Yuri Makino’s swim with the dolphins

Yuri Makino

Note: My friend Yuri is an associate professor at the University of Arizona where she teaches screen writing and directing. She recently received a grant to film dolphins, both wild and in captivity.

This post is a letter Yuri sent to friends at the end of her trip to the Florida Keys. She gave me permission to publish it. Enjoy!

Dear Friends,

I’m writing from a motel in the Florida Keys. The ten days I spent on a dolphin research boat in the Bahamas already feels like a dream. (For those of you who don’t know, I’m working on a documentary about human-animal encounters.)

There’s one photo attached which I look at to try to hold on to the magic of my experience. In the picture I am standing at the bow of the Stenella and before me is a pod of spotted dolphins in the crystal-clear, turquoise sea. Our first days on the sea were amazingly still, peaceful and the water visibility perfect.

Before the trip I wasn’t sure how close I’d actually get to the dolphins. As it turned out I had interactions with them in the water daily. Sometimes they were a bit far, but mostly they swam by close enough that I could have reached out and touched them.

Being a sure-footed, astrologically earth-signed, desert dweller, I was totally out of my element floating around awkwardly with fins in the open sea. I was completely disorientated most of the time. And then to have these large graceful creatures glide by added to my dizzy state of mind. Sometimes a dolphin would swim below me belly-up or askew to check me out. Other times one might sneakily cut around me, peering into my video camera. One dolphin tried to play a game of passing sargassum (sea grass) off to a young grad student on the trip. He was a good swimmer and it was clear to me that they liked playing with him since he could maneuver himself fluidly in the water. He would dive down with them and they’d circle each other. They certainly realized I was a klutz.

What people seem to express after they’ve encountered a dolphin is that moment when the dolphin looks you in the eye. I’ve experienced it now too, that moment of recognition of each other and each other’s consciousness. I’m not sure why it’s a revelation when it really should be obvious that their experience has the potential to be as rich as our own.

Another unusual experience is having the dolphin use its echolocation to “check you out.” You feel a tingling, buzzing sensation of the sound waves through your body. Their vocalizations are varied and often I couldn’t see the dolphins but I could hear them. They can make a cacophony of sounds: high whistles, chirps, squeaks, chips and clicks. With a friend’s hydrophone I was able to record this underwater symphony one evening.

While most of my experiences near the dolphins were relaxing and mesmerizing, I also witnessed their aggressive behavior with each other, which isn’t well known to the general public. It became clear that dolphins have full lives with their own personal dramas.

First of all, they live up to around 40 years and their bodies show their “battle wounds.” They have scars from shark attacks, propeller injuries, and from fights. The researchers who were on the trip use their scars to help identify them. Most of the dolphins we encountered were the friendly spotted dolphins and the researchers also use their spot patterns for identification. One of the researchers on the trip

knows probably 50 dolphins by name with just a glance at their markings, which often are almost invisible to me. (They’re keeping track of at least 200 of the spotted dolphins. Some they’ve been tracking 20 years.)

The baby spotted dolphins are born without spots and start getting them when they are three. It’s also when they leave their mother’s side. I’ve attached a picture of the common pairing of mother and baby. I’ve seen a mother discipline her juvenile by holding him down on the sand until he got the picture. (Dolphins need air around every three minutes.) Touch is important to them. They constantly touch each other with their dorsal fins for confirmation of their relationships. Interestingly, sex also plays a big part of their behavior. They are the only mammals besides humans and apes who engage in sex for pleasure. Sexual activity is also for comfort and bonding, and happens between same and different sexes and all ages. However it’s also used for dominance.

On my last day I witnessed some fierce squabbling. Two bottlenose dolphins (“Flipper” types) were harassing a pod of 20 spotted dolphins, almost all males. Bottlenose dolphins are much bigger than the spotted ones and, unlike the spotted, have a huge penis which they use to aggressively mount the spotted dolphins. They also exhibited head-butting, tail slapping and jaw clamps, all very violent behavior. We kept our distance during this fight. The strange thing is that the spotted could have high-tailed it away from the bottlenoses, or ganged up on them (which sometimes they do), but they didn’t. And the aggressive behavior seemed to spread among the spotted, and so other squabbles were breaking out within the same species. At some point, the fights ended and they were back to their peaceful ways, rubbing each other with their dorsal fins and riding the bow wave of our boat.

The untrained eye would miss much of the behavior I described. The main researcher aboard would review with us in the evening the video she took in the day and explain what was going on. Some of the most surreal experiences were the “night drifts.” On the calm nights we’d motor it to where the shelf drops off into the deep and where the dolphins feed at night. We’d drift along in waters at 1200 feet and drop lights into the water to attract squid and other things the dolphins feed on. With some trepidation, I entered the dark waters, trying to keep from thinking about what creatures could be in the 1200 feet below me. Once in, I was immersed in an almost black and white world. The dolphins, glowing from reflected light, would speed through the pools of light hunting down squid. In some ways, it was more relaxing than in the day when a good deal of the time we had to swim after the dolphins. At night they came to us.

The second night drift my camera was being problematic. It was a good opportunity to go in without the camera, to just enjoy this dream-like world.

One afternoon we anchored over a shipwreck, a boat that had carried sugar a hundred years ago. From above water it didn’t look like much, but when I got in with my mask on, it was like a scene from a children’s book. Fantastical purple and green plants growing between ship remains. A big green moray eel slithering between a coral covered structure. A stingray hovering over the sand. A long, shimmering barracuda eyeing me and me eyeing it nervously back. Schools of iridescent tropical fish swaying in formation, here then there. Surely there must be a treasure chest hidden somewhere.

