The MOON: Your organization, TerraMar Research, has recently launched a new initiative nicknamed POD, for Protect Our Dolphins, referring to bottlenose dolphins off the Santa Barbara coast. Your website advises:
These dolphins are now facing a myriad of unprecedented environmental challenges, many of which we share with them in our coastal community. With their very small population (perhaps as few as 350 individuals along the entire California coast), dwindling pod size (a sign of stress and challenges to survival), lesions on their skin related to contaminants, severely high contaminant levels in their bodies, and exceptionally high risk from additional coastal environmental threats, these animals both deserve and need our support.
What has changed in recent years to so significantly stress the dolphin population now? What are the major threats dolphins—and other cetaceans—face worldwide?
Frohoff: Scientists concur that bottlenose dolphins in many parts of the world are exhibiting signs of environmental stress and distress ranging from skin lesions to death. The most significant threats vary by location. Beluga whales in the St. Lawrence waterway, for example, are perhaps most threatened by toxins in the water. In Taiji, Japan, the most serious threat is the annual dolphin slaughter—where dolphins are killed for fertilizer, if you can believe the barbarity of that. Worldwide, dolphins are threatened by fishing—and there are some researchers, National Geographic’s Dr. Sylvia Earl, for example, who recommend that we stop eating fish altogether because fishing methods have become so harmful to by-catch species, let alone to the targeted species. “Dolphin-safe tuna” is a nice idea, but visit the Earth Island Institute website to see how diligently they are working to ensure that there is truth to that label. Earth Island warns that the U.S. Department of Commerce’s dolphin-safe label is, in reality, “a death certificate for dolphins.” They urge consumers not to buy tuna with this label.
Worldwide, other threats to dolphins—and to most forms of marine life—include global climate change, plastic wastes, coral reef destruction, oil spills, and other toxic discharges like the radioactive wastewaters.
Because we share our coastal communities with dolphins, any harm to our coastal environment harms local dolphins. In communities like the central California coast, anything we put on our lawns or gardens, or pour down our drains, or discharge from our wastewater treatment facilities, directly affects ocean health. Although we have a cluster of laws that aim to protect our environment, they are not adequately enforced. We know this from effects on human health, as well. When surfers experience recurring eye, ear, or throat infections after only an hour or two in the water, imagine the effect on dolphins who live in the water continuously and who have very sensitive skin. When did that become acceptable—that exposure to the ocean could be hazardous to your health?
As it says on the POD website, by “protecting dolphins, we help ourselves and our shared coastal-habitat community for the benefit of generations of dolphin and human children to come.” This is further evidence of the precarious state of the global environment—where the fate of all species depends on the actions of one species—homo sapiens. Although the bad news is far-reaching, the good news is that the improvements we make have far-reaching consequences, as well. It underscores the need for awareness of the interconnectedness of all beings.
COMMUNITY REFLECTIONS
SHARE YOUR REFLECTION
4 PAST RESPONSES
by calling your project as The Dolphin Personhood Project it seems you are ascribi g human characteristics to another species and by doing so are acknowledging humans' dominion. Is this the very behaviour you say your work is trying to counterract?
I feel a resurgent inspiration by this article to support marine biology, and the ocean, in general. With human population on the planet growing exponentially, which in turn casts off all its by-products into the oceans' environs, we are quickly usurping that very limited blue frontier. Efforts to learn from our aquatic cousins in the wild need to be more widespread, as time is drawing nigh. One day the great plastic blob we have created will slow the ocean current; the aquatic creatures will float on the surface; and rescuers will no longer be able to scrub their toxic-filled bodies back to life. Many of us will be living on, and destroying, another planet by then. And all the money that was made by countries and corporations oblivious to our responsibility to take care of the oceans and the Earth, will long be useless.
Orcas and dolphins have indeed exhibited protective behaviors of their pod members when aggressive, rogue dolphins showed up and in fact escorted them out of the area, firmly. After working with Lilly's project myself I learned that we humans are not one of many higher minds, we are in fact one of the lesser minds. All animals have a great deal of intelligence and "higher mind". We simply don't have ways to measure that other than against our way of thinking in our own environment. We are the only animals that are continually aggressive toward all species, especially our own, will destroy ourselves in order to bring down another, attack and kill for the pleasure of it and soil our own "beds" (i.e.: the Earth) continually-virtually destroying our selves with so much self hatred that we aim to take everyone on this planet with us. We do indeed have a great deal to learn from whales, dolphins and in fact all species around the planet.
I loved ALL of this article. All animals are the human's evolutionary KIN. We must learn to show true hospitality to the other cousins of our species. I wish all killing and capturing or breeding of every cetaceans species would be at least put on a temporary hold until we learn how to communicate with them and can ask them about their stories and their community-based ethics. Then it is my belief, hunting, killing, and capturing aand breeding all animals shoul come to an end. Who do we think we are?