If dolphins weren’t such a$$holes, they would gently cradle the octopus like a kitten, stroking its mantle and respecting the cephalopod’s amazing intellect. But who are we kidding! This is a dolphin we’re talking about, and marine mammal researchers have found that dolphins “shake and toss” cephalopods like a dog tearing apart his favorite chew toy:

Why is this dolphin such an a$$hole to the octopus? Probably because cephalopods are yummy but dangerous food – they’re smart and sucker-y, and dolphins run the risk of *suffocation* if the octopus isn’t fully torn apart and incapacitated before meal time. As Sprogis et al. (2017) found, death by octopus tentacle is surprisingly common:

It is apparent that octopus handling is a risky behavior, as within our study area a known adult male stranded and a necropsy confirmed the cause of death was from suffocation from a large 2.1 kg octopus.1 The dolphin had attempted to swallow the octopus, however, the octopus was found almost intact, with the head and the mantle of the octopus in the dolphin’s stomach and the 1.3 m long arms separated from the head and extending out of its mouth.1 Similarly, another T. aduncus [dolphin] died from suspected asphyxiation due to an octopus lodged in its mouth and pharynx approximately 140 km north of our study area (Shoalwater Bay Islands Marine Park).2 In these two cases, the dolphins may not have processed the octopus sufficiently by shaking and tossing it to ensure the arm’s reflex withdrawal responses were inactive. Octopus arms have a defensive response, as their receptors can detect stimuli that cause damage to their tissues (Hague et al. 2013). These receptors allow octopus arms to continue reacting even after the arms have been detached from the head, allowing the arms to coordinate a reflex withdrawal response (Hague et al. 2013). Dolphins must therefore process the octopus sufficiently to reduce the arms reflex withdrawal response and limit their suckers adhering to them, which otherwise would make them difficult to swallow.

So mad props to all the octopuses out there, for fighting the good fight against dolphins (and sometimes winning!)

Here’s the frame-by-frame photo in all its glory (Figure 1 from the below paper):

Reference:

Sprogis KR, Raudino HC, Hocking D, Bejder L (2017) Complex prey handling of octopus by bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops aduncus), Marine Mammal Science, doi: 10.1111/mms.12405

The post Reason 5,879 why dolphins are a$$holes: Octopus “handling” first appeared on Deep Sea News.

But seriously though…

The photos seems to have first surfaced on a Reddit group called /r/funny, where members routinely swap amusing photos, real and photoshopped.  This particular photo, which appears to have been photoshopped, was briefly lent credence by a hoax Wikipedia page (“Cranberry Bog Dolphins,” which was almost immediately taken down)

Yes there is no such thing as cranberry bog dolphins.

The post This Thanksgiving Remember the Cranberry Bog Dolphin first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Yes, according to a recent study by Lancaster and colleagues.  Many marine mammals are precocial in that the young are relatively mature and mobile from the moment of birth. Juvenile dolphins for example are independently swim, surface to breathe, and maintain contact with mother on their own.  But how developed is the hearing of a juvenile dolphin?  Are their tiny, little ears fully formed?  Alright so maybe they do not have ears per se just ear openings but you get the drift.

Inside a vertebrate skulls, including the dolphin, is an area referred to as the tympanic or auditory bullae.  These hollow, spherical, bony structures are on the bottom, back portion of the skull and enclose parts of the middle and inner ear.  Lancaster and colleagues found in two species of dolphins, the Common Bottlenose and the La Plata, the tympanic bulla is same size in adults and juveniles, despite the smaller skulls and bodies of the young.  Why would juveniles have adult-sized “ears”?

The size, shape, and material of a structure determine its resonance frequency, i.e. the detectable auditory frequencies.  If dolphins vocalize at a certain frequency then the size of the tympanic bulla needs to match this—even in juveniles.  If young had a smaller ears the parents may just sound like Charlie Brown parents. As the authors state, “The fact that the overall structure of
this [auditory] architecture has remained relatively constant throughout the last 45 million
years of cetacean evolution indicates that it was an early and essential adaptation for
underwater sound reception and hearing.”

