Dolphin Chronicles: One Woman's Quest to Understand the Sea's Most Mysterious Creatures

For everyone fascinated with the possibilities of human-animal communications comes a moving account of one woman’s attempt to unravel the mysteries of the dolphin—one of the sea’s most enigmatic creatures.
 
Of all the mammals on earth, none has inspired our affection as much as the dolphin. In 1988, a group of researchers began a revolutionary experiment: They “borrowed” a pair of wild dolphins from the sea, studied them in captivity, and then set them free to continue studying the animals in their home waters. This is the extraordinary story of that project, an ongoing adventure shared by a daring team of humans and two very special dolphins that has built a bridge between disparate worlds and very different creatures.
 
Now, Carol J. Howard, a researcher and primary member of the team, invites you along on the coast-to-coast odyssey that began when two Atlantic bottlenose dolphins were captured in Tampa Bay, Florida, and transported to Long Marine Laboratory in Santa Cruz, California. Touching, enlightening, and ultimately inspiring, it’s a story filled with drama, humor, and heartbreak—one that offers breathtaking possibilities and poses crucial questions for anyone who cares about the future of the dolphins . . . and of the planet itself.
 
“Carol Howard’s sensitive, dedicated research has produced a glorious book, a must for those who love animals and for those who love the sea.”—Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of The Hidden Life of Dogs

1
Destiny Drive
 
Shuffle your feet, just shuffle your feet,” Larry called down at us, his southern drawl as thick as the Florida summer’s air. Perched atop the sighting tower of his fishing boat, he shouted out instructions like a square-dance caller, directing the rest of us in the steps of “the stingray shuffle.” Most of the members of our twenty-two-person crew were wading through waist-deep water just offshore from Cockroach Bay, along the eastern edge of Tampa Bay. Such shallow, sandy areas tend to be a favorite haunt of stingrays. They like to settle on the bottom and flutter their way in under the sand, rendering themselves nearly invisible. In the murky bay waters it’s impossible to see your own feet, let alone what they might be landing on. That was the problem.
 
Stingrays are placid enough creatures usually, and beautiful, almost hypnotic to watch as they glide along with graceful undulations of their thin, flat bodies, like waterborne flying carpets. Stepping on one is another matter. The ray’s long, whiplike tail is armed with a formidable multibarbed stinger—far worse than any fishhook—near its base. Not content merely to impale an intruder and leave it at that, a disturbed stingray will thrash about once it has implanted its stinger, further ripping the victim’s flesh with each twist. Sometimes the two-inch stinger breaks off in the tussle and, with its row of tiny barbs down each side, will work its way in deeper and deeper if left untreated, like a porcupine quill.
 
The idea behind the stingray shuffle is to kick sand out ahead of you with each step to alert any stingrays in the neighborhood of your approach. The rays will simply swim off peaceably if they know you’re coming, at least in theory. The method isn’t infallible, however: one of the volunteers in our crew had twice before been stung by rays, requiring medical attention each time. So we shuffled our way cautiously through the water toward the net that encircled a small group of dolphins. That’s what we were after—dolphins, not stingrays.
 
 
We were there in Tampa Bay to catch two Atlantic bottlenose dolphins. Ideally, we wanted a pair of young males, roughly four to seven years of age—old enough to have been away from their mothers awhile but still several years from sexual maturity. That was a key element in our plan for a “dolphin science sabbatical,” in which we would essentially “borrow” a couple of years of the dolphins’ lives, bringing them into captivity for two to three years of research and then returning them. We sought two young males with the idea in mind of ultimate release. Among the wild bottlenose dolphins in nearby Sarasota Bay, juvenile males are known to form close associations with one or two other young males, bonds that may last for many years, possibly even for the rest of their lives. If our two animals were to form such a bond, we figured, they might readjust more readily to life in the wild.
 
Although captive dolphins had been released on several previous occasions, what we had in mind was unique. For one thing, this was the first time such a release had been planned from the outset, even before capture. We also intended to release the dolphins back into their home waters, in the same area where we caught them. Furthermore, we planned to carry out a detailed, systematic, long-term follow-up study of the results—another first—and in fact had already begun studying the resident dolphin communities in Tampa Bay.
 
The dolphin sabbatical was originally the brainchild of Dr. Kenneth Norris, a world-renowned expert on whales and dolphins. Ken was the scientist officially in charge, the principal investigator on the current project—or the “Grand Pooh-bah,” as we tended to call him when he wasn’t around. Not that there is anything pompous about him. Far from it. Bearded, balding, given to wearing flannel shirts and baseball caps and driving a pickup truck full of animal feed of various sorts, he tends to look more like a prospector than some ivory-tower academic. The title was intended as one of affectionate veneration.
 
