Logo
Prev
Bookmark
Rotate
Print
Next
Contents
All Pages
Related Articles
Browse Issues
Help
Search
Home
'
National Geographic : 2015 Jun
Contents
Dolphin Captivity 69 In a holding tank at the Seoul Zoo, Taesan (foreground) and Boksoon learn to eat live fish again. They’re scheduled to be released off Jeju Island this summer. If all goes well, they’ll rejoin Chunsam in their native group. clock and can tell exactly when they are going to get fed. We have to turn that around, because we know that in the wild they will eat more one day than another.” Foster also wanted to wake up their highly capable dolphin brains. He dropped into the pen things they might not have seen for years, like an octopus or a jellyfish or a crab. He cut holes along the length of a PVC tube, stuffed it full of dead fish, and then plunked it into the water. Tom and Misha had to figure out how to ma- nipulate the tube so that the fish would pop out of the holes. “In captivity we train the animals not to think on their own, to shut down their brains and do what we ask them to do,” Foster explains. “ What we are trying to do when we re- lease them into the wild is get them off autopilot and thinking again.” The feeder tube had two other benefits. It floated about five feet below the surface, so Tom and Misha were reminded that food is found underwater. It also helped disassociate humans from the provision of food. “ We had to get them to understand that fish doesn’t only come from a silver bucket and a person,” says Amy Souster, a young marine mammal trainer who was draft- ed into the project by Foster. Getting Tom and Misha ready was a step-by- step process that continued through the spring of 2011, with up to 20 learning sessions a day. By the time the hot summer months approached, Foster was hopeful that Tom and Misha would be ready to swim free in early fall. But in the summer heat, with the bay’s temperature climb- ing to a dolphin-stressing 80 degrees or more, Tom and Misha lost their appetites and were hit by a virulent blood infection that was bare- ly staved off by emergency tube feeding and a heavy dose of antibiotics. “That almost certainly would have killed them within a few days,” John Knight, Born Free’s consulting vet, recalls. “It was a very close call indeed.” Tom and Misha didn’t have a close bond and mostly tolerated each other. But Souster was moved to see Mi- sha trying to care for Tom, pushing him to the surface to help him breathe when he sank to the bottom of the pen and taking him fish in an attempt to get him to eat. To make matters worse, by the end of the summer the villagers in Karaca had made JEAN CHUNG
Links
Archive
2015 May
2015 Jul
Navigation
Previous Page
Next Page