that's one of the reasons also that people love them, because you often see them swimming in large pods and seeming like they're having a good time together. It's because they basically are pods can be as small as two or up to a thousand, but generally they're between forty and sixty, and they can form very long time social relationships.
Yeah, there's different kinds of pods. There's like, you know, the pod pod, the original one. There's a bunch of different dolphins that some have familial ties, some don't. There's juvenile pods where they the kids reach I guess the end of toddler stage and they're like, go on, go form your own pod. So a bunch of them about
the same ageable form of pod together. There's bachelor pods, which is usually two sometimes three males that essentially just form their own jam and crews around together, sometimes forming lifelong friendships. And all of them have their advantages, like it's easier to hunt that, it's easier to defend against something trying to kill you. Yeah, it's easier to pass down knowledge from one generation to another, which we'll talk about in a second. So there's all sorts of advantages.
But because of their social nature, they do have a lot of traits that you're like, wow, that's really human.
Like, yeah, for sure, this is I told Emily about this one and she was like, well, that's bs, but this is this is sometimes what happens. It's it's fairly rare, but sometimes males will team up and steal a female dolphin from another pod and basically, you know, keep her captive and prevent her from returning.
Uh.
And it looks like what they think is going on is like they have a situation where they need a female because their long gestation period is and lactation keeps them from being available to breed for sometimes years at a time, so they're like, we got a breed, We're gonna go take her and keep her here.
Yeah, there's this high competition for females. So it's not the most tasteful dolphin fact around. So we'll follow that one up with a more heartwarming one where they also have been observed in plenty of instances to engage in altruistic behavior, like social behavior where they don't leave behind like sicker injured friends.
Yeah, go ahead tell them about that one.
I think this was in the mid two thousand aughts, I think whatever, there was a group of eleven dolphins that essentially swam together to form a raft with their injured companion in the middle to keep them from sinking and dying. Yeah, and I mean that's pretty amazing altruistic behavior. I think they've also seen other ones do that too. It's not like this is a one time thing, so that's a pretty I mean there's a lot of animals that are out there like, oh you're sick, good luck dying,
We're moving on, or I'll eat you exactly. Yeah, dolphins don't do that. They try to take care of their peeps.
Amazing. All right, I say, we take our second break, Oh okay, and we come back with more on the amazing dolphin right after this.
So, Chuck, one of the great things about dolphins is that we know that they play. It's not anthropomorphizing, it's they're playing. Juveniles play with one another. They sometimes play with their parents. They'll swim around and the head of another dolphin and just kind of tease them. We talked about them teasing fish earlier. What is that all about?
Yeah, I mean sometimes they've been observed doing that. Like they'll go up and not eat a fish, but they'll like get the fish's tail in its mouth and being like like kind of like I got your nose, and then they'll swim away and the fishes like what just happened?
Yeah, and then I'm swimming porpoising in the waves of ships that are traveling fairly fast. They think, essentially, that's for thrills and kicks. Yeah, that's so cool.
Yeah, it's pretty cool.
There are also gay dolphin behaviors as well, where those male friends for life and the bachelor pods they'll have sex.
¶ Dolphin Society and Unique Behaviors
I mean, isn't that the whole point? In the Bachelor Pod.
I think so, you know, yeah, that and playing video games together afterwards.
Yeah exactly. Yeah, I mean they this is where, you know, gets a little sexy. But they basically on a daily basis, they've observed dolphins exhibiting what's called non conceptive sexual behavior, so they're not trying to reproduce. They're getting together and having a good time for the fun of it.
Yeah, and that and CSB for the church goers. That also includes masturbation. Apparently captive dolphins do that every day, which makes sense because they've got nothing else to do, so they're just kind of bored. But they will use walls. Other dolphins they'll use trainer sometimes for stimulation. Yeah, and that actually happens.
Yeah, I saw too. They might lean up against a washing machine from time to time.
Yeah, pretty good. Is that real? Is that just a troper? Is that real?
I'm sure it's happened. All right, let's talk about let's clean this thing up. Well, actually we can't clean it up because we're about to talk about something else like that. We're talking about dolphins intelligence and we know they're smart and a lot of that comes from a guy named doctor John C. Lilly in the nineteen sixties who really put dolphins on the map in a bigger way by
saying that they're probably as intelligent as we are. He did some pretty awful experience experiments, like injecting them with LSD. He mapped unsedated dolphins cerebral cortex with probes, and he was involved in a very infamous experiment in nineteen sixty three. I said it was the seventies. It was the sixties when he got a woman named Margaret Howell love It and paired her with a dolphin named Peter and a flooded apartment so they could live together and learn more about each other.