This was to be Ken’s last big research venture before he retired. Its aims were twofold: one, a laboratory study of echolocation, dolphins’ biosonar; and two, a field test of Ken’s longtime dream of a dolphin sabbatical.
 
Ken had worked out the details of the sabbatical notion with Dr. Randy Wells, undoubtedly the leading authority on the bottle-nose dolphins of Sarasota Bay. Randy had been studying the resident community of roughly one hundred dolphins for nearly twenty of his thirty-five years, starting as a high school student. Working with a growing cadre of scientific colleagues, plus a steady stream of Earthwatch volunteers (a program whereby people pay to spend their vacations participating in various research projects around the world), he has amassed an unparalleled wealth of information about this wild dolphin society. He knows who hangs out with whom, what parts of the bay they frequent, how far they travel, how fast they grow, who gave birth this year, who died or disappeared. He has followed three generations or more, watching youngsters grow up and have calves—even grandcalves—of their own. Out in a boat on the bay, Randy can often recognize individuals by the shape of their dorsal fins the way most of us recognize people by their faces.
 
We chose Tampa Bay as a capture site for the sabbatical project because of its proximity to Sarasota Bay. In fact, the two are interconnected: the northernmost tip of Sarasota Bay opens into the southern base of Tampa Bay. We didn’t want to take dolphins out of Randy’s study group but did want a location close enough so that his findings would apply. The discovery of pair bonds among Sarasota males, for example, led to our decision to go for two young males.
 
Randy was largely responsible for the day-to-day planning and organizing of the capture. He also acted as coordinator of the dolphin facility at Long Marine Laboratory, which would serve as the newly caught dolphins’ home during their two- or three-year research stint. The lab was affiliated with the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC), where Ken taught and I was a graduate student in biology.
 
I’d flown to Florida three weeks earlier. We had transported Josephine and Arrow, the two dolphins we’d been working with previously, from Long Lab to a dolphin facility in the Florida Keys. Jo and Arrow were both older females, originally donated to us by the Navy—Navy surplus, I guess. Delightful characters both, but not good research subjects, as it turned out. Arrow had come to us with a variety of physical ailments and was never fully healthy; sweet of temperament, she nonetheless didn’t seem to catch on to what we were asking of her. Josephine—well, Jo had a mind of her own, and doing research was not generally what she had in mind. After their lengthy tours of duty with the Navy—more than twenty years in Jo’s case—the two of them were due for retirement, we figured. Where better to retire than Florida? We took them to the Dolphin Research Center (DRC) on Grassy Key, where they would live in bay pens with other dolphins of their kind, be well fed, but not be required to work for their living.
 
We had considered releasing Josephine instead of retiring her, testing the “dolphin sabbatical” first with her. We didn’t want to release her alone, however, and we had thus far been unable to find a suitable companion. Arrow simply wasn’t healthy enough to be a promising candidate; she would need ongoing medical supervision and would be unlikely to survive in the wild. For a while we hoped an older male dolphin Jo had known in the Navy might accompany her, but the Navy ultimately said no.
 
Lack of a companion wasn’t our only reservation. We were also concerned about Jo’s age and the length of her stay in captivity. Would she remember how to fend for herself? For that matter, would she want to? Furthermore, we didn’t know just where she’d originally been captured, so we couldn’t return her to her home waters—an important aspect of the sabbatical notion. She wouldn’t know the territory, nor the wild dolphin society in which she would find herself, and that could put her at a serious disadvantage. Perhaps most worrisome of all was that, when faced with new or frightening circumstances, Jo tended to quit eating, at least temporarily. To set her free without a familiar companion, in unfamiliar surroundings, could potentially be a death warrant. We decided, for the time being, to continue looking for an appropriate partner for Jo and to see how she adjusted to the DRC.
 
Michelle Jeffries, the head dolphin trainer at Long Lab, and I spent two weeks at the DRC, working with the staff there and trying to ease Jo and Arrow’s transition to their new life. From there we headed for Sarasota, where we met up with Randy Wells and his group, who were at the tail end of one of their capture-release sessions. Randy runs several two-week research sessions each year. Some are survey sessions, simply monitoring the dolphin’s behavior—who’s where doing what with whom. One or two sessions a year involve actually catching some of the dolphins in the study area —maybe twenty or thirty over the two-week period—taking a variety of on-the-spot measurements, blood samples and the like, and then releasing the animals, generally within twenty minutes to an hour.