Stuff You Should Know - How Dolphins Work!

Episode Date: September 2, 2025

E-e-e-eek! E-e-e-eek, we say! Adding to the tradition of our wonderful animal episodes we contribute this amazing installment on one of the all-time great sea creatures, the dolphin! Attach a sponge to your rostrum and dive in with Josh and Chuck!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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And welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. Jerry's here too. And this is stuff you should know where we use a lot of upspeak. So here you go. Was that your dolphin? Yeah. I hadn't practiced for a while, so it was a little rusty. Hey, can I just very quickly mention a correction? Oh, sure. I'm freewheeling it here, but we got a lot of emails from people that are in disbelief that we didn't know.

It's chassis. Oh, I knew it was chassis. I used it correctly. Oh, everyone said that we were saying chassis, and every time I said it, you were like, yeah. I didn't, I just didn't correct you. Oh, well, I appreciate that. Sometimes you don't like to be corrected or else you're like, I know, I'm just saying it that way. So I just didn't.

Not to leave you out there twisting or anything like that. Okay, interesting. If you want, maybe we can retake this whole thing and I'll just take it with you. How about that? No, that's all right. Anyway, I didn't know it was pronounced chassis. Now that I hear it, I've heard that word, but I'm not a car guy, so I don't know these things. Well, I feel really terrible.

I mean, I feel terrible. I'm very sorry. I'll correct you every single time from now on, okay? Great. Okay, I'll just bring the podcast to a screeching halt and be like, no, that was wrong. Okay. That's really funny. What a twist.

Man, I'm sorry, Chuck. So we're talking about Dufins. Is that how it's pronounced? I think so. Okay. That's how we should say it then. And I'm pretty excited about this one, Chuck, because as everybody knows, dolphins are awesome. And we're going to talk about all the reasons why they're awesome.

That's pretty much the gist of this episode. Yeah, I mean, you know, dolphins are marine mammals. I guess we should start there. And that entails a whole host of things that we're going to go over. It's not just some fish. But they technically are cetaceans. And that's a marine mammal along with 80. other types of species, including whales, and if you think porpoises are the same, it's in that same

species. So, relax. Right. And I just realized, Chuck, I don't have any of my notes here, so I could try to wing it, or you can just wait a second and I can go get my notes. Go get your notes, and I'll just continue. And no one will be any of the wiser. And then you can fill me in when I get back. Yeah, exactly. Okay. There are 40 plus species of dolphin, and they're in the family of oceanic dolphins or delfinity. And there's also river dolphins. So I know everyone's out there saying, hey, there's river dolphins out there. There aren't many. There's four not just four, but four kinds of river dolphins. And each one is just one species. So those are the river dolphins. Yeah, I've always found that so weird. I mean, I know that taxonomically you're

supposed to really kind of stick to it, but there's got to be a better way, you know? Yeah, for sure. But we're, I mean, we're going to talk a little bit about other kinds, but we're mainly going to be talking about the bottlenose, of which they're about 600,000, because the bottlenose dolphin is the one that everyone is most familiar with and the ones that are on TV and, unfortunately, and dolphinarians. Yeah, where they keep dolphins as hostages. Yeah, and make them perform tricks for dopes. It's crazy. Yeah, so, yeah, bottlenose are the money dolphins. that's everybody's talking about, and that's what we're going to talk about. And they, I think they're one of the more studied ones, too,

even though the common ones, there's so many more of them. But we know that dolphins, bottlenose dolphins. And, yeah, I think basically when we're saying dolphins, unless we specify, we're talking about bottlenose dolphins. How's that for some guardrails? Yeah, for sure. And also, speaking of guardrails, we might as well just go ahead and say, I know there'll be plenty of kids listening because they love our animal episodes.

Oh, yeah. And the dolphin episode gets a little, you know. A little blue. Not blue necessarily. It gets a little sexy here and there. But, you know, that's just the deal with dolphins. Okay. So, yeah.

So I think that was a pretty good COA, man, because it does get a little, you know. I mean, hey, I feel like this is all, like, scientific stuff. So we should be able to handle it and kids should be able to handle it. But if there are any adults that are like, what are you talking about? than do the little research first. Right. Oh, so I think I was talking about how bottlenose dolphins are pretty well studied and that we know that they live for about 45 to 50 years.

