I’m not saying this story about a bottlenose dolphin in New Zealand rescuing two stranded pygmy sperm whales isn’t awesome. I think it’s great. Brief summary:
Two pygmy sperm whales, a mother and a calf, beached and became disoriented in a bay on the coast of New Zealand. Rescuers (human) arrived and tried to help them out of the bay, but they apparently kept running into a sandbar slightly offshore. While the humans were seriously beginning to consider paddling out to the whales and euthanizing them to prevent them from slowly baking in the sun as they collapsed under the own weight (I’m serious, this is what happens when cetaceans end up on dry land), along comes local dolphin celebrity (??) Moko. Moko wiggles up to the whales, squeaks and clicks at them a little, and suddenly they’re following along and safely back out at sea while the rescue workers look on, flabbergasted and gleeful. Onlookers said it was evidence of dolphins’ “friendly nature.”
So that’s what I have a problem with. “Friendly nature.” Before this, people thought dolphins were friendly because they liked to play games with humans in the water and occasionally saved a drowning seaman or two. If you ask me, that’s not evidence for anything other than dangerous naivety. Most other animals run (or slither or fly or swim or bounce or hop) the other way when they see humans coming. Those that don’t tend to come out the worse for the encounter. Dolphins, however, occasionally approach humans. And want to play. But is their nature really friendly? Dolphin societies have slavery, rape, dominance hierarchies, sport killing and what some people describe as a form of prostitution.
The question I would like to ask is, is a dolphin saving a pair of stranded whales any different from a group of humans saving a pair of stranded whales? Or a human family rescuing a stray cat? Or a wolf suckling two young boys who would go on to found an enormous and long-lived European empire?
I don’t think it’s any different. I think it’s a natural result of the learned behaviors that are encouraged in a group-living species. But I don’t think dolphins are anything to get all New Age about.
6 Comments
i don’t think people really perceive dolphins as magical creatures, often found frolicking off into the lisa frank sunset with a family of unicorns. what i think people find so captivating about dolphins is their capacity for altruism, which is pretty rare in the animal kingdom. granted, there is a fine line between defining events like this (and others you mentioned) as symbiotic or altruistic in origin, nor is this incident evidence that dolphins are friendly creatures, but i do think this situation is pretty special. i might be even be getting a little new age-y on it.
So this leads me to conclude that altruism can only exist alongside the aforementioned negative qualities that we share with dolphins. Then I have to ask whether it’s better to have both or neither?
On behalf of the dolphins (who I don’t think have internet yet) I agree that it’s probably wrong to say that they have a “friendly nature” but it’s nice of them to help people out when we stray off land. I used to surf with my friend and his dad and I remember once we were encircled by dolphins, which I thought was way cool until my friend’s dad said they were probably fending off a shark, which made the situation less cool, but made me think highly of dolphins.
Guys, I like dolphins too. Dolphins are awesome! I just wanted to give people the full picture, because there’s a lot more to it than “dolphin rescues whales.” My point in writing all that about “friendly nature” and group-living animals is that I don’t see much difference between a dolphin saving a pair of whales that are only very distantly genetically related to it and a group of humans doing their damndest to rescue same, even if they fucked it up.
My point, to clarify further, is that the amazing thing isn’t that anyone would ever save anyone else from anything ever. The amazing thing is that self-sacrificing behaviors that evolved from a system of reciprocal altruism–behaviors that evolved as a means of increasing an individual’s chances of survival by increasing the group’s chances–have been generalized by several species into behaviors that can be applied to any individual of any species with little or no material benefit to the actor.
BUT it does or does not coexist with the negative behaviors?
I’m hesitant to say that these behaviors have to coexist in the same organism, as I can’t logically prove that necessity. But from what I’ve seen, there’s ample evidence in biology that within-group altruism goes hand in hand with other, less fun behaviors (like murder, rape, mob violence, war).
Chimps wage war with competing clans, murder individuals within their own groups and frequently rape females. Dolphins we’ve already covered. And I won’t even bother mentioning humans (oops I just did). And those are the advanced organisms. If you look to the eusocial animals, such as bees, ants, termites and naked mole rats, it gets even weirder.
Naked mole rats live entirely in underground burrows, are almost completely blind, and have highly structured societies in which a single queen produces all offspring within the colony while all other individuals work to expand the tunnels, feed the young and care for the queen. It was previously thought that non-queen NMRs were biologically different than the queens and therefore unable to breed.
This turns out not to be the case. All naked mole rats are reproductively viable. They’re all born able to reproduce. The queen, herself, is nothing more than a normal female who has broken out of the ranks of the workers and bitten and clawed her way to the top. Now here’s the kicker: the queen basically beats any other female into submission to the point where the stress hormones the other females produce shut down their reproductive systems.
So here again you have a species which on the surface appears to be living in completely communal, harmonious societies…
I could go on and on. Does that answer your question? I’ll give it another try if it doesn’t.
i think the first part did; the second part may have raised more questions. thanks though