Yeah, so Lily was obsessed with the idea that dolphins could learn English, not just to understand it, but to speak it, because sometimes apparently they'll mimic's people speaking a little bit with one of their squeaks. So He's like, they clearly want to communicate. That's why he injected him with LST. That's why he had Peter live with Margaret, and she was supposed to teach him how to say Hello Margaret, but apparently though the lessons would get interrupted
because Peter was rather randy dolphin. He was captive after all. So Margaret Howell love It became known as the woman who would manually satisfy really relief, and she was like, yes, I realized this is a very odd behavior. And apparently Hustler picked us up and wrote all about it, this crazy, this crazy thing that was going on, and she was like, look, I'm trying to actually interact with the dolphin, teach the dolphin this, and Peter just can't focus on anything else.
So it's like an itch, you scratch it and then you move on, And of course it's what everybody talked about. But eventually the funding dried up and Peter was essentially just kicked out of the apartment is separated from Margaret, who he'd essentially adopted as either a pod member or his girlfriend or something. He had a very strong attachment to her, and they just ripped him away from her, and it did not go very well.
No, he did not say so long and thanks for all the fish. He very sadly appeared to have taken his own life. He just kind of sunk himself to the bottom and didn't breathe anymore.
Yeah, how sad is that?
Oh, dude, I mean, you put this dolphin in an apartment with this woman, and then that happens, and then he seemingly kills himself.
Yeah, kids, Yeah, I mean, if you ever see a dolphin in captivity, it's it's a really horrible thing to see, especially if it's like just indoors. It's just it's worse than other animals I think, and I don't think any animals should be kept in captivity, but dolphins seem to be. It's just worse, you know.
Yeah, I mean to me, when you're talking about an ocean dwelling species, it's a big area, right, Yeah, but they are smart sort of a long way of getting around and saying we know they're super smart. We've seen their vocalizations and their social relationships and how they can learn and mimic things. But you know, saying like they're as smart as humans, it's just a weird. People should stop comparing animals to humans like that.
Yeah, that's a great point, Chuck. I mean, they're their own thing. Let's understand them on their own.
Terms, exactly meet him where they're at. As they say, we do know.
They use tools. There is just there's some dolphins that have been shown to basically attach a sponge to their rostrum, their beak, or their schnas when they're hunting for food or forging for food on the seafloor, to basically cushion. It isn't that neat?
Yeah, it's amazing, like a little bumper.
Yeah. But even more amazing than that is that not all dolphins do that, some groups do that, and that they learn it from the other members of their pod, which is a cut and dried version of culture that fits essentially all of the boxes for culture and culture is very rare in the animal kingdom, and dolphins seem to display it, at least through the sponge tool use.
Yeah, for sure. So this is sort of the saddest part of the episode is when we talk about captive dolphins and kind of what'smans have kind of screwed it all up as usual. But there has been dolphin entertainment for a long time since in nineteenth century, but things really grew after the TV show Flipper in the nineteen sixties. There were three dolphin areums before that, and by two thousand and nine there were one hundred all over the world.
And while trade is illegal in the US, Mexico, and Europe, they are captured at different places in the world, and we're going to talk about some specifically, like Japan and Taiwan. But the rate of mortality is disputed. If you want to look at SeaWorld's research, they're going to say it's
really not that different. If you're going to look at research by people who used to work at SeaWorld and don't anymore, they'll say, no, male orc has lived fifteen years less in captivity, and females as much as thirty. So just I think that speaks for itself.
And there was also a nineteen eighty eight study Chuck in the journal Marine Mammal Science, and it found that about half of captive dolphins die within ninety days of being captured. So this is not They're just not a species or a family or a type of animal that should be held in captivity, and yet they are. SeaWorld very famously in twenty sixteen said that they were no longer going to breed orcas, but that they weren't about
to retire the orcas that they still had left. Yeah, that was largely thanks to the documentary Blackfish, which you've never seen that, go watch it right now.
Yeah, good one.
But they still have captive breeding programs for their dolphins, and those don't seem to be going anywhere either.
Yeah, some people, you know, make an argument that, you know, studying these things in captivity is like how we how we learn about them, which is obviously true to a certain degree. But dolphin experts will say, hey, you're not learning about their real habitat if you're studying a dolphin in captivity, because they're in captivity, Like their behaviors change, like, you know, all kinds of things are different because they're swimming around in a pool rather than the ocean.
Yeah, Like, imagine putting a hue into solitary confinement long enough for them to become totally insane and studying their behavior and extrapolating it onto the rest of humanity. That's essentially what the critics are saying that people who study animals in captivity are doing. It's tough to disagree with that as far as I'm concerned.
