The incident occurred off New Zealand's Mahia Beach, 500km north-east of Wellington. Before the dolphin arrived, rescuers had tried for over an hour to persuade the whales, a pygmy sperm whale and her calf, to swim away. They had been unable to navigate out to sea and had stranded four times on a sandbar.
The dolphin, a bottlenose, announced its arrival by surfacing between the rescuers and the whales, which were stranded in slightly deeper water than the wading people. The whales had arched their backs and were making anxious calls to each other, but once the dolphin arrived some sort of communication occurred between the three animals.
The dolphin was able to persuade the whales to relax and, clearly encouraged, they were then able to wriggle free and follow the dolphin off into a safe, deepwater channel.
'I don't speak whale and I don't speak dolphin,' Malcolm Smith, the rescue team's conservation officer, told the BBC, 'but there was obviously something that went on because the two whales changed their attitude from being distressed to following the dolphin quite willingly and directly along the beach and straight out to sea.
'The dolphin did what we failed to do. It was all over in a matter of minutes.'
Later the dolphin, a regular in the area known to be a female and called Moko by local residents, returned to the beach to interact with swimmers. Smith admitted to breaking the usual rule among marine scientists of not directly handling a wild creature unless necessary as part of a rescue.
'I actually went into the water with the dolphin and gave it a pat afterwards, because she really did save the day,' he said. |
