"Everybody seems to love dolphins." "They have these fixed smiles." "They play." "They swim as though they own the ocean." "We think of them as intelligent, friendly, cooperative, and caring." "Sometimes, we seem to see them as perfected versions of ourselves." "But there's new scientific research that could change our minds about all that." "Wouldn't it be nice to be a dolphin, to live in a world so peaceful and carefree?" "But then, maybe it only looks peaceful and carefree." "For all our fascination about these animals, we know very little about them." "Because until recently, studying wild dolphins was about as easy as studying an animal that lives on Mars." "Take their swimming, for example." "It's spectacular, beautiful, acrobatic." "But it's also impossible." "At least, that's what physics seems to say." "An animal the size and shape of a dolphin lust can't go that fast and maneuver like that." "Some theories about how dolphins do it have verged on the mystical." "Maybe their body heat changes the viscosity of the water." "Or maybe their shape channels the water in some special but unknown way." "Some species can swim for hours on end at speeds of up to 25 miles an hour, with bursts reaching 35." "The best human swimmers, Olympic champions, can only manage about eight miles an hour, and only briefly, at that." "And yet, this is about as fast in the water as any land mammal gets." "All right!" "All right." "Give them big time." "Terrie Williams, an animal physiologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is trying to find out what makes dolphins so athletic." "She and her team are testing the power and stamina of two captive-born bottlenose dolphins." "This one is Primo." "He'll swim against a load cell, a force-sensitive disk fixed to the wall of the pool." "It measures the pressure he exerts." "I want you to give me a reading of the load every two seconds, all right?" "Good." "The hood over Primo's blowhole will gauge his oxygen input and carbon dioxide output." "Primo's trainer, Billy, keeps him swimming at a steady rate, while he listens to a readout of Primo's pushing power." "The reason we're doing the load cell experiments is iust to find out what kind of an athlete bottlenose dolphins are." "We know that dolphins can swim maybe five times faster than our best human Olympic swimmer, and we don't know how they do it." "So what we're trying to find out is basically all the bits and pieces that make up a great swimming athlete." "All right, write down oxygen 02 level 20.23." "Good!" "There's my buddy!" "Good iob, Primo." "Good!" "What they're measuring is the dolphin's so-called '"cost of transport.'"" "That's how much energy it takes to move an animal of a given weight a given distance." "Good boy!" "All right, that's it." "Looks good!" "The team has discovered that of all the costs of transport ever measured, the lowest is a dolphins." "In other words, as far as anyone knows, it's the world's most effortless swimmer." "And then, on top of that, we measure lust the basic physiology that you would measure for any Olympic athlete." "We look at heart rate, respiration rate, oxygen consumption, all those things that tell us, is this a fantastic athlete or is this an animal that lust knows how to cheat when it swims through the water?" "Terrie measures people's efforts, too." "These are the University's speed swimmers." "They're being used as a yardstick, to see lust how efficient dolphins are." "They're not a patch on a dolphin, of course." "But when dolphins are compared to other sea animals, sharks, say, they're not that much more efficient, which means that the difference must lie in some special dolphin tricks and shortcuts." "What those tricks and shortcuts are, no one knows." "71, you guys are identical." "And even though there's been plenty of scientific research on dolphins and a lot has been learned, there's still disagreement over such basics as the names of the species and how many there are." "There's no argument on the family level, though." "Both whales and dolphins are Cetaceans, which can be split into two groups." "One, the Mysticetes, includes the great plankton-eating whales." "The others are the mainly fish-eating Odontocetes, or toothed whales." "This group includes all 40 species of dolphins, from the acrobatic dusky dolphin" "to the spectacular spinner, to the beautiful spotted dolphin," "to the popular bottlenose," "and the powerful orca, or killer whale, not a whale at all, but by far the largest member of the dolphin family." "In fact, there are several dolphins with '"whale'" as part of their name." "They are also sometimes called blackfish, which is even more misleading, since not are all black and, of course, none are fish." "Dolphins come in all shapes, sizes, and colors." "They range from the tiny four-foot Hector's dolphin to the beautifully-colored striped dolphin