Yeah, they're also used by the US Navy. They're the second largest holder of marine mammals in the United States behind SeaWorld. Yeah. They started this program, the Marine Mammal Program for the Navy in nineteen fifty nine, and by the nineteen eighties they had over one hundred dolphins. I think that numbers ticked down to like the mid seventies ish now. But you know, if you've heard stories of like dolphins used in war with like lasers on their head,
they don't have lasers on their head. But there have been some verified reports that dolphins have like blowguns on
¶ Dolphin Intelligence and Controversial Studies
their head.
Oh was that verified? I know that there's certainly rumors, well.
Not verified as in like the US Navy verified it, but I think there have been people that are like, no, this is happening, and they've observed it in the Soviet space as well well.
For the most part, what they're used is to either identify mines like find and identify minds because their echo location can detect the void inside the casing of a mine that's buried under mud, and they'll go to tag it essentially. Or they'll look for swimmers or divers who are trying to sabotage like a ship or something, and they'll go up and basically bump them and put a tracker on that diver and then let the Navy people take over and track that person. So the Navy's like,
no dolphin has ever killed a person in combat. It just has never happened. But there is one recorded instance of a dolphin killing human and from what I can tell, it sounds just yeah.
This was in nineteen ninety four. There was a dolphin near sel Power, Brazil that was named tiaw and he was very friendly and gregarious and was well known around the area for like hanging out with people and had a lot of bad human interactions as a result of that. This guy was harassing them. Apparently there were also there was also a case where he injured twenty nine swimmers. They were trying to ride him and put popsicle sticks
in his blowhole. This guy was harassing him and he and he basically nosed him in the abdomen and the guy died from internal bleeding.
Yeah, like ti how he wasn't a naval dolphin by the way, he was just this is just the one example of somebody, oh yeah, of a dolphin killing a person. But yeah, he was very, very friendly and he had to put up with a lot of crud, but he would he would dish it back out if you pushed him past the past the point of no return. He apparently after the guy died. Tiaw is left and they haven't seen him since he fled the He fled the interview.
Yeah, he's fleeing the interview. Dolphin watching is also you know, you might think like, hey, that's a pretty innocuous thing to ride around a boat and look at these things.
Right.
There are companies that supposedly do it responsibly, but that's after like, you know, we had to get involved and say hey, you can't feed them. That happened in the early nineteen nineties, Like they're getting hit by boats because they're trying to like say, hey, you want to see some dolphins, let's chum the water or whatever or not chum or whatever they use, and they put like time limits and distance limits. If those are followed, then you
know that's better. But any kind of boat activity like that is just going to disturb their normal activity. And if there are too many boats around, these dolphins will just be like, all right, I got to relocate somewhere, maybe far away, and maybe they're not even able to do that safely.
You know. Yeah, yeah, in that sense, it's still not enough regulation or protection of the dolphins. But you can make a pretty good case that the United States has some good laws in place that do protect dolphins. There's one that was passed in nineteen seventy two, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and among other things, that basically said you're not allowed to eat dolphin in the United States.
They used to hunt dolphin and eat dolphin, and apparently people who have eaten dolphin are like, this pretty good, but you can't do that in the US anymore, not since the swing in seventies. And some people are like, well, you're eating dolphin when you eat can tuna. That seems to be quite untrue. There's people say that, yeah, there's a can tuna that says it's dolphins safe. That doesn't mean that dolphins aren't being caught in bycatch. It means
that there's no dolphin in your tuna. But there are types of tuna fishing that that are much safer for dolphins than others. So if you care about that and you love cantuna, look for a cantuna that says it's either pole caught, polland line caught, troll caught free, school or school caught or fad free. Any of those are much less likely to accidentally catch and kill dolphins. When they're fishing for tuna.
That's right. Uh, I always thought tuna was chicken of the sea.
Now, did you ever see that episode of Jessica Simpson
¶ The Ethics of Dolphin Captivity
and Nichola ch'es Nope, there it was insane, Like I saw that.
One and like, what, I don't even know what you're talking about.
Oh, she was confused. She was eating a can of tuna of Chicken of the sea tuna, and she's like, I thought it was chicken. But then he's like, no, you know it's tuna. She's like, no, I know it's tuna, but I thought it was chicken. And it just like you're you'll start bleeding out of your ear if you try to follow it too closely. Interesting, it was something that show is actually surprisingly good.
You watched it?
Yeah, back in the day.
That surprises me.
It surprises me too now that I think about it.
Yeah, joshup, now, wouldn't watch that? Right?
Probably? Not?
No, Josh of your Yeah for sure. Hey, I watched Brett Michael's Rock of Love. That was That's my one reality TV show.
Scar Okay, that's not that's yeah. I was gonna say it's not too bad. It's pretty bad.