Yeah, pretty good. That's in the wild. Yeah, of course. I know we've talked about plenty of animals over the years where they actually live longer in captivity, usually because they're just food for other larger animals. That's not true with dolphins. Their lifespan is usually much shorter.

And that's controversial. We'll talk about that later. but we know that in the wild, 50 years, it's a pretty aged dolphin, if you think about it. No, agreed. That's a nice long life, I think, for a sea creature. Yeah, what more can they ask for? Stop complaining, dolphins.

There was one supposedly that was 67 years old, presumed dead in 2017. Right. But my friend, I like to think that that dolphin is 75 right now. Nice. I think that's a great way to look at things. Yeah. So do you kind of see dolphins close?

closer to shore. Sometimes they are basically just out to sea. It depends on the species. I think common dolphins stay fairly close to shore. Bottlenose will get right up on you, essentially. The place where Umi and I used to live kind of along the coast, in our backyard, dolphins would swim. There's like a lagoon. And now that I know a little more about dolphins, I always assume they were bottlenose, but now that I know a little more, I think that they are probably common dolphins? Well, there's a lot more. There's like millions and millions of those

and about 600,000 bottlenose. So just statistically, you're probably right. Precisely. And then the other reason that I think that is because they would basically put on a show chasing fish. They'd jump out of the water and they chase the fish backwards.

It was really something to see. And apparently the common dolphins are more acrobatic than bottlenose. Okay. And they might have been playing, as we'll see. You never know. It's possible. They might have been teasing them poor fish.

If you are somewhere where you can look up safely on the computer and image, you should look up P-A-K-I-C-E-T-U-S, I guess the P-A-C-A-C-E-T-U-S. You nailed it, Chuck. That is the common ancestor that dolphins share that was around about 50 million years ago. And if you look at it and say, well, wait a minute, Chuck, this thing's walking around on four legs with fur. That's because that's where dolphins came from. It's pretty remarkable when you look at it. It looks like when you see the head of that. you can see the dolphin in it, you know?

Yeah, so dolphins are more closely related to hippopotamai than they are like sea lions or otters or anything like that that are also aquatic or semi-aquatic. And it's because this peccasetus basically moved to the water little by little by little. And it's one of those rare evolutions where we have like a complete fossil record from Pachocetus to dolphin. We know all of the iterations

that went through over the tens and tens of millions of years. But that's, I mean, that's where dolphins came from. They were basically these wolf-sized creatures. Yeah. And one of them, I guess, spent a little extra time in the water and was like, you guys, this is fantastic.

Like, you should come in here. We should all just stay a little longer. And then before you know it, their legs turned into flippers. Exactly. I think there's like two or three days. What's cool, too, is, They're, when dolphins are in the embryonic stage, they actually start to develop limbs.

Yeah. Before the genes kick in and, well, actually kick off, I guess, and they stop developing and then get absorbed. But they're, like, in a stage of development, they start to grow limbs. So that's, I mean, it's a pretty good indication that they used to be land mammals. Yeah, they have vestigial ears, as we'll see, too, but I'll just kind of tease that out. Right. And then so the speciation from land mammal to semi-aquatic mammal to fully aquatic mammal, the dolphin, was complete when somebody mentioned being wet to a dolphin. And the dolphin said, what is wet?

Really? Yeah. That was my understanding from the National History Museum. So, like we said, they're going to share some characteristics with land mammals. But they have a lot of really cool traits. And some of these are like, you may know. And some of these are just, I mean, if you're wondering why people are obsessed with dolphins, it's not just because they go to a dolphin show and think they're awesome.

Or maybe that's why you might be obsessed with them, listener. But there are so many remarkable, amazing facts about dolphins. They just kind of stack up. Like usually when we do animal episodes are like one or two, like, fact of the episodes. But this is just riddled with them. Yeah. So let's start. And also, a big shout out.