The post Do baby dolphins hear their parents? first appeared on Deep Sea News.

as judged within our own moralistic anthropomorphism, the links between dolphins and drugs are the most widespread and least know.

1) Dolphins as Recreational Drug Abusers?
Two years back, a sensational yet possibly important finding was released via the internet of observations that Bottlenose Dolphins caught and tortured small pufferfish into releasing Tetrodotoxins. This intensely powerful poison protects these fish from predators, and can kill anything that eats them, including sushi

connoisseurs seeking the thrill of fugu, the elusive and expensively-prepared raw pufferfish. Theoretically, low non-fatal doses of the toxins were providing a high for the dolphins that they actively sought to score mind-bending bliss. What became apparent is that this ‘discovery’ was merely an observation loaded with assumption within no framework of actual scientific research, and more importantly, it became a marketing ploy for an upcoming television program on dolphins. Despite this behavioral interpretation being untested and unproven, the hilarity of stoned dolphins caused the blogosphere to erupt with sweeping generalizations of recreational drug use among dolphins, and fears that gangs of pufferfish-toking dolphins might terrorize your favorite Club Med, added to our list of grievances against them.

2) Dolphins as Victims of Drug Abuse?
2014’s BBC exposé about neuroscientist John C. Lilly and his systematic dosing of LSD and Ketamine to captive Bottlenose Dolphins made lot of people lose their scat in a big way. How could – and why would – someone send dolphins on an acid trip? It’s not like they are Peter Fonda or anything. While the 1960’s were the heyday for oceanographic expeditions and marine science, it was also the golden age of harebrained

hippie pseudoscience, and it just made perfect sense to slip drugs to dolphins to better understand their ‘consciousness’. Lilly’s intent was to develop a method of communication between man and dolphin, whether dolphins wanted to or not didn’t really figure into his scheme. Of course, it never worked. Despite a flurry of recent articles about Lily’s work, none of it was ever really secret, and I even heard about Lilly’s dolphin drug den from a professor when I was a teenager taking a marine mammalogy course at my local community college way back in 1984. What shut down his project wasn’t outrage from the public or other scientists, but a combination of lack of funding (well after NASA pulled out), the lack of any tangible peer-reviewed research, Lilly’s own accelerating drug use, mortality of his captive strung-out dolphins, and the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act that prevented Lilly’s kind of direct abuse to dolphins. Nothing came out of Lilly’s dolphin dosing experiments, but years later, video game creator Ed Annunziata was so entranced by Lilly’s increasingly fanciful and paranoid writings, particularly about the possibility that humans and dolphins might be able to communicate with aliens, that he developed Sega’s Ecco the Dolphin.

3) Dolphins and Drug-Fueled Raves?
I’ve seen dolphin shows at marine life parks, and while they are pretty damned ace at diving through flaming hoops, they are still lousy dancers, so what are they doing at raves? Sadly, from a great-idea-gone-horribly-wrong debacle involving a rave in the Swiss amusement park Connyland, we now know that raves and dolphins definitely do not mix.

Even the greenest novice of dolphin fun-facts knows they have an incredibly sensitive and complex ability to receive and process sound, so what idiot green-lighted six hours of high-decibel disco thump thump thumping next to a dolphin tank? This is the type of deafening sonic warfare we used to torture dictators (I’m looking at you Manuel Noriega!), so nobody should have been too surprised when two of the dolphins went belly-up the next day. One was dead, the second would die a few days later. The real surprise wasn’t that they died from the ear-blasting dance music, but that a the toxicology report from the necropsy found them to have high concentrations of Buprenorphin, a synthetic heroin popular at raves, likely slipped to them by a raver, possibly to better understand their ‘consciousness’, which deteriorated into unconsciousness and death by drowning. As with any murder mystery, fingers were pointed at other culprits who were later cleared of wrongdoing.

