In a Tanzanian jungle, a scientist and a medicine man follow a chimpanzee in search of a cure for a deadly disease. On the plains of Kenya, a woman learns a powerful lesson about family — from a pair of elephants. And in the Florida Keys, an eight-year old boy with a genetic illness utters his first words, for a chance to swim with dolphins.

From the ancient world to the modern, human lives have been influenced by animals in matters that reach far beyond the food chain. Wisdom of the Wild illustrates some of the surprising ways in which animals help teach, heal, and strengthen people, in body, mind, and spirit.

To order a copy of Wisdom of the Wild, visit the NATURE Shop.

Online content for Wisdom of the Wild was originally posted December 1999.

Join Hardy Jones in his crusade to protect dolphins in NATURE’s The Dolphin Defender.

Nearly three decades ago, filmmaker Hardy Jones became fascinated by wild dolphins. Even though many said it couldn’t be done, he set out to film these sleek sea mammals in the open ocean. Along the way, he became closely involved with his subjects and came to appreciate dolphins as highly intelligent creatures worthy of careful protection.

Eventually, Jones turned his camera into a tool for conservation. He filmed dramatic dolphin hunts, and the documentary footage made headlines and sparked international protests. Jones also discovered the effects of chemical pollution on dolphins and orcas, the largest species of dolphin. He came to realize that threats to these marine mammals were threats to the ocean itself, and to us all.

Now, in NATURE’s The Dolphin Defender, Jones shares some of his most dramatic and beautiful images, and tells the moving personal story of his journey into the world of dolphins. It is a memorable voyage revealed with the energy and elegance of the dolphins themselves.

To order a copy of The Dolphin Defender, please visit the NATURE Shop.

Online content for The Dolphin Defender was originally posted May 2005.

Hardy Jones, the filmmaker behind NATURE’s The Dolphin Defender, is a former journalist with CBS News and UPI. He has been making documentaries about oceans, and marine mammals in particular, for more than 20 years. He has also founded a conservation group, BlueVoice.org, that seeks to publicize the threats facing dolphins and other sea life through films. Jones spoke to NATURE Online from his office in California in May 2005.

How did you become interested in dolphins?

Originally, I became interested in human consciousness, and that led me to a bunch that studied consciousness. One of the things they were fascinated by was this other animal on earth that had a brain as large as our own: the dolphin. Also, I’d been a diver all my life. But I hadn’t really had contact with dolphins until I met this incredibly brilliant group of people in the late 1970s.

How did you decide to make your first film about dolphins?

Well, at the time, dolphins were being killed by the thousands, so I was very concerned. Everybody said that you couldn’t make a movie about dolphins in the wild. But a treasure diver told me there was a place in the Caribbean where you could find dolphins and dive with them. That was 1978 … and it was miraculous. There we were, 40 miles from land in this cobalt-blue water … dolphins swarming around us with this intense curiosity. It was the opportunity of a lifetime.

Do you have a favorite species?

There are over 40 species, and I’ve probably seen about half of them in the wild. But spotted dolphins that I know so well are the ones that I feel closest to.

You have some strong feelings about how dolphins should be protected. …

Yes. The message that I’m trying to bring forward is that dolphins are intelligent, individual creatures just like us. They deserve an unusual level of protection because they are sentient creatures. Increasingly, people are saying they don’t want dolphins killed needlessly, any more than you would want a person killed. It’s not right. The state of the oceans is precarious, and [of] the dolphins even more so … pollution, over-fishing … we’re in a dangerous situation and have to do something about it. Dolphins are called an umbrella species because, to save a dolphin, you also have to save their habitat and their prey — everything. So when you tell a story about a dolphin, you are really telling a story about the whole ocean.

In the film, there is some remarkable footage of dolphins apparently protecting you from a hammerhead shark during a dive.

Oh yes. When they went after that shark, it surprised and relieved me enormously. That hammerhead was really huge. But the dolphins can be quite aggressive. And the sight of these four young dolphins dive-bombing that shark was wondrous. Every once in a while you get a bit of insight into what happens out in the ocean when we are not there.

