Dolphins save suicidal girl.

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Read the full article here.


I read things like this, and I wonder exactly why no studies have been organised to investigate this type of phenomena. Stories have been circulating for centuries about dolphins rescuing people out to sea, and they are always anecdotal.

This one is no exception; at the bottom is a disclaimer stating that the article was adapted from a separately published work.

Are these stories true? Are they just stories? Is this all part of a great Dolphin Masterplan? What's in it for the dolphins, and if it is true, why do they wait until someone is near death before they intervene?

It's not a debate. I just saw something that piqued my interest, and I thought I would share it.

 

[M&F]

It may or may not have something to do with the fact that dolphins have been known, includingly by science, to experience attraction to human beings sometimes. There have even been cases of dolphins who became attracted to swimmers and then started perceiving other swimmers as competition and attacking them.

 

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I'm not sure that's a factor. If a dolphin saw other swimmers as competition here, surely it'd be attacking the other dolphins nearby. Besides, the story implies that they had to swim quite a way to get to her, if the researchers had to increase speed 'to keep up'.

It also implies that they know that boats are artificial things and the people on there are the same as the ones in the water sometimes.

 

[Superbird]

Perhaps dolphins realize that humans are mammals too, just like them, and thus they feel some sort of kinship, which would encourage them to help us as they would help one of their own?

I'm really looking forward to the day when we decode dolphin communication and figure out how they think and how smart they really are.

 

[M&F]

I'm not sure that's a factor. If a dolphin saw other swimmers as competition here, surely it'd be attacking the other dolphins nearby. Besides, the story implies that they had to swim quite a way to get to her, if the researchers had to increase speed 'to keep up'.

It also implies that they know that boats are artificial things and the people on there are the same as the ones in the water sometimes.

That wasn't to say that exact same scenario plays out in every single human-dolphin interaction, it was just an example of the extent to which it can happen.

Perhaps dolphins realize that humans are mammals too, just like them, and thus they feel some sort of kinship, which would encourage them to help us as they would help one of their own?

I'm really looking forward to the day when we decode dolphin communication and figure out how they think and how smart they really are.

"Fellow mammals" might be a little bit of a stretch, but, well, I'm not sure if that was a dolphin or a different cetacean, but one of those has been shown to use different sounds towards its own kind and human beings. And the real kicker is that the former sounds are outside the range of sounds we can hear, but the latter aren't, so it implies that dolphins (or whatever was the cetacean I was reading about) are aware of the fact that our hearing range differs from theirs, and also that they try to communicate with us.