Breaking news out of Florida: Lee County deputies reportedly arrested a man recently on the beach near the Sanibel Causeway. The unnamed suspect was found dripping wet and drawing detailed diagrams in the sand. He told officials he'd been kidnapped by dolphins, pulled under the surface, and forced to build an underwater city. The man said the Head Dolphin, "Gerald," communicated with him through clicks, and found some way to help him breathe for several days. You can get more details in this TikTok video that's been viewed over five million times in the last few days:
I talked with Justin Gregg of the Dolphin Communication Project to get to the truth about our aquatic pals (or nemeses?). Gregg is an animal cognition expert, a dolphin scientist, and the author of Are Dolphins Really Smart?. If anyone knows the truth about dolphins' soggy cities, it's Justin Gregg.
Justin Gregg: No. It's insane. Absolutely not.
JG: No, that's also insane. First of all, they don't build anything. They don't have thumbs.
JG: Look at it this way: Why do humans build shelters? Because it's raining or whatever. Are dolphins protecting themselves from the rain? No. It's already wet.
JG: Dolphins are not stationary animals. They have places to go and things to do. There would be no purpose to them having a city...everything about them is evolved to help them be free swimming animals that live in groups that swim around. It's like asking, why don't dogs fly?
JG: I don't even know what "kidnap" would mean to a dolphin. Where would they be taking them and why? It's weird.
JG: Nobody knows Gerald, because Gerald does not exist.
JG: Yes, and if you ask any dolphin scientist, you will get the exact same answer. There's no professor somewhere who's going to say, "I've seen the city."
Tião, Brazil's murderous dolphin
Dolphins may not kidnap people, but they do occasionally get aggressive, and in 1994, a dolphin killed a guy in Brazil. Tião was what's known as a "lone dolphin," a dolphin who likes hanging around with humans instead of his fellow aqua-bois. Tião became a tourist attraction on the beach at Caraguatatuba, where people would swim with him, shove popsicle sticks in his blowhole, and try to pour beer in his mouth (yay, people!). In December 1994, two swimmers, Wilson Reis Pedroso and João Paulo Moreira, apparently took it too far. The pair were reportedly harassing Tião, and the dolphin broke Pedroso's ribs and head-butted Moreira so hard the man died.
If you've ever wondered why your mushroom dealer has a dolphin tattoo on her ankle, you can thank one man: John C. Lilly. Lilly is the inventor of the sensory isolation tank, and the father of dolphin-based conspiracy theories. "He was a medical doctor who found out that dolphins had large brains," Gregg said. "That was a big deal when it was discovered in the 60s. They started doing experiments and saying they're pretty good at learning stuff, like dogs."
Sex and drugs at the dolphin trap-house
Lilly took NASA's money and built "The Dolphinarium," a house on the island of St. Thomas with a partially flooded floor, so Lilly's wife, Margaret Howe Lovatt, could live, eat, and sleep in the same space as a dolphin named Peter. The idea was to isolate the dolphin so it could only socialize with a person, then it would have to learn to talk. It didn't, but Lovatt "fell in love" with the dolphin despite the language barrier. She eventually "seduced" (abused) the dolphin too, but only so it would focus on its English lessons, she claimed. Then John Lilly dosed it with LSD, because maybe that would do something? (According to Gregg, LSD doesn't seem to work on dolphins, but you still shouldn't give it to them. "You would run afoul the Marine Mammal Protection Act and be thrown in jail, so don't do that.")
Rather than questioning his premise, Lilly concluded that the barrier to inter-species communication wasn't a lack of intellect, but a difference in dimensions. So he took a ton of ketamine in sensory deprivation tanks and talked to cosmic dolphins all day long.
The story of John C. Lilly is both hilarious and disturbing to me, but it's a lot less enjoyable to dolphin researchers. "Lilly actually set back the study of dolphins by about 20 years, because everyone was afraid to say, 'I study dolphins.'" Gregg said. "We're all back on track now. Now you can study dolphins legitimately," he added.
Military dolphins
Other dolphin-related myths
Here's a rapid-fire debunking of some other dolphin-related myths, many of which are covered in Gregg's book Are Dolphins Really Smart?
Dolphins are peaceful: They can get aggressive with people. They sometimes attack porpoises for no reason we can discern.
Dolphin echolocation can cure cancer: This has actually been studied and there's nothing to it.
Dolphins are on the brink of extinction: To end on a positive note: While there are some species of dolphins that are in danger, particularly river dolphins, the iconic bottlenose dolphins are doing well, all things considered. Their status is "least concern," meaning the population is stable and they number in the hundreds of thousands or millions globally.
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