Hardy Jones

You’d also like to communicate with dolphins, and have worked with a computer that plays back their sounds, etc. …

It can be frustrating. I want to be able to talk to them. You get this feeling that, at the end of the day, they are as interested in meeting us as we are meeting them. … That’s why it is so tragic that dolphins are being captured and killed in so many parts of the world.

One thing I’d like to have people come away from our film [with] is how wonderful and curious dolphins are. When they haven’t been harmed, they welcome contact with humans. It’s just an incredible experience to swim and interact with these animals in the wild. So my dream for the future is to keep learning. I think we can learn a lot about ourselves just by learning about dolphins.

In the summer of 2003, word got out that fishermen in the Solomon Islands, a tropical chain of islands in the Pacific, had trapped some 200 bottlenose dolphins in a shallow inlet. After securing the animals’ captivity, they began selling them to the highest bidders.

Who were the buyers interested in such cruelly captured creatures? Marine parks that prize the intelligent animals for their ability to perform acrobatic tricks, and hotels and amusement centers that charge guests a hefty fee to “swim with the dolphins.” Like the dolphins captured in Bluefields, Nicaragua in NATURE’s The Dolphin Defender, these animals were destined for hotels. Although the Bluefields dolphins were eventually rescued and released, several dozen of the Solomon dolphins were not as lucky and were flown to tourist hotels in Mexico. The imports drew fierce protests from conservationists and condemnation from Mexican newspaper editors, who said the trade violated international conservation laws. Eventually, the government responded that it would more carefully scrutinize future dolphin imports.

Even today, despite government efforts, “the demand for live dolphins is just exploding,” says Hardy Jones, the filmmaker and dolphin advocate behind The Dolphin Defender. “The trade is being encouraged by people willing to pay $150 each to jump in the water and swim with a captive dolphin for an hour.” For decades, Jones has been working to expose and stop the trade in dolphins which he says contributes to the decline of some species. In Japan, for instance, where dolphin meat is considered a delicacy, the trade is helping bring back another troubling practice: the annual dolphin hunt, which Japanese fishermen largely abandoned in the 1970s after international protests.

Traditionally, the hunts took place in several seaside villages. Fishermen would corral the dolphins into nets or weirs, then kill and butcher them. The meat brings a good price on the Japanese market, and was at one time an important source of income for some families. (Jones says dolphin meat today is contaminated with mercury and other pollutants, and not very safe to eat.)

In 1980, Jones filmed one of the hunts and gave the bloody, dramatic footage to television networks. Many viewers were shocked, and the ensuing protests persuaded many fishermen to abandon the practice. One village eventually established a dolphin-watching industry to help replace lost income.

Scientists rehabilitate a Bluefields dolphin before releasing it back into the wild.

But Jones says the growing dolphin trade, which some analysts estimate involves up to 1,000 animals a year, is encouraging Japanese villagers to bring back the hunt. That’s because they now have two kinds of customers: those interested in buying the meat, and those willing to pay $20,000 or more for a single live dolphin.

“Japan is becoming a major source of dolphins along with China and some other nations,” Jones says. Demand is also coming from Asia, where an economic boom is promoting the growth of tourism. In the United States, dolphin captures are strictly regulated; there have been no legal captures since 1993. Some marine parks have learned to breed dolphins while others display injured animals that are being rehabilitated or import animals from European parks.

In the Solomon Islands, the controversy over the 2003 captures has died down. But some conservationists say an unstable political situation has allowed the trade to continue on a smaller scale.

The protests have had an impact elsewhere. Last year, a dolphin hunter obtained a permit from the government of the Caribbean islands of Antigua and Barbuda to capture a dozen dolphins. After the public found out about the permits, however, protesters convinced officials to change their minds.

by Irene Tejaratchi

Dolphins use sound to detect the size, shape, and speed of objects hundreds of yards away. Fascinating and complex, the dolphin’s natural sonar, called echolocation, is so precise it can determine the difference between a golf ball and a ping-pong ball based solely on density. Although humans have researched these intelligent marine mammals for decades, much of their acoustical world remains a mystery.