to the massive orca, which can grow to more than 30 feet and weigh up to seven tons." "It's fin alone can be taller than a man." "Slightly different in shape are the six species of porpoise." "They have shorter, chunkier bodies, high foreheads, and less well-defined beaks." "And the tips of a porpoise's teeth are completely different from a dolphin's." "While a dolphin's teeth are sharp and conical for grabbing fish, a porpoise's are flat and spade-like, but also for grabbing fish." "No one knows for sure why the teeth are so different, for, strangely, apart from this, the animals are very similar." "Dolphins live in all the oceans, from the freezing waters around the Poles to the warmth of the Tropics." "But oceans aren't the only place they're found." "Some of the world's greatest rivers, China's Yangtze, Pakistan's Indus, and India's Ganges and Brahmaputra have freshwater dolphins." "So do South America's massive Orinoco and Amazon Rivers." "The Amazon and its tributaries, the world's largest river system, stretch nearly 4,000 miles and flow through nine countries." "And found throughout most of the system are the largest of the freshwater dolphins, the seven- to ten-foot boto or Amazon River dolphin." "This is a mother with a large calf that hasn't yet quite mastered catching fish." "It's a skill that the youngster spends most of its first year learning." "The forests in this region flood every year and botos swim up among the trees." "As an aid to maneuvering, they have a very flexible neck and flippers." "Evolution molds animals' bodies to fit like cogs into their environment, and dolphins are descended from creatures that have been through fundamental re-moldings twice." "Once, all life was in the oceans." "Then, plants, insects, and finally vertebrates came to live on land and breathe air." "So the dolphin's ancestors evolved over hundreds of millions of years into mammals, into what are now called Mesonychids." "They looked like wolves, but were more closely related to cows and deer." "About 50 million years ago, they foraged in swamps and estuaries." "And as they foraged deeper into the water, their bodies changed." "They became aquatic again." "They became an animal called Archaeocetes." "They were still mammals, though, so they couldn't breathe underwater." "But they could evolve to make breathing easier." "Archaeocetes' nostrils fused into one, moved to the top of its head, and became a blowhole." "The body became more streamlined." "There was a dorsal fin, to aid balance." "But unlike a fish's fin, without a bone structure." "The front legs became fins for steering, though they still have a land mammal's finger-like bones." "But there was no need for the back legs to turn into anything at all, and so they disappeared, although some dolphins still have some loose leg bones unconnected to the rest of its skeleton." "And the rest of its skeleton has made its changes, too." "The vertebra are very loosely connected and padded with fibrous discs, which makes the whole backbone almost as sinuous as a whip." "The neck vertebra, though, are fused together, and they're the whip's handle." "Huge muscles have developed, running the full length of the skeleton." "These muscles in a land mammal would be used mainly to hold its body up." "But in the weightless, underwater world, dolphins can use them all for swimming." "Hair has been lost and a thick layer of blubber has been gained." "Since water drains heat off a body faster than air, the extra insulation was important." "The skin is ultra-smooth and is part of the general streamlining." "And for swimming, a large, strong, tail, horizontally flattened instead of vertically, as a fish's tail is." "But stamina and power aren't all that dolphins have developed." "Their senses have adapted to water, too, in ways that no fish ever managed." "First, they simply had to be able to see accurately." "We land mammals are used to seeing in air, but have problems focusing underwater." "The only way we can do it is to wear goggles, which maintain above-water conditions by trapping air around our eyes." "Dolphins have developed their own goggle effect, elastic lenses that expand and contract to let them focus both above water and below it." "They also have special glands that protect their eyes from saltwater, which is an adaptation that river dolphins, of course, didn't have to make." "India, the Ganges." "It isn't salty, but it's lust about everything else." "It's certainly muddy, with only a few inches of visibility." "And the dolphins here don't have any lenses on their eyes at all and can probably lust see light and dark." "So how does the Ganges dolphin find its way around?" "How does it find the fish that it eats?" "It relies almost exclusively on a sense that all" "Cetaceans are masters of, echolocation." "Sonar." "Its entire head is built around an array of sending and