The only thing even more unfathomable than dolphins tripping their lights out during a Swiss rave is this question: what the hell are dolphins even doing in Switzerland in the first place? My initial thought was so they could be closer to all the offshore banking (sorry), but in reality, wherever some city leader or chamber of commerce officer hatches a plan to build a municipal aquarium as a tourist draw or potential cash-cow, it means there will be dolphins, even in the Alps. Sadly, but not unexpectedly, many dolphins do not adjust well to captivity so far from the sea and away from members of their own pod, so socially-dysfunctional behaviors like aggression and anxiety can be treated with drugs like Valium, used to ameliorate the same mental disorders in humans.  As some have asserted, these drugs can be potentially be overused in captive animals, and may ultimately hasten the death of dolphins in captivity.

In an even more ironic twist, several of the most widespread and dangerous drugs at raves are Blue Dolphin, White Dolphin, and Pink Dolphin, basically cheap derivations of opiates, methylamphetamines, or methamphetamines, each pill embossed with a tiny dolphin. To take that irony to the third degree is the drug Dolophine, a type of methadone that is used as a pharmaceutical therapy to wean users off of opiate-based rave drugs. When a doctor is administering Dolophine as a treatment for an addiction to Blue Dolphin, they can use the treatment tracking system called DoLPhIn, the Database of all Pharmaceutical Inventions, to better manage their care.

4) Dolphins and Mexican Drug Cartels?
Earlier this year, May 24th, a 66 pound load of cocaine with an estimated street value exceeding $3.5 million US, washed ashore on a Galveston, Texas beach. Bootleggers dumping their load to evade capture or erase the evidence isn’t new, but this one was particularly interesting. Each of the 1 kilo packages were wrapped in black plastic and stamped with a white dolphin – the logo of the notoriously violent Gulf Cartel. Beach combing for drugs seems to be the new pastime for coastal law enforcement as these types of discoveries

happen virtually on a weekly basis. You would think that dolphins could make use of these parcels (they have a blow-hole after all), but it is morphologically impossible for dolphins to ingest cocaine in the usual manner, and toxicology sampling from live and dead-stranded dolphins from the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean have yet to show any level of discarded cocaine in their system.  With ramped-up enforcement by U.S. and Mexican authorities, moving large quantities of drugs from Mexico is getting costlier and more difficult, so a loss like this batch of cocaine can be a big financial hit to the cartels. Since drugs are becoming less of a guaranteed money-maker, cartels are diversifying, putting money and effort into everything from extorting lime growers to illegal tuna fishing. Mexico and several other Latin American countries have been trying for decades to make their legal tuna fleet abide by ‘dolphin safe’ regulations or face a ban on their fish from US canneries, but cartel-backed tuna boats follow none of these regulations and kill hundreds of dolphins in tuna nets with impunity while easily moving their product with well-honed business skills of violence, bribery, corruption, and intimidation. Moreover, these same fishing boats are often used in the transport of cocaine and marijuana, with the tuna odor effectively thwarting drug-sniffing dogs.

5) Dolphins as Anti-Drug Enforcers or Junkie Athletes?
On the front line of the high-seas War on Drugs is The Dolphin, an 87-foot US Coast Guard cutter that has made record drug seizures in recent years in the drug-running hot-zone between south Florida and the Caribbean. The Dolphin’s crew intercepts drug cartel’s cocaine-packed speedboats blasting across the Caribbean from Colombia and dilapidated tuna boats stocked with bales of marijuana from the Dominican Republic, and each year they confiscate tons – literally tons – of drugs, but much more still makes its way to the shores of Miami.  And here, one type of dolphin in particular has an intense hunger for drugs – the Miami Dolphin. With their long-running parade of current and former players failing drug tests, caught carrying or dealing drugs, and even keeling-over from drug-related deaths, this team far out competes any pufferfish-toking dolphin gang, any time, in any ocean.

The post Dolphins and Drugs – The Shocking Connections first appeared on Deep Sea News.

“I think it’s important to establish, first of all, that Irrawaddy dolphins are jerks to study.”

Not exactly the preface I was expecting.

“One of my esteemed colleagues describes them as, ‘cute, but generally irritating.’  They tend to be boat-shy and will scatter in all directions (popping up hither and thither), they surface low to the water, have relatively tiny dorsal fins, and sometimes will surface and re-submerge without even showing them.” Tara continues sarcastically, “This makes photo-identification absolutely delightful. I have said many not-so-nice things to these adorable critters.”