One of the keys to dolphin echolocation is water’s superb conduction of sound. Sound waves travel 4.5 times faster in water than they do in the air. Dolphins use this to their advantage, in ways that would make a superhero envious. Using nasal sacs in their heads, dolphins send out rapid clicks that pass through their bulbous forehead, or “melon.” The sound is focused, then beamed out in front of the dolphin. The sound wave speeds through the water, bounces off the object under investigation, and is reflected back to the dolphin. Fat-filled cavities in the dolphin’s lower jaw receive this information and auditory nerves conduct it to the middle ear and brain, where an acoustic picture is created.

Scientists say that dolphins may also use clicking to communicate with one another. Although dolphins do not possess vocal cords, they still “speak” using sounds such as whistles, squeaks, and trills. A mother dolphin may whistle to her newborn for days, apparently to imprint a signature whistle upon her baby that will enable it to recognize her. It is believed that dolphins use whistles to identify one another and possibly for other functions, such as communicating strategic alerts while hunting in a group, but scientists have yet to crack the code. Many doubt, however, that dolphins have a formal language akin to that of humans.

In the 1950s, researcher John C. Lilly helped pioneer the systematic study of dolphin vocalization. A strong advocate of interspecies communication, Lilly wrote several books about dolphins, inspired the film Day of the Dolphin (1973), and was a supporter of the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972. Another pioneer of dolphin research, Kenneth S. Norris, first obtained evidence of dolphin echolocation by blindfolding a bottlenose to test its ability to locate an object underwater.

Since the 1960s, American military scientists have studied dolphins, and have trained them to perform such tasks as attaching explosives and eavesdropping devices to enemy ships or submarines. In the mid-1980s, the U.S. Navy began training dolphins to search for mines using their echolocation. In 2003, dolphins were deployed for the first time in a real war situation to probe the seafloor for mines near the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr. For decades, animal activists have opposed the use of dolphins for entertainment or military activities, citing questionable training methods and the stress-related illnesses, such as ulcers, that the animals can manifest in such situations.

Dolphin advocates also object to the navy’s use of manmade sonar, which is used to scan and investigate the ocean depths, claiming that it is harming dolphins and other marine mammals. They point to incidents such as the beaching of four different whale species off the coast of the Bahamas in March 2000, following navy sonar exercises in the area. Marine mammals strand themselves for a variety of reasons, but investigations confirmed that navy sonar caused the Bahamas stranding. Researchers are not exactly sure how manmade sonar affects marine mammals. Some believe the intense sounds may scare or disorient them and cause them to rapidly flee to the water’s surface, resulting in a sort of decompression sickness that damages sensory organs and causes internal bleeding.

If technological sonar can be implicated in the death of dolphins, it would be a tragic irony, considering that the sonar is based in part upon nature and dolphins’ superior echolocation capability. Efforts to replicate dolphin echolocation continue to fall short, as humans have yet to achieve the complexity and precision that 50 million years of evolution has bestowed upon dolphins. Perhaps if scientists could understand dolphin-speak they’d have more luck, but for now the true nature of dolphin communication remains mysterious.

Wild dolphins face numerous threats, from hungry sharks to the entangling nets of fishing boats. But scientists have only recently begun to fully recognize another threat: chemical pollution.

Around the globe, researchers have found potentially unhealthy quantities of industrial chemicals in dolphins’ tissue and in mother dolphins’ milk. As NATURE’s The Dolphin Defender shows, one group of contaminants is of special concern: polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs.

More than 200 kinds of PCBs have been used as flame retardants and electrical insulators in products ranging from cereal boxes to plastics. Although they were banned in the United States and many other nations in the late 1970s, PCBs continue to leak into the oceans from river sediments and other sources. The chemicals enter into the food chain and ultimately into fish, which dolphins eat. Researchers with the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Charleston, South Carolina, say that dolphin blubber carries some of the highest PCB concentrations found in any wild animal.