Thanks to Kyle for helping us out with this one. Oh, Kyle, okay. Thanks, mate. Or no, it's probably Keele now that I think about it. I feel terrible, Chuck. I'm so sorry, man. So that's okay. So they're placental mammals, so they're not going to lay eggs like you might see a fish do in the water. They bear live young. And it depends on the species, but their pregnancies are going to be between about 10 and 18 months. I don't think I mentioned while you were gone that orcas are part of this. group or species?

Family. Family, okay. I knew it was one of them. They're actually dolphins. They're not real whales. Yeah, exactly. So I think the orcas have the longest gestation period of about 18 months. But it's very cute because they're going to nurse those calves sometimes up to two years at a minimum of six months.

And those little babies stay with mama for up to five years. Yeah, like toddlers. Isn't that adorable? Yeah. One thing that I hadn't considered is that so dolphins nurse under, water. Wait a minute. Do you think after your child passes toddlerhood, they're just sent out to the wild? That was my understanding, from the National History Museum again. Okay, great. They're really misinforming me, apparently. So one thing I hadn't thought of as I was saying is that

a dolphin is a nurse underwater, which could be kind of hard, and then adding to the fact that they don't have lips that they can kind of latch on to a nipple with, it's a puzzler. And it turns out that the way that they nurse is by rolling their tongue into essentially a straw. Yeah. And that's what they latch on to. And apparently we know that it's not the tastiest milk as far as a human palate is concerned, thanks to a scientist named Lillian Eichelberger, who I guess on a dare drank some dolphin milk and was like, it's fishy, oily, it lacks sweetness.

No, sir, I don't like it. Yeah. And if you think that's a weird thing to do while studying dolphin milk, just strap in because things get much weirder. For sure. For sure. Things got weird in the 70s, as we'll see. But it's got like a milkshake consistency,

which is why I guess the straw-shaped tongue kind of fits, I guess. I guess so. Yeah. So they have to swim, obviously. They don't have to swim to survive because they breathe air. So it's not like they need air to pass across gills to survive. Right. Good point.

But they do swim quite a bit. they're known for it. Their bodies are actually streamlined to help them swim even more. One thing I also didn't know is that the pectoral fins, the ones that stand up off the back, where you're like, shark, and then your friend says, no, it's dolphin. You go, oh, a dolphin. They have no bone. I believe there's just cartilage. And those are, they use those to help to steer. Yeah, for sure. It's like a little steering unit. They have a layer of blubber. You associate blubber with whales, but the dolphin has blubber too, which is going to provide a little bit of buoyancy.

If they haven't had food in a while, you know, just like humans do, they can sort of devour their own fat. Helps out with body heat. And then besides that steering, they have two horizontal flukes on the tail, so they move vertically. So that's another great way to tell a shark from a dolphin,

aside from just opening your eyeballs, because I think they look quite different. But the shark, you know, has that vertical tail. that sort of goes from side to side, the dolphins is flipped, and to me looks like a more efficient system, but that's just a guess. You'd think so. The sharks seem to do pretty well for themselves, though.

Yeah, and real quick, in-show correction, I guess. The dorsal fin is the one on top, right? Yes. Yeah, that's for the stability. The steering comes from those little side flippers, the pectoral fins. Yeah, okay. I definitely got that wrong. So to, like, reimagine it, just imagine a kid running around

with their arms sticking out like they're pretending to fly, except dolphins do it for real and in the water. Those are the big differences. That's right. Or like a kid running with their arms to the side, like in the terrifying new movie, weapons. Oh, don't tell me anything about it. That's funny that you always say that,

even though I've never told you anything about anything. Well, you just told me bad. I just want you to stop right there. Yeah, yeah. It's on the poster. Okay. All right. So, yeah, I can't wait to see that movie.

I'm very exciting. And you said to see it in the theater, right? I mean, I recommend it. I was at a sold out 1030 a.m. So people are pretty hyped about it. But it was also kind of neat. There were at least 20 local Atlanta crew, as it turned out, because when the credits started rolling,

they were all hanging out and, like, clapping for each other. Oh, neat. That's very supportive. Did you know any of them? I did, but I didn't know until afterward when Emily said that my friend Stephanie worked on it. And I was like, oh, she might have been one of those people. That's very cool. So, yeah, I want to see that movie.