Despite popular notion, studying dolphins entails it’s fair share of frustrations. No one understands this better than Scripps Institute of Oceanography scientist and premier “waddy” wrangler, Tara Whitty.

Armed with her camera and clipboard, Tara scans the waters of Malampaya Sound for signs of her rather elusive study species. Unfortunately, the Irrawaddy’s ephemeral presence is most likely attributed to their ICUN designation rather than their secret plight to evade Tara’s ever-watchful eye. Though I can’t say that for sure.

“Irrawaddy dolphins (Orcaella brevirostris) are a relatively little-studied species of dolphin distributed patchily around Southeast Asia. They occur in riverine, estuarine, and coastal habitats, which puts them in contact with a number of human activities. Though the species as a whole is listed as Vulnerable by the IUCN Red List, several subpopulations (i.e., geographically separated groups) are listed as Critically Endangered. Major threats include accidental entanglement in fishing gear, or “bycatch”, as well as habitat degradation (particularly for the riverine subpopulations), pollution, and boat traffic,” Tara explains in her research blog Of Dolphins & Fishers.

As a conservation ecologist, Tara’s research with the Irrawaddy is critical in our greater understanding of these creatures, their role in the ecosystem, and what efforts we might take to recover their rapidly fleeting populations. Yet, the dolphins are merely players in a greater underlying narrative.

Whether by tradition or necessity, many of the coastally developing nations that encapsulate the Irrawaddy’s home range continue to depend on small-scale and artisanal fisheries. Despite the fisheries being relatively low-tech, they are vital to the livelihood and food security of millions of people. Conversely, these fisheries exhibit the greatest threat to dwindling dolphin populations through accidental capture by fishing gear. Balancing the complicated interface between human well-being and charismatic animal conservation, dolphin bycatch presents a problem not easily remedied.

Thus, Ms. Whitty has taken to the business of mapping conservation-scapes. Stepping back and looking at the whole picture, these conservation-scapes consider not only human impact on dolphins, but the social, cultural, and economic factors that drive human-dolphin interactions. Furthermore, her work examines the obstacles and opportunities that exist for fisheries management and marine conservation within these communities.

Through extensive interviews with the local populace spanning her four study sites (Thailand, Indonesia, and two in the Philippines), Tara compares conservation-scapes across locales to better understand how management might be improved in these places. These household surveys cover topics ranging from fishing practices and local dolphin knowledge to perceptions of marine resource management and governance structure. Now, it would seem that such direct interactions would not bode well for “prying scientists,” however this did not appear to be the case for Tara and her team.

She fondly recalls, “Often, we were treated with great hospitality – given the best (sometimes only) chairs in the household, treated to snacks and extremely sweet coffee or tea, and sometimes fresh coconuts. I also had several charitable local women offer to find me a local husband: ‘You are married? No? Ah. When do you come back here? OK. I will find some men for you.’”

When not being promised off to the locals, Tara and her interview crew continue to pinpoint potential pathways for improving conservation and fisheries management practices in these areas. With this goal, SAFRN, more formally know as the Small-scale and Artisanal Fisheries Research Network, was founded.

At it’s core, SAFRN is more or less a “support group” for those interested in doing interdisciplinary research within small-scale fisheries. Often times, research that is done in these areas is not cohesive, with multiple projects in progress, but little to no communication between them. Thus, with collaborators from Scripps Institute of Oceanography, San Diego State University, and the Southwest Fisheries Science Center, “SAFRN aims to serve as a hub for interdisciplinary communication and collaboration on methods for studying small-scale and artisanal fisheries, and for elucidating the commonalities and differences across fisheries in different regions where this research is conducted.”

So what does this all equate to? Does Tara’s research on the inter-tangled lives of humans and dolphins end in a happily-ever-after?

“I’ll be blunt: I have serious doubts about whether the dolphins at 3 of my sites are going to make it.  They have tiny population numbers, with bycatch beyond the sustainable “Potential Biological Removal” rate.  I believe that this represents the situation for many subpopulations of marine mammals, particularly riverine and coastal cetaceans, and thinking about it can be disheartening.  I spent a good amount of time feeling discouraged, wondering, ‘What am I doing here? What’s the point?’