receiving equipment." "The dolphin makes clicks near its blowhole." "And then, in a fat-filled cavity in its forehead called a melon, the sound is guided into a narrow beam." "The sound is sent out as a series of short pulses." "The echoes that are reflected back are heard through the dolphin's lower law, which is connected to the ears." "It's as good as vision." "In some ways, better." "Dolphins can see things that can't be seen." "Dave Goodson is from the Underwater Acoustics Group at Loughborough" "University in England." "We're looking at the dolphin's sonar and, lust to put it into perspective, the bottlenose dolphin can see something the size of an orange about" "80 meters ahead of him." "And that is approximately equivalent to the echo it would get from quite a large fish, but one that it could still swallow whole." "So we've got a good feel, I think, for what they do in the wild when they're looking for fish mid-water." "But then we discovered the interesting things, like the dolphin who is looking into the seabed surface at close range, and clearly has detected the presence of a fish that's buried in the sand." "Now, the echoes at the frequencies they produce should bounce from the sand." "But they're able to get some information from below the sand//particles, and they will sometimes even dive into the sand to recover them." "If dolphin sonar seems sophisticated, it's because the animals have had 20 million years to adapt and perfect it." "They don't need to use active sonar to find their way around." "They have a perfectly good passive sonar." "They can listen, they hear waves breaking on the seashore." "They know which side of their travel direction that is." "They will hear the noise of shipping in a harbor." "They'll hear the clinking chains of a mooring, for example." "So they've got lots of acoustic cues that they could listen to, and that doesn't expend any energy." "So they will travel quite happily in total darkness, and swim quite fast, without echolocating to avoid bumping into things." "When they use the active sonar, it's because they need to, and that's when they're trying to localize the food." "They have to identify a swimming prey, lock onto it, guide their mouth to the actual fish." "And in a sense, they're using the transmit and received echoes as a means of touching the food." "It's equivalent to us reaching out across the dinner table to pick up a piece of food." "But it takes quite a lot of energy, and so the only time you really hear a bottlenose dolphin, for example, in the wild, turning the sonar on is when he's basically feeling hungry." "But it's the sensitivity and accuracy of dolphin sonar that fascinates scientists." "And it's the receiving equipment that seems most sophisticated." "As a sonar engineer rather than a biologist," "Dave has investigated the dolphin as a sonar system, and it's the lower law, the teeth in particular, that's been given the most scrutiny." "The interesting thing about this is that the spacing between these teeth is actually the same all the way along the law." "Now, that seems a little strange, but it also makes sense, because this is about one wavelength apart in seawater at the highest frequency these animals operate." "So the question comes to mind is, are the teeth playing some part in echo reception?" "Dave believes that the teeth are acting in an array, like a TV antenna." "But to be able to sense direction, one array has to be offset against the other." "And that's exactly what the dolphins have done." "One side of a set of teeth is pitched precisely half a tooth space further forward than the other." "This means the echoes from a target arrive on one side sooner than on the other and the dolphin's brain can immediately compute an exact position." "Actually, echolocation is less like vision and more like touch." "Touch itself is also an important sense for dolphins." "They use it to both identify unfamiliar obiects and for social interactions." "They use their flippers, dorsal fin, beak, and tongue to investigate their surroundings." "Males sometimes even use their penis." "Sex, in fact, is often used for more than lust reproduction." "It's vital for establishing and reaffirming relationships within a group." "A lot of time is spent in sex play, and in a day, one dolphin might copulate with several partners." "Orcas are no different from other dolphins in this respect." "But for all this sex, actual conception is rare." "It happens only once every two or three years." "This means that male competition for females in heat can be intense." "They perform leaping mating ballets, chasing and caressing for several hours before mating." "Gestation periods vary among species, but tend to be about ten months." "The calf is born one to a pregnancy, and, unlike any other mammal, tail first." "It instinctively rises to the surface for its first