It was this day that I also saw a shark, actually three sharks. I looked at the research team looking at a shark as big as a dolphin some 50 feet away on the ocean’s bottom and they didn’t seem concerned as we headed back into our boat, so I wasn’t either. I thought I would be more freaked out to be in the water with a shark but the unreal-ness of it kept me calm. However it turned out that when we viewed the video footage one of them was a bull shark and potentially dangerous. They had thought it was a harmless, bottom-feeding nurse shark, like the other two, but were mistaken.

It did make me wary to hear on the CB radio that a captain of a dive boat (which takes scuba divers) in the area saw a 14-foot tiger shark. Our captain complained about a tour guy who “chums” for sharks, that is, he throws in bloody or fishy bait to attract sharks for his thrill seeking shark divers. The problem is that he’s doing this in the same waters as the dolphins and us.

While there were wonderful moments of tranquility in the water and in the mornings when we were anchored and I would do yoga on the bow, much of the time was physically draining. For one, getting in and out of the boat with the video camera was often challenging when the water was rough. Also, I had a hard time keeping up with the research team who were zooming off after the dolphins, photographing them and collecting poop samples for DNA research. I often felt like the tag-along little sibling. The boat had to pick me up a few times to bring me closer to the researchers and dolphins. We often would jump in only to have the dolphins cruise elsewhere.

We’d get back to the boat, take off our fins and masks, dunk the cameras in fresh water, de-fog our masks, put back on our fins, check our cameras, and get ready to go out again in a flash. Sometimes as I jumped off the boat and had my camera passed to me, praying I wouldn’t drop it, I felt like a skydiver on a crucial mission. I found it a bit stressful.

A few days into our trip a dramatic lightning storm ripped over us at night. The captain said he’d never seen anything like this before. There was so much lightning that a much of the time the boat was lit up as if it were daytime. The waves that night and the following slammed the boat throughout the night and I got tossed in my top bunk. Only once throughout the handful of rough periods did I feel queasy and had to go outside to watch the waves. I ate some candied ginger and luckily felt better quickly.

The other experience that the main researcher said was a first is when two female bottlenoses, named Justice and Ditch, interacted with us for 20 minutes. She said she’s never seen this species interact so intimately and for so long before in the wild. My best footage is from this encounter.

I experienced more time with bottlenoses yesterday at the Dolphin Research Center in the Keys. I rented a car and drove down here after we docked back in Palm Beach. The strangest thing was walking out on the dock and realizing that I had walked more than 40 steps in a straight line, something I hadn’t done in 10 days! Wearing shoes and no bathing suit was odd too.

I had mixed feelings about being at the research center. The contrast of the often elusive and seemingly serene (though they do make a lot of noises underwater) wild dolphin compared to the constantly verbal (above water), antic-driven trained dolphin was jarring. It was amazing to see how quick the communication between the dolphins and the trainers were. But I found it all rather exhausting. The trainers, mainly women, talk “baby-talk” with the dolphins, giving them non-stop affirmation, touches, kisses and fish. Do they like this? Maybe.

The slogan of the research boat is “In their world, on their terms,” quite a contrast to the experience of dolphins in captivity. While I could tell that the trainers loved the dolphins, I wondered if there might be as an effective way to communicate with and train dolphins that didn’t have such a keyed up, condescending style. It felt cartoon-like, like putting an animal in silly clothes, and felt overly anthromoporphic. Part of my “trainer for the day” session included a “dorsal pull,” which was novel, but in retrospect, I could have skipped it because I felt it was asking maybe a bit too much of the dolphins to pull a stranger around. It seemed to require a lot of trust on the dolphin’s part.

The photos reveal how thrilling it was for me to be close to and to touch the dolphins, which we aren’t allowed to do with wild ones. Their skin feels like a wet truck inner tube. I can see how people wouldn’t want to give up this possibility.

On Monday before I fly out I’ll go back to the center and do some interviews with the trainers and co-founder of the center. The co-founder is a colorful, groovy guy who told me that when he came back from his tour in Vietnam he was an incredibly angry person until he came in contact with dolphins. I look forward to hearing more about his story.

I am still not certain the direction of my doc project. The most interesting interview so far is with Gini, one of the guests on the boat. She’s been swimming with wild dolphins for 20 years and is passionately against any dolphins in captivity. She makes a convincing argument and draws moving connections between our inhumane treatment of animals and of other humans.

The captivity question is a big issue, but at this point I’m not interested in it as my main focus because it feels narrow. While I was on the boat, I read a powerful article about whales in the NY Times magazine. (I’ve included the link below.) It made me think that I’d like to go to Baja on whale tour.

And then there are elephants…. I’d like to meet elephants and all the highly cognitive mammals. Oh, did I mention I’d also like to follow the monarch butterfly migration from Canada to Mexico too?! (I visited the lovely butterfly conservatory in Key West and spoke to a groundskeeper, ex-military, who said his new job was good for his head and his heart. Animal therapy may be a theme in my doc.)

At the heart of my growing interest in animals is my awakening to the consciousness of nonhuman animals brought on by my dog, Nanook. He certainly has brought me much joy and with this comes a sense of responsibility for his wellbeing and for the wellbeing of other animals. Becoming more sensitive to the emotional and physical lives of animals brings with it the weight of the how terribly we treat some animals, consciously and unconsciously, and the ways in which we are destroying their habitats, and of course our habitat. The New York Times article draws connections between Navy Sonar testing and mass whale beachings. The sonar ruptures blood vessels in their brains and ears. Sadly, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of continuing this testing.

Like Gini, I would like to believe that we are beginning to recognize that our evolution depends on growing more sensitive to human and non-human animals, and to all life.

Warm wishes from the Keys,

Yuri