Here are some thoughts that emerged from that process:  This particular conservation issue (marine mammal bycatch in small-scale fisheries in developing countries) generally coexists with a suite of other issues that need to be addressed regardless of the charismatic animals, for environmental and social sustainability.  Maybe we can’t save these dolphins, but “mapping conservations-capes” at these sites might be able to help improve future management of other issues related to ecosystem health and human well-being.

We need to be candid about conservation outlooks.  Not alarmist, not carelessly optimistic, but candid and pragmatic.  We will almost certainly lose subpopulations, perhaps subspecies or species, of marine mammals due to bycatch in the coming decades.  That is the reality of the situation. Effectively dealing with that reality will require growth in how we approach conservation research. ”

For the dolphins and many cetaceans that roam this area, the future looks grim. However, Tara does not believe all is for naught. Many of these coastal communities are in desperate need of interdisciplinary data sets that take into consideration the ecosystem as a whole, humans included. Organizations such as SAFRN are needed to streamline this information, make it accessible, and ultimately, utilize this data in a way that implements sustainable solutions.

The Irrawaddy are merely the sentinel species, forewarning us of impending danger, not only in Southeast Asia, but globally. Are we listening?

For more about Tara Whitty’s research and the Small-Scale Artisanal Fisheries Network, visit:

http://artisanalfisheries.ucsd.edu

http://tswhitty.com

Special thanks to Tara Whitty, for letting me tell this story for all of you here at Deep Sea News and for dealing with my many, many e-mails. Salamat. 

Related articles

• Saving dolphins & Managing small-scale fisheries
• Introducing SAFRN’s Blog!

The post The Plight of the Irrawaddy first appeared on Deep Sea News.

• Fukushima radiation leak
• Starfish wasting disease
• the Deepwater Horizon oil spill
• California oarfish “mortality event”
• Hurricane/Superstorm Sandy
• the “great Pacific garbage patch”
• the current Atlantic dolphin UME
• the collapse of various fisheries, exemplified by the Long Island Sound lobster fishery

So what’s wrong with debating these fascinating topics?  Well nothing, as long as the discussions are based on reason, information and, frankly, reality.  Also nothing, as long as there actually IS a debate, which isn’t always the case.   Here are some examples of the sort of reasoning that we have seen in comments, emails and tweets about the above examples:

• Starfish wasting disease. Starfish are melting. Radiation leaked into the ocean at Fukushima. Therefore Fukushima caused the starfish melting.
• Hurricane/Superstorm Sandy.  Hurricane Sandy happened. Then dolphins began dying on the Atlantic coast. Therefore Sandy caused the Atlantic dolphin UME.
• The “great Pacific garbage patch”.  There’s a giant patch of garbage out there.  If we could just sort of scoop it up, that would be good.  Someone should invent something to do that.
• The Long Island Sound lobster fishery. “They” sprayed insecticides in the tri-state area to control mosquito populations.  Around the same time, lobsters died.  Therefore insecticide spraying killed lobsters.

Among these sorts of comments and communications dwell many types of formal and informal logical fallacies, that is, flawed reasoning.  A common one is Arguing from Ignorance which is not meant as an insult, but is defined as “assuming that a claim is true because it has not been proven false”; this can be seen as a facet of Arguing from Silence, where a cause is assumed based on absence of evidence.  For example, the LIS lobster fishers made an erroneous connection between insecticide spraying and lobster mortality back in 1999 because there wasn’t another explanation at the time and it seemed reasonable (to them). A big problem is that you can make this sort of logical fallacy in the blink of an eye – it’s basically intellectual laziness – whereas the sorts of controlled and rigorous studies required to build a good theory for any environmental disaster can take a really long time.  In other words, fallacy is instantaneous but truth works at the speed of science, which is, unfortunately, often pretty gastropodal.  Not enough time has yet elapsed to reveal the true cause(s) of the starfish melting syndrome, for example, but in the case of the LIS lobsters, science showed pretty unequivocally that the mortality resulted from a multifactorial suite of environmental problems, particularly chronically elevated temperatures and persistent hypoxia, probably exacerbated by some fishery-related factors.  Pesticides didn’t enter into it.  And yet, if you ask the average Joe on the street in Hicksville, they are more than likely to say that the pesticides killed the lobsters in ’99, because that message – wrong as it was – was widely disseminated in the heat of the crisis, whereas the truth came out quietly in scientific papers and agency reports years later when the crash had long since faded from The News.