breath." "Though dolphins have very little sense of smell, their sense of taste is excellent." "The mother squirts the rich milk directly into the calf's mouth." "The mother and calf will be together for two to three years." "By staying with its mother for so long, the calf learns the skills it needs to survive," "how to hunt and feed, and, lust as important, how to communicate with the rest of the pod." "The highly social dolphins need to understand each other and they've evolved complex languages." "There are claims that dolphins are as intelligent as humans, if not more so." "They do have large brains for their body size, use language, and are easily trained by humans." "But does this mean they really are intelligent?" "Dolphins and intelligence, that's a tough question." "I think it's tough because I don't know how to measure it for humans." "I don't know what makes intelligence for a child versus an adult, and we can talk to them." "I don't know what to do about dolphins." "We don't have the same language, so I don't know how to measure intelligence." "Are they friendly?" "Are they sociable?" "Are they trainable?" "They're all those things." "They're great fun to be with, they pay attention to you, and if that's all intelligence, then they're right up there with dogs and horses and primates." "Intelligence has enabled dolphins to operate in teams." "Of all the dolphin languages, the kind used by orcas is thought to be the most sophisticated." "Here in northern Norway, they're using it as they work a shoal of herring." "Whole families, sometimes three generations of them, tend to work together." "First, the orcas start to corral the herring by swimming around and under the shoal." "Communicating constantly and circling, leaping, and thrashing their tails, they keep tightening the herring knot." "They flash their white bellies, concentrating the ball further." "The fish are stunned and disoriented by powerful tail strokes." "And then they're scooped up." "An adult orca can eat more than 400 herring a day." "And the seabirds get the leftovers." "A different part of the world, different prey, different tactics." "In Patagonia, in South America, orcas come up to the beach to snatch sea lion pups." "But why they seem to play football with them isn't clear." "Are they being exuberant, or lust softening the sea lions up?" "Western Canada, the Johnstone Strait, near Vancouver Island." "All kinds of migrating fish are channeled through here, providing a living for families of orcas that have been established in the Strait for centuries." "They hunt by traveling in a line through the murky water, using their sonar to search for, in this case, this season's salmon." "Then, once they've found a shoal this way, they can corral them, turn off their sonar, and go after the big fish by sight." "Orcas and other dolphins don't have saliva to break food down before digestion in the stomach." "Instead, the stomach lust goes ahead and processes large chunks of food." "In fact, both whales and dolphins have two stomachs, the same as cows and other land herbivores, which is another clue to their evolution." "One stomach is for storing food, the other for digesting it." "This means that orcas can eat a lot while food's available and then transfer it, bit by bit, to their second stomach at their leisure." "All dolphins dive, and some go as deep as 1,000 feet or more." "When humans do long, deep dives, the increased pressure forces nitrogen from the air they're breathing to dissolve in their bloodstreams." "Then, if they come up too fast, the nitrogen un-dissolves, making bubbles in the blood." "It's like a fizzy drink bottle being shaken and then opened." "This condition, called the bends, is very painful and can cause permanent iniury, even death." "But dolphins don't have this problem." "You have to understand, diving, for dolphins, is an amazing thing, when you think of all the things that they have to do." "They have to exercise." "They have to keep warm." "They have to be able to hold their breath for a long period of time." "And they're doing all of that on one breath." "And so it's like asking a human athlete to run around a track, run a marathon, and do it on a single breath." "Terrie Williams had worked out the oxygen consumption for an active dolphin, but found her figures didn't add up." "When dolphins dive to 600 feet, which they often do, they should, by rights, run out of oxygen and drown before they can reach the surface." "To find out why they don't, scientists from Texas A and M University fitted a dolphin with a video camera." "What they discovered surprised them." "Up until these experiments, it had been assumed, reasonably, that dolphins dive by swimming." "But it turns out that they don't." "After a few powerful tail strokes, the animals shut down their engines and drop like stones." "As the water pressure increases, the