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Wildlife & Railway Art - Frédérique Lucas

@namu-the-orca / namu-the-orca.tumblr.com

Art and other miscellaneous ramblings. I wish the railway to wildlife balance was even, but I have to admit it's mostly wildlife for now. If you want trains and nothing but trains, see my sideblog.
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Here's an interesting article from Nature. The title is a bit generic and makes it seem like there's nationwide dolphin attacks happening, but in reality it's about a single male Indo-pacific bottlenose dolphin that has been frequenting a bay for some years, seeking out human contact, and now there's increasing conflict.

Solitary sociable cetaceans are not a new phenomenon, they have been known for decades, and from all around the world. There's regular reports going back to the 1800's, and Pliny the younger even wrote of a solitary dolphin in 109 AD.

Wherever they go, these solitary dolphins (often bottlenoses) attract attention. In some rare cases a good, mutually beneficial relationship develops, as with Fungie the Dingle bay resident (who sadly passed away in 2020, aged over 40).

However, often things get out of hand, not in the least due to media attention and all manner of people seeking "that special bond" and "magical experience" of meeting a dolphin in the wild. They are so friendly and angelic and surely this one must love to interact with me because why else are they here?

But dolphins are wild animals, and they can and do regularly harm humans. Even when they seek out these interactions themselves, when both parties don't know how to conduct themselves around one another, injuries happen. Often, in the end, it's the dolphin that pays the price. Frequently their life is cut short by propeller blades, or they are otherwise injured by human activity. In rare cases there's a happy end, where either equilibrium is found, or the dolphin rejoins their conspecifics. I think it is an interesting observation (and perhaps 'antidote') in this time of "meeting dolphins in captivity = bad and they must hate people, meeting dolphins in the wild = amazing interaction with a free spirit that can't possibly go wrong".

And if you want to read of a very interesting individual case: here is an initial report of attempts to "educate" JoJo the solitary bottlenose dolphin from the Turks and Caicos Islands, on proper human interaction etiquette. The intervention was successful as JoJo continues to live there to this day, and has been assigned a personal human guardian who is trained to provide him with the social interaction he needs. This way his aggressive and sexual interactions with other people has been mitigated.

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