A related problem is that in the time between when people first propose a fallacious cause, and when the true cause is revealed through reason and research, the fallacious one can become ingrained like an Alabama tick.  Once people get an idea in their head, even if it’s wrong, getting them to let go of it can be bloody hard.  Indeed, there’s a term for this; it’s called “the Backfire Effect”: when confronting someone with data contrary to their position in an argument, counter-intuitively results in their digging their heels in even more.  In this phenomenon, the media has to accept a sizable chunk of responsibility because, as the lobster example shows, the deadline-driven world of media agencies is more aligned with the rapid pace of the logical fallacy than with the slow and deliberate pace of scientific research.  Many media outlets are often quite happy to give airtime to ideas that haven’t yet been critically evaluated, especially if there isn’t much other information to report (yet) about a given crisis.  I’m pretty sure some folks I know are going to totally jump down my throat for saying that.  They will doubtless point out that journalists are the defenders of the One Truth, but this is my editorial soapbox, so go ahead fellas.  Besides, John Stewart calls CNN out for this sort of stuff practically every night, and if it’s good enough for him…

Perhaps the most common flawed thinking we see in the comments and back channels of #DeepSN is the false correlation, or causality inferred from coincidence; formally, this is called post hoc ergo propter hoc.  This was the fallacy that Jenny McCarthy committed when she decided that the MMR vaccine had caused her sons autism, simply because the latter followed the former closely in time.  Well yeah, 100% of car accident victims ate breakfast that day too, but you don’t see people ditching their cheerios do you?  McCarthy’s willingness to shout her ignorance from the rooftops (and Oprah’s couch) has done untold damage to the public health, especially as it now turns out that her son didn’t have autism anyway.  The point is, logically flawed thinking of this kind is not trivial or a private deficiency; it can cause real harm to the thinker and to others. The recent kerfuffle on Chris Mah’s excellent post debunking a link between the Fukushima disaster and the starfish melting syndrome on the US Pacific coast is a perfect example of post hoc thinking.  Fukushima happened -> Starfish wasting happened -> therefore Fukushima caused starfish wasting.  As Chris pointed out, though, starfish wasting started before the Fukushima event, so even before any research has been done on the true cause of the syndrome, we can comfortably discount Fukushima radiation as the primary contributor.  If, as an academic exercise you apply post hoc thinking in light of Chris’s point, flipping the first two premises in the above syllogism, you could just as easily argue that Starfish wasting caused the Fukushima event!  That’s obviously absurd on its face and just serves to reveal the fallacy for what it is.  It may be more plausible that the radiation caused the starfish melting rather than the other way around, but that doesn’t make it any less fallacious.  Another aspect of the post hoc phenomenon is that it doesn’t seem to happen in the good direction, only the bad.  Fukushima must have caused the starfish melting syndrome, but no one is jumping up and down saying that the record numbers of whales in California waters this year are a pleasant and unexpected side effect of Fukushima, even though it’s happening at the exact same time as the starfish problem.

One last example of flawed thinking that inhibits reasoned debate about ocean science issues is false pattern recognition, or simply “leaping to conclusions”.  The 2013 case of “oarfish mortality” is a great example.  Last year precisely two oarfish washed up in California, within a couple of weeks of each other.  Oarfish are rare, so when two of them washed up in quick succession, many folks were quick to assume that the two events were related and that we were at the start of an oarfish mortality event.  Of course, it was just a statistical anomaly; a rare event that nonetheless happens inevitably if you wait long enough.  TV and radio media are some of the worst offenders when it comes to leaping to conclusions this way (print media outlets tend to be a bit more rigorous).  One of the ways they justify this is through posing a question.  Rather than framing the piece as “Oarfish mass mortality underway”, which would require fact checking, they go with “Are we at the start of an oarfish mortality event?” and support it with a few quotes from bystanders asked to wax hypothetical about their experiences.  By framing the story as a question or hypothetical in this way, journalists abdicate somewhat the responsibility to substantiate the claims made.  It may appear to editors to be a harmless practice that stimulates conversation around an interesting topic, but it often causes a significant amount of work for those who make it their business to try to inject a bit of science into the public conversation.  This is especially the case when the truth (statistical anomaly) is a lot less interesting than the alternative, that 30ft oarfish are going to start washing up all over the place!