flexible rib cage and lungs collapse, making the animal smaller and less buoyant." "At the bottom of a deep dive, the heart races and the dolphin makes a few strokes for the surface." "As it reaches 250 feet, the decreasing pressure lets the lungs open." "The dolphin becomes buoyant and it glides the last leg to the surface, where, in this instance, the scientists can retrieve their video footage." "Water can rob the body of heat about 25 times faster than air, and so the animals had to figure out, basically, how to keep warm." "The tough part, though, is that they always have that wet suit on." "So when they get into warm water, it's a tough, tough situation on how to get rid of the excess heat." "And the only places they can lose heat is across that dorsal fin, across the flukes, and then across the pectoral fins." "And those are pretty small surface areas, but they serve as a terrific radiator that the animal can bring blood up into and then cool that blood and have it go back into the core of the body and help cool the animal down." "Terrie and her team at Santa Cruz have run experiments both in the wild and at the pool to measure dolphins' body temperatures." "Okay, let's take that one." "Okay I'll move to dorsal fin." "0, 1, 2, 2, 4, 5" "What they've discovered, by using heat sensors and thermal imaging cameras, is that dolphins wait until they surface before rapidly pumping their hot blood to their tails and fins to be cooled." "Since pumping blood around their bodies uses energy, waiting until they surface conserves oxygen and extends the length of their dive." "So it's not ius a matter of the dolphin holding its breath." "To make the dive as long as possible, the whole body pitches in." "And when it comes to communication, the whole body also pitches in." "Jaw snapping sends messages." "And often, what looks like a friendly grin is, in fact, a threat." "Swimming upside down and twisting in a corkscrew movement reinforces the general mood." "When a dolphin is angry, it arches its body, opens its mouth, clamps its laws loudly, and performs tail flaps and loud squawks." "Research has shown that dolphins aren't always the peaceful, altruistic beings people think they are." "There's a dark side to the smiling dolphin." "A group of males will often gang up on a single male, biting and charging him." "Until recently, sharks were thought to be the dolphin's only enemy." "But dolphins can sometimes give as good as they get, ganging up to drive them away." "Dolphins often have scars and damaged or even missing fins and flippers, as testimony to past shark encounters." "In Scotland recently, there have been deaths of Cetaceans that have nothing to do with sharks." "Every year, about 15 harbor porpoises with horrible iniuries are found washing up on the shores of the Moray Firth." "Since none of them show any evidence of being eaten, sharks don't appear to be the culprits." "Many porpoise bodies are turned over to the Scottish Agriculture Center and investigated by veterinary pathologist Tony Patterson." "This particular porpoise was found in the Moray Firth." "And over the last few years, we've found that almost 60 percent of the porpoises from that area have been killed by bottlenose dolphins." "And I have an upper law." "This is from a bottlenose dolphin from the Moray Firth population." "And if I can show that this exactly fits these teeth spacings on the porpoise" "Absolute proof came when an amateur cameraman filmed bottlenose dolphins tossing porpoises around like rag dolls." "Until then, the only members of the dolphin family seen doing this kind of thing were orcas." "What we've discovered more recently is since 1992, we have had five young bottlenose dolphins in their first year of life with iniuries identical to those we see in the porpoises, including rake marks." "We don't know the behavioral reasons for the attacks on the young bottlenose dolphins by the adults." "We don't know, at the moment, whether it's males or females that are carrying out the attacks." "My personal feeling is that it's probably more likely to be males." "And if that's the case, a possible explanation is that it may be analogous to where a male lion comes into a pride." "It will kill the offspring to bring those females back into estrus, so it can mate with them." "And that's a plausible explanation, I feel, what might be happening in the bottlenose dolphins." "But the number of dolphins killed by sharks or other dolphins is nothing compared to the number killed by humans." "These are tuna in the Pacific, chasing smaller fish." "A tuna boat, with its enormous purse seine net." "And dolphins that were chasing the same fish the tuna were chasing are now caught in the same net." "Every year, thousands of dolphins die this way, lust as they die in other kinds of nets," "or are killed because they damage fishing gear or simply scare away