It was pretty bad. But that's your that's your boy.
Oh yeah, he's one of them. The whole crew is my boys.
Yeah, Cca Gang, that's right, Bobby Dolphin, Ricky Rockett, I got it.
A nice work, Chuck.
Dolphin hunting, though, still happens in other places around the world. We promised to talk about it a little bit. But there are drive hunts, very infamous ones that happen in Taiji, Japan, and the Faroe Islands. And there's another great documentary from two thousand and nine called The Cove about the Japanese hunt, and it's awful to watch. But they round up just thousands and thousands of dolphins and corral them and sell some to dolphin arians and slaughter the rest.
You've seen it. I don't think I could see.
It, man, Yeah, I don't bother you the deal.
There's also another documentary from Netflix called Sea Spiracy, not the best name ever, but it's about the Ginda Drop, which is an annual dolphin hunt in the Faroe Islands off of Denmark, and it's essentially the same thing. They're driven into a corral and then killed by knife and I think in twenty twenty one, fourteen hundred dolphins were killed in the Genda drop that year, which was a record with knives. Jeez.
We did talk about bycatch a little bit. There was a study in twenty twenty that found that since nineteen fifty, over eighty percent of Indian ocean dolphins may have been killed has bycatch eighty percent, with about eighty thousand total cetaceans caught each year. And then there's ghost fishing, which
¶ Dolphins in Military and Human Interaction
we did an episode on, and that's you know, when just the fishing industry as a whole ends up killing animals in the ocean. Ship strike and predation and starvation and getting caught up in nets and lines and all that awful stuff.
Yeah, when they abandon their old fishing gear they can't use anymore and it just floats around and can kill animals in the sea for hundreds of years. It's nuts. We should end this on a high note, chuck. So just a reminder that dolphin moms use whistles to baby talk with their dolphin calves, that's right, and they play with each other. Yeah, for sure, that's it for dolphins. Everybody. Hopefully you like this one. We loved it. We might
just do it again, who knows. But in the meantime, while we figure that out, it's time for listener maw.
This is a remember the Bolkswagen episode in the Lemon ad. We weren't sure exactly what that was all about. Oh yeah, we heard from a lot of people. This is from LORI, and I'm trusting LORI because LORII is an advertising copywriter.
Oh good, she says.
Hey, guys, confusion about the famous VW Lemon ad Create to buy Bill Burnbock at DDB. The body copy is about VW's preoccupation with every detail. Each bug goes through a rigorous inspection process one hundred and eighty nine checkpoints. If there's any issue at all, no matter how small, the car doesn't leave the factory. So the car in this ad has a scratch on the glove compartment, so it's a Lemon. Apparently there was fine print in the
ad that explained this. One more thing, though, guys, All good ad campaigns begin with an insight, a simple sentence, a nugget of emotional truth that determines how the brand speaks to consumers and how consumers relate to the brand. The insight for the BW Beetle you don't buy a Beetle you adopt it.
Oh wow, that's neat.
We just got don Draper by Lori.
Yeah, we did. Way to go, Lorii. That was a really great email. Hats off to you.
Yeah, and Louri is a BW Beetle owner as well, so she ticks all the boxes for sure.
I trust Lorii. That's a new stuff you should know.
T Shirt agreed.
Also, Chuck, I want to take a second to put in a correction which I think we mentioned before from the Zizian episode. So in it, I talked about Eliezer Yukowski, who is kind of like his Machine Intelligence Research Institute was kind of at the center of the Zizians, like that's where they all met. Yeah, and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute is trying to figure out how to create an artificial intelligence that is friendly to humans, that's aligned
with human goals and doesn't wipe us out. And I said that Eliezer had basically thrown in the towel and was like, this is not it's too late, We're not going to make it. We got an email from Malo Borgan, who was the CEO of the of Miry, and he said, hey, you got it a little wrong. Eliezer's book that's coming out. It's called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies? Is not
about throwing in the towel. It's saying like, we're right there on the edge, but when there's still time, we can still figure out how to make an AI as super intellent jan AI that doesn't wipe out humanity. And here's how, and let's get busy. Now. It's kind of like I'll call the arms to get humanity in action. So I definitely flubbed that one. And a huge thank you to Mallow for letting us know, but also letting us know really gently.
Yeah, he's really nice about it. Yeah.
So the book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, It's
¶ Conservation, Threats, and Modern Practices
by Eliezer Yudkowski, who is an amazing thinker and his collaborator Nate Sores, comes out September sixteenth. If you want to go buy it, fantastic, fantastic, And if you want to get in touch with us, like Mallow or Lori, you can send us an email to send it off to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,