There are a whole slew of other related phenomena collectively called “cognitive biases” (of which the Backfire Effect is one example), that come into play during heated debates about events like Sandy, Deepwater Horizon and Fukushima.  I am not even going to scratch the surface on those here, because this post is long enough already and we hope to have some experts on these phenomena comment here soon. In the meantime, perhaps one way we can help move the conversations in more helpful directions would be a checklist that people can consult to check their logic.  After all, awareness of a problem is half the solution, amIright?  Scientists often have some form of this kind of thinking ingrained as a part of their training, but not always, so it can’t hurt for all of us to think consciously about our thinking, me included.   To that end, I offer the following, non-comprehensive list of things to consider before you hit “Reply” on that cleverly crafted response.  If you have additional suggestions I invite you to add them in the comments.

• Am I seeing a pattern that could just be a statistical rarity, and leaping to a conclusion?
• Am I connecting two events causally, because they occurred close together in space or time?
• Am I inferring a cause in the absence of evidence for any other explanation?
• Am I thinking inductively “It must have been such and such…”
• Am I framing the issue as a false dichotomy (debating only two possible causes, when there may be many others).  In other words, am I framing the issue as an argument with two sides, rather than a lively discussion about complex issues?
• Am I attacking my “opponent” and/or his/her credentials, rather than his/her argument?
• Am I arguing something simply because other/many people believe it to be true?
• Am I ignoring data because I don’t want to lose face by conceding that I may be wrong?
• Am I cherry picking data that support my position (a cognitive bias)

Deep Sea News seeks to raise awareness through scrutiny, not negativity.  By that we mean that we try our best to stick to the facts and then deliver them in our usual style of “reverent irreverence“.  For those who favour the ad hominem attack: we’re not paid to blog and we don’t all work at the same place (in fact, we all work at different places, all educational or non-profit).   We’re just 7 scientists who love what we do and want to share that passion with everyone else.  We relish vigorous discussion about the subject we all love, marine science, so with a bit of luck and a bit of effort, I hope we can improve the conversation by keeping it reasoned and scientific, so that DSN stays fun and informative, and doesn’t become a hive for trolls and a battlefield for flame wars.

The post No, but in all seriousness… first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Dolphins are trying to tell us something.  Not in clicks and whistles, but in tissues and organs.  This post has nothing to do with dolphin intelligence and interspecies communication, it’s about what happens when nature loses its complex balance of host-pathogen stability and tips over into a disease outbreak.  Right now, dolphins are dying in substantial numbers along the US East Coast.  Authorities call this a UME, or Unusual Mortality Event, a bland but descriptive acronym if ever there was one.  A UME is a specific situation defined by the Marine Mammal Protection Act, wherein the number of dying dolphins (or any marine mammal) rises significantly above “the usual” rate.  Once a UME is declared, the government frees up money for additional research and intervention to address the issue.  So what exactly is the problem?

In early summer, more dead dolphins than usual began washing up on beaches in Virginia, Long Island and New Jersey.  Over the course of the summer and fall, sick and dead dolphins continued washing up and eventually the strandings spread to Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and even Florida.  In an average year in this region, about 300 dolphins strand but so far in 2013 there have been over 1200 (I wouldn’t be surprised if we hit 1400 by EoY). This extensive geographic range includes several different dolphin stocks, both coastal resident animals and more migratory stocks that move over great distances in open waters.  Dolphins are still washing up at the time of writing, and this UME has become one of if not the biggest dolphin UME ever.