fish." "These are lucky ones, though." "They have been caught in one of the many new nets with dolphin escape hatches, required by law in several countries." "And dolphins sometimes seem to kill themselves." "Like many other animals, a lot of dolphins and whales migrate." "Their guide is the Earth's magnetic field." "And it's thought they follow magnetic contours that cover the Earth." "But even thought dolphins are highly intelligent and social and have a built-in navigation sense, they still often swim up onto beaches and die there." "These strandings are one of the great unsolved mysteries of the animal world." "Up to 90 pilot whales have died on Tasmania's southeast coast hits weekend." "Despite this latest tragedy, the experts are still no closer to finding out lust what makes these highly intelligent animals end up like this." "Every year, thousands of dolphins, both alive and dead, are found stranded." "It's nothing new." "The phenomenon's been documented for thousands of years." "It's distressing, though, to people who come to help, especially when many of the animals seem to be perfectly healthy." "Only certain species tend to strand themselves, usually the most tightly-knit social ones, such as pilot whales and false killer whales." "One theory is that the social bonds between the members of a group can be so strong that if one individual strands the others follow." "Other theories suggest that the strandings may be deliberate mass suicides or anomalies with the magnetic contour lines." "Often, people can work to return dolphins to the sea, only to watch them turn around and head straight back to the beach." "One way of understanding why dolphins do this might be to understand more about their societies." "Scientists all over the world are studying dolphins and the relationships within the pods." "They use various techniques to identify different individuals and to work out the parts they play in their groups." "We're studying their social organization and population structure." "And the way we do that is to collect skin samples for DNA analysis." "DNA sampling techniques involve using a harmless nylon pad to scrape a tiny amount of loose skin from a dolphin's back." "This Earthwatch team is taking samples from a group of dusky dolphins in New Zealand." "It's a very healthy population, there's a lot of genetic diversity there." "So that's a good sign that the dolphins, these dolphins, are doing quite well." "As far as photo ID goes, we take pictures of their dorsal fins." "The skin on the dorsal fin, on the trailing edge, is quite thin, and so it tears and tatters readily." "It occurs naturally and leaves these natural marks that we can use for identifying individuals." "And we can track the over time with these photographs." "A dolphin's dorsal fin is as individual as a person's face." "And the process of logging them is as painstaking as keeping records of human fingerprints." "The photos have to be catalogued and converted into stacks of hand-drawn outlines." "But they enable the scientists to follow individuals and record migration routes and family pod sizes." "This, at least, is the traditional way." "Fortunately, the electronic age has now arrived, and quicker ways of logging fins are being developed." "Rather than wait for them to leap, dolphins can be videotaped underwater and the fins' outlines generated later by computer." "Intelligence helps make dolphins highly social animals." "But as in any society, there tend to be individuals that are different, loners that seem to want to be sociable with species other than their own." "Over the years, many of these solitary dolphins have turned toward humans and become known as '"friendly dolphins.'"" "New Zealand has had more than its fair share of friendlies, including a celebrity called Opo, who swam with bathers in 1955." "Opo attracted visitors by the thousands." "She let children ride on her back, but often smacked the shins of adults who came too close." "She was suspiciously killed lust one day before she was to have been given official protection by the local council." "Europe has had a good population of friendlies, too, especially off the coasts of Cornwall and Ireland." "Fungi, a lone male bottlenose dolphin, resides in a bay near Dingle, on the Irish west coast, where people flock from all over the world, year after year, to see and swim with him." "Friendlies aren't always solitary." "They also turn up in groups, as at Monkey Mia, on the west coast of Australia, where dolphins come close to the shore to be fed and stroked by humans." "But are these dolphins lust being friendly, or is it the regular supply of food that the people bring?" "For more than 100 years wild dolphins have been displayed for human enioyment." "Dolphinaria had a real surge of popularity after the TV soap opera" "Flipper sparked public fascination." "More and more people