14 DAY TRIAL // Only recently, over 100 pantropical spotted dolphins found themselves swimming in the shallow waters at Whales Cover, near Western Australia’s port city of Albany.
Were it not for the distress call produced by a juvenile dolphin, the group would have probably beached and most of these marine mammals would have died.
Wildlife specialists working with the local Department of Environment and Conservation explain that, almost immediately after first spotting this group of dolphins swimming in said area, they came to understand that something had to be done in order to avoid a mass stranding.
Thus, they waited until the tide hit a higher level, and then they launched a rather peculiar rescue operation.
More precisely, they caught one of the group’s juveniles and transported it by boat to deeper waters. Once there, this young dolphin, which now found itself alone and quite scared, began producing a distress call that drew in the rest of the dolphins. The Journal quotes nature conservationist Dean Utber, who explained the decision to capture and move said young dolphin to deeper waters in order to save the entire group as follows:
“The juvenile was sending out distress signals, which was calling the dolphins in, as soon as it was translocated to deeper waters the pod followed it out and last we saw they were swimming out to sea.”
Needless to say, it is highly unlikely that the dolphins could have been saved in any other way, seeing how there were quite a lot of them and trying to trap them all would have sooner or later turned out to be a futile endeavor.
As previously reported, dolphins are renowned and admired for their ability to display emphatic behaviors.
Therefore, it need not surprise us that the over 100 specimens trapped in said Australian shallow waters did not delay in answering the distress call issued by just one member of their group.