In the dolphin swim tank at the National Aquarium in Baltimore, a young trainer named Darlene is prancing along a walkway, back and forth, back and forth. Wherever she goes, Shiloh follows. When Darlene throws a ball into the air, Shiloh snatches it like Nick Markakis leaping at the right-field wall. When Darlene applauds Shiloh’s performance, Shiloh lets loose a happy squawk that sounds like Donald Duck in full operatic squawk.
Shiloh is the 29-year-old Atlantic bottlenose dolphin who delivered a stillborn calf the other day.
As the dolphin went through a few maneuvers Wednesday morning, Sue Hunter, the aquarium’s director of marine mammal training, cast an approving eye. Life goes on, and Shiloh has moved on.
“Dolphins are very intelligent, and they have emotions,” Hunter said. “I believe that strongly. There’s a lot of similarity between human and animal emotion. They can’t tell us verbally, so we infer based on how we perceive their behavior. We learn their body language, just as they learn ours.
“When the baby was born, Shiloh was attached to it because of her maternal instincts. But the baby was never alive, and Shiloh understood it wasn’t going to make it.”
She delivered the calf in the pre-dawn hours of July 14. There had been exhaustive prenatal care in the weeks leading up to delivery: ultrasounds, daily vitamin supplementation, diet monitoring, blood assessments and trainers keeping a steady eye on her behavior. All signs were good.
But dolphin calves have a high mortality rate. About one-third don’t make it to their first birthday.
When Shiloh’s calf arrived, Hunter said, there was no breath and no movement. There never was any sense of life, not for a moment. Trainers asked Shiloh to bring the baby to them. She did. It was hard to watch, Hunter said. Then they asked Shiloh to take the baby to another pool — there are several adjoining tanks at the aquarium — and then asked her to come back.
“We were giving her the choice to leave the calf behind,” Hunter said. “Then we took the calf away and let Shiloh go back to see that it was gone.”
The next day, Shiloh sought out the calf once more. Hunter says there were contact calls — repeated whistles. “It was like she was saying, ‘Where did you go? Where are you?’ ” Hunter said. “It would go on for a few minutes at a time. But then, after a day, it stopped. Now you see Shiloh spending a lot of her time with Chesapeake.”
Chesapeake is Shiloh’s daughter. Right now, she’s the one splashing around a visitor’s feet as a big morning crowd starts to build in the aquarium pool bleachers. It’s the usual reaction: They’re charmed by the dolphins’ antics, by the way they follow direction, by that little smile on their faces, inscrutable as Mona Lisa’s.
It triggers part of our deeper fascination with the dolphins. There’s a playfulness to delight the child in each of us — but a mystery, too. What’s that smile all about? It’s strictly muscle and bone structure, of course. But it gives them a look that says they want to be friends.
You watch the trainers work out with them, and what’s immediately clear is the great affection they have for the dolphins — and the trust the dolphins have in the trainers. As the trainers take blood samples from them and check their stomachs, holding them still at one end, the dolphins seem utterly relaxed.
Even when they see a visitor at pool’s edge, they’ll make an approach, check you out and then turn back to the water as though saying, “OK, I’m gonna go play now.”
“People are awed by them,” Hunter said. She pointed to a dolphin named Jade, who was balancing a ball on her head. “She invented that on her own. So we started rewarding her to encourage it. People are awed by that.
“And the look of a smile, of course. But you look at their eyes to see what they’re really feeling, and their body language, and their vocals. When Shiloh lost her baby, she was making noises like, ‘I want that calf. It’s mine, it’s mine. Why isn’t it doing the things it should?’
“But maybe that’s my imagination. She hasn’t sulked. She’s being playful again. She’s looking to us to keep things normal.”
Life goes on. Now Hunter pointed toward Shiloh, who was swimming with Chesapeake. Chesapeake is pregnant. Shiloh will be the calf’s grandmother.
“I think,” Hunter said, “they’re going to raise that baby together.”
Please send news tips to Michael Olesker at [email protected].