wanted to try to get closer to these friendly and intelligent animals." "Dolphins are good crowd-pullers, and every years, dolphinaria are visited by more than 20 million people in the US alone." "They act as ambassadors for their cousins in the wild by increasing awareness of the threats posed to them." "Dolphinaria have also provided the chance for long-term, close-up studies of dolphins." "Many visitors loin conservation groups and become lifelong friends of these charismatic, fun-loving animals." "It's difficult to put into words and impossible to prove, but there's an elation that many have after a close encounter with one of these enigmatic creatures." "Dolphins seem to possess an uncommon ability to provoke humans towards a deeper sense of connection with nature." "They seem to seek us out and want to interact with us." "It's this interest of them in us that's been used by therapists around the world to help with the rehabilitation of disabled people, mainly children." "That's it." "Give the dolphin the ball." "Because of the power of this unique interaction, dolphins have been used as a treatment for disorders that conventional medicine can't cure." "This has led to many people believing that dolphins have magical healing abilities." "There's no evidence of any sonic or special healing power from the dolphins." "Indeed, dogs and cats have been known to have similar effects." "But never mind." "Whatever the reason, swimming with dolphins does seem to work." "There's also a less institutional way of connecting with dolphins." "Every year, more than five million people all around the world go on organized whale- and dolphin-watching trips." "The lives of humans and the lives of dolphins are about as different as it's possible to be and still be on the same planet." "But getting even an inkling of a dolphin's life is an experience that stays with people forever." "People who have swum with dolphins say that it is one of the most emotional experiences they have ever had." "And people who are at a low point feel that the dolphin is choosing to be with them and to make them feel special." "But sometimes the very people who come to admire dolphins can also cause disturbance to them." "So tourism needs monitoring." "Catherine, I've got dolphins." "They're off Barney's point." "Okay." "I would guess they're about, oh, maybe about two o'clock, lust south of Barney's point." "Ready, fix." "We track the dolphins using a surveyor's theodolite, which measures horizontal and vertical angles." "And using this, we can determine the dolphins' locations, their movement patterns, and where they are in relation to one another, within the various pods that they organize themselves." "Noni, are you ready on the computer?" "Okay, ready, fix." "We can also track vessels in their area." "And over the last ten years, tourism industry has developed here in Kaikoura, extensive whale watching and dolphin watching, and also dolphin swimming." "It's a lot of people iumping in the water with the dolphins." "And we lust want to make sure that it's done in a way that's sustainable and that seems to work." "And it does seem to work here." "We think this is actually a very well-managed system and a model for other places, where people are looking to increase tourism with dolphins, in other parts of the world." "So they've got a good thing going here." "There's little doubt that dolphins score highly in the popularity polls, even though they have few of the features that normally make animals popular with us, soft fur and large eyes and ears." "Maybe people find dolphins so appealing because dolphins seem to be so interested in us." "There's a lot of interaction between people and dolphins." "And if you've ever been at a zoo and had a lion look at you, you get that feeling in the pit of your stomach that you're being sized up for the next meal." "But when you have a dolphin look at you, you feel like you're being sized up for how much fun you can be." "So maybe we lust need to be a little bit more like dolphins." "They're lust more fun." "Maybe we see dolphins as we'd like to see ourselves." "We know we're causing them harm." "So much harm, in fact, that the very existence of some species is under threat." "But if we can't live in harmony with such intelligent animals, animals that seem actively to like us," "what hope is there for other creatures on the planet?" "Like us, dolphins are intelligent, live in complex societies, and share their work." "They are wild animals, and do wild animal things, such as fight each other for dominance and kill to eat." "But then, so do we." "Whatever their faults, there's no doubt there's something very special about dolphins." "It's a feeling that anyone who's had a close encounter with these beautiful creatures won't be able to explain." "But the experience will stay with them for the rest of their lives."