Although it is difficult to link PCBs to specific health problems, dolphin researchers have found some troubling trends. One is that female dolphins with high levels of PCBs appear to have lower pregnancy rates than less-contaminated females. That may be because PCBs interfere with the reproductive process.

Another finding of concern is that heavily contaminated female dolphins that do get pregnant often lose their first calves. That may be because the mother dolphin “burns” blubber to make milk. The PCBs and other compounds stored in the blubber become part of the milk and are transferred to the calf. The chemicals may harm the baby dolphin’s immune system, making it less able to fight off infections from viruses and bacteria.

Scientists have also found that PCB-contaminated male dolphins don’t develop sexually. Even more alarming, research shows PCB similarly affects other members of the dolphin family, such as orcas. As The Dolphin Defender shows, the orca population in Puget Sound, off Seattle, Washington has dwindled in the past 20 years. The high mortality rate and undeveloped reproduction systems were attributed to the high PCB levels in the orcas’ tissues.

Researchers are still trying to verify such links. They are now conducting several long-term studies of dolphin populations around the world. PCBs aren’t the only target; pesticides and other industrial chemicals that wash into the ocean are also being measured and analyzed. Eventually, conservationists hope the studies will lead to a better understanding of this invisible threat to dolphin survival, which will then lead to possible solutions.

WEB SITES

Blue Voice
http://www.bluevoice.org
Learn more about Hardy Jones’s work to protect dolphins.

Center for Whale Research
http://www.whaleresearch.com/index.html
View orcas in their natural habitat in the Orcacam. Learn more about the Southern Residents, the orca population in Puget Sound.

Former Japanese Fisherman’s Ecotour Could Change a Deadly Way of Life
http://www.hsus.org/marine_mammals/marine_mammals_news/former_japanese_fishermans
_ecotour_could_change_a_deadly_way_of_life.html
Izumi Ishii, a former dolphin hunter in Futo, Japan, now leads dolphin-watching tours.

Dolphin Hunt to Dolphin Watch
http://www.outdoorjapan.com/features/ojfeature-bluevoice-futo.html
Find out how you can join Izumi Ishii’s dolphin-watching tour in Futo, Japan.

American Cetacean Society
http://www.acsonline.org/index.html
Explore facts, figures, and more on whales and dolphins.

Marine Attractions: Below the Surface
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/custom/interactivefeature/sfl-marine-capture,0,4194929.flash?coll=sfla-home-dots-utility
An interactive by the ORLANDO SUN-SENTINEL explains how dolphins are captured for marine attractions.

Dolphins and the Law: A Worldwide Timeline
http://www.wspa-usa.org/pages/319_dolphins_and_the_law_a_worldwide_timeline_.cfm
Read a legal review from the World Society for the Protection of Animals.

Dolphin Mystery: What’s Killing Firstborn Calves?
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/01/0112_040108_tvbottlenosedolphin.html
Read this article and investigate up-to-date research from National Geographic News.

NATURE: Dolphin: Close Encounters
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/dolphins/
Discover the remarkable complexity of dolphin communication. Find out about the controversy surrounding captive dolphins.

BOOKS

Mann, Janet. CETACEAN SOCIETIES: FIELD STUDIES OF DOLPHINS AND WHALES. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Pryor, Karen. DOLPHIN SOCIETIES: DISCOVERIES AND PUZZLES. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Reynolds, John. THE BOTTLENOSE DOLPHIN: BIOLOGY AND CONSERVATION. Jacksonville: University Press of Florida, 2000.

Smolker, Rachel. TO TOUCH A WILD DOLPHIN: A JOURNEY OF DISCOVERY WITH THE SEA’S MOST INTELLIGENT CREATURES. New York: Anchor, 2002.

Taylor, Scott. SOULS IN THE SEA: DOLPHINS, WHALES, AND HUMAN DESTINY. San Francisco: Frog, 2003.