The overwhelming majority of dolphins tested to date have been positive for cetacean morbillivirus, a virus in the same group as the human measles virus.  This is a specific agent that seems to pose little risk to other animals or to people, but which is evidently lethal to dolphins.  The rate of positive antibody tests from UME dolphin blood samples is a very strong circumstantial case for a morbillivirus epizootic (a large-scale disease outbreak among animals).  Its unlikely that we will ever have stronger evidence than that, because to fulfill, for example, Koch’s postulates in this case would be kind of unethical!

It’s not an unprecedented epizootic, however.  There was another dolphin UME on the Atlantic coast in 1987-88 that killed over 700 bottlenose dolphins, which was also (later) attributed to morbillivirus.  In fact, it was that event in part that lead to the UME provisions in the Marine Mammal Protection Act in the first place.

Why do these things happen?  The short answer is that we don’t really know.  From a disease ecology point of view, natural ecosystems are staggeringly complex, so much so that trying to nail down a single cause is probably futile.  It may be meaningless anyway, because with multiple age/size classes of multiple stocks affected in multiple habitats along an extensive stretch of coastline, the only things that may be common among all these cases could well be the host and the pathogen!  Its entirely possible, indeed likely, that significant differences exist in the underlying stressors that made the dolphins susceptible to both infection by the pathogen and the disease that results when they fail to fight it off.

Perhaps the most important lesson to be learned here is simply that something is profoundly out of whack right now.  Dolphins are apex predators and we know from studies like the long-running HERA project that they are excellent sentinels of coastal ocean health.  They bioaccumulate toxins from lower in the food web with ruthless efficiency and, as mammals like us, they express disease in ways that resonate with human health.  For example, check out this paper about multi-drug resistant E. coli in dolphins in Florida.  Where do you think they got that from huh? Yep, probably us, possibly from hospital effluent.

Regarding morbilivirus, which they did NOT get from us, it may be that these epizootics are cyclical or sporadic, only time will tell.  But for the next little while at least the stranding response networks on the east coast are going to be working overtime.

If you have questions about the dolphin UME, especially if you live in the affected areas and are worried about risks to your health or that of your pets, I strongly recommend this NOAA/NMFS page loaded with Frequently Asked Questions about the current outbreak.

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1. They gang rape femalesAs Miriam wrote before XXfactor, “Dolphin sex can be violent and coercive. Gangs of two or three male bottlenose dolphins isolate a single female from the pod and forcibly mate with her, sometimes for weeks at a time. To keep her in line, they make aggressive noises, threatening movements, and even smack her around with their tails. And if she tries to swim away, they chase her down.”

5. Dolphins kill their own babies.  Males are known to kill off babies.  In one study, 5 juvenile bottlenose dolphins had fatal injuries consistent with a bottlenose dolphin attack.  Infanticide by males may occur within dolphins, as it does in other species, because females become immediately ready for pregnancy after the death of infant.  The study also suggests that violent interactions with harbour porpoises (near 100 incidents in this study alone) by bottlenose dolphins may occur because they confuse infants of the two species.

6. Dolphins never sleep.  Yep dolphins can stay awake for five days straight with no loss of mental acuity. And after missing all that sleep they don’t even need to catch it up with little dolphin naps.  So great, horny dolphins are probably awake while I’m sleeping.  Just fantastic.

7. Dolphins are voracious predators.  Dolphins are not some crystal and patchouli wearing vegan.  Nope they are stone cold meat eaters.  The feed in packs so no fish or squid can escape.  Hunts are coordinated and focused on decimating prey. Dolphins are inventive and creative and nothing is safe.  Not even us on land.

9. Dolphins are sexually transmitted disease bags.  Yep dolphins are just full of STD’s. h/t to SFS10. Freakin dolphin and rainbow art.  I blame dolphins for this trend.  This stuff is all horrible, a blight on human existence.  It’s so bad I think it actually discourages people from becoming marine biologists.  And let’s not even start with dolphin and rainbow tattoos.  Or the “very unique” dolphin on the ankle tattoo! There is only one cool dolphin tattoo.

Also now that you are primed make sure you take a look at The Oatmeal’s Five Very Good Reasons to Punch a Dolphin in the Mouth

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