Yeah, back to dolphins. Yeah. So dolphins are also known for as far as they swim. They kind of jump in and out of the water and can go quite fast doing that. It's called porpoising, much to dolphin chagrin. And it turns out it's not just porpoises and dolphins that swim like that. Penguins do too. And I was like, no way.

This came from the National History Museum, so I had to go double check. And by God, I saw a video of penguins swimming super fast, faster than dolphins, and they were porpoising in and out of the water. It was really something to see. Have you not seen that before? Not that I know of. I mean, I forget stuff, so it's possible, but it seemed pretty shocking to me when I saw it. Dolphins are also pretty good smellers. They have a blowhole.

It's basically like nostrils, and it's above the frontal skull bones. And it's kind of cool because it connects right to their lungs. They're not mouth breathers, even though apparently they did find a mouth-breathing Hector's dolphin, which are dolphins near New Zealand in 2015. Yeah. So I don't know what that says about that guy, but he was a mouth breather. But that blowhole, like I said, is connected directly to the lungs, and they can open it and close it with a nasal plug.

And they can fill that thing up very, very fast. Like in a fraction of a second, they can fill up their lungs. through the blowhole they only breathe five or six times a minute and they can't stay under water all day but they can stay down there for a few minutes at a time

yeah for sure but if they sit down there too long and they run out of air they can drown they are air breathing mammals just don't forget that the saddest thing I could imagine yeah which we'll get to that later

yeah the blow hole also does a really good job of expelling air because again this is like it's like our mouth breathing in and out except on the top of our head.

So when they breathe out, especially having been underwater for a little while, they're breathing out warm air into usually colder air because the sea temperature is usually warmer than the surface temperature in a lot of cases. And it'll condense, and that's what their spout is. It's like you can see it. Yeah, it's pretty cool. And apparently you can tell, like, different species apart by the kind of spout they have, right? Yep, from what I understand.

I couldn't, but I think scientists can. Why don't you take the unihemispheric sleep? Because that's pretty remarkable, and you haven't had a wowie. Oh, thanks. Also, I have a correction that I want to put in, too. Okay? Okay. So we're talking about what dolphins do is unihemispheric sleep,

which is because they are in danger of predation, because they don't stop and, like, you know, fall to the bottom of the ocean, they actually have to keep going while they're sleeping. So what they do is shut down half of their brain, and the other half just kind of keeps an eye on things. And then when the one brain, one side of the brain has had enough sleep, it switches over to the other hemisphere, and then that one takes its turn to sleep, and the other one takes over to kind of stand guard. Yeah, that sleeping with one eye open is kind of an old, like, Western trope. But that's like so funny that dolphins literally do that. Yeah, for sure. And that actually

ties in Chuck, Unahemispheric Sleep, to our Zizians episode because they were trying to figure out how to do that themselves, which seems to be impossible for humans from what I can tell. And by the way, stay tuned for listener mail because I have a correction related to the Zizians episode. So this is like a correction, loused episode, okay? All right. Should we take a break? Yes, I think so. Okay, we'll come back with Correction Fest right after this. All right, we're back with more on dolphins. No more corrections, I promise. They have, and this is to me another.

like fact of the show. They have incredible eyesight. They see really, really well within about 150 feet. And they do this because they have two kind of slightly flattened eyeballs on, you know, the sides of their head. When you look at a dolphin, they're kind of on the side. Imagine that you're on an airplane and all of a sudden you hear this. Attention passengers. The pilot is having an emergency and we need someone, anyone, to land this plane. Think you could do it? It turns out that nearly 50% of men think that they could land the plane with the help of air traffic control. And they're saying like, okay, pull this. Do this.

Pull that. Turn this. It's just. I can do my eyes close. I'm Manny. I'm Noah. This is Devon. And on our new show, no such thing.

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Be a part of my new chapter and listen to the new season of the Overcumper podcast as part of the MyCultura podcast network on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And they see from both simultaneously and then like us with binocular vision, they stitch it together to see one thing. But what that results in is a 300 degree panoramic view where they can see basically anywhere they want except right above them. Yeah, that's their one blind spot is above them.

And apparently, if they're trying to get a really good look at you, they'll tilt their head down and try to look at you like that. It's pretty cute. Yeah. So they actually do have really good eyesight underwater and above water, and the way that they can transition from a fairly dark environment to a bright, you know, sunny environment is because they have a double slit in their pupils. So when their pupils are wide open, and say they've dive deep and there's not a lot of light, so they're trying to capture all of it, it looks like they have two tiny pupils.

But then as they come up to the surface and they get closer to the sun, one of their pupils or one of the slits closes and it narrows so they don't take in quite as much light. So they can see pretty well. And they're apparently up to 150 feet. They have just really great eyesight from what we can tell. Yeah, and they, you know, it's important that they can do that out of the water because when they porpoise and jump out, they want to see everyone going, oh, my God, Larry, luck. Then they give them a little wink. Nice.

Yeah, and it makes a ding sound. They have teeth, and they're not like, you know, big scary shark teeth. They're kind of cone-shaped. Yeah. They eat fish, of course, crustaceans, squid. And they use their beak. It's also called a rostrum, but we just call it. beak. And, you know, they'll grip that prey and they swallow it whole. They, and they're smart

enough to know, and we'll get to how smart they are later, but they're smart enough to know that they got to swallow this fish head first so they don't catch those spines on their throats. And if they come up against like a catfish or something that's got like really, you know, spiky, spiny things coming off their head, they'll bite those heads off and eat the rest of it. Yeah. I'll bet that's a sight to see. Yeah. So they also have really good hearing, which makes sense because they use echolocation, which we'll talk about, but they have ear canals just like us, but they're totally useless. They're vestigial. They don't connect to anything. And in fact, they're plugged up with some pretty serious earwax that everybody just kind of considered a curiosity

of whales and dolphins that they have big plugs of earwax in their ear canals that don't connect to anything. And scientists realized like, oh, actually, they put down layer after layer throughout their life and you can examine an earplug or a plug of earwax of a dolphin or a whale and pretty closely estimate how old it is like you're counting tree rings so cool i think so too i love that and they can also you know get into that earwax and and analyze it and see what kind of like pollutants it was exposed to and stuff like that maybe hormone fluctuations uh so yeah that that's pretty awesome and that's like fairly recent right uh yeah i don't know exactly exactly when, but it is a fairly recent finding for sure. So, yeah, look for more talk about

dolphin earwax in the future. They don't listen exactly like we do, but they receive high frequency sounds through, and this is a pretty good band name, Acoustic Fats, and their lower jaw, and that's going to vibrate through their skull, and they have these, you know, I guess they're unattached internal earbones that pick up this sound from the acoustic fats. Yeah, so they can hear sounds, but it's also really useful for echolocation, too, where they send a click out and then wait for it to bounce off something and come back. It's received through that jaw bone. Yeah.

And apparently, because the teeth are so close to the nerves that transmit this impulse, they think that the teeth might actually act as amplifiers, and I wonder if that has to do with the cone shape, too. Oh, maybe so. Maybe. Yeah. I mean, a cone is a very common way to amplify a sound. It is, like an old-timey cheerleader.

Yeah, totally. Yeah, I mean, that's just another amazing fact. They, you know, Navy's used sonar, so it's, and we'll get into this a little bit more, but, you know, everyone has sort of heard the stories about the damage. that's done by, you know, ships and navies and exploding things underwater. Yeah, one of the largest dolphin strandings took place because of sonar.

There is a big multinational naval exercise in the Arabian Sea in 2009. I remember that, yeah. And 200 dolphins just stranded themselves, just trying to get away from the horrible sound. So, yeah, we've talked about this before. It's a real issue that's just nothing's being done about it. Yeah.

Yeah, it's, yeah, there's a lot of sadness in this episode for sure. They do vocalize, you know, you just rewind and listen to Josh at the beginning if you want to hear exactly what it sounds like. Don't bother going to YouTube or anything. They vocalize with whistles and pops and braze. They make these sounds with something called phonic lips, and those are near the blowhole. That's a good one, too. Did you say band name? That's a good one, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Sonic Youth and Flaming Lips got together for a super band. Nice. I just saw the flaming lips, and they were great. I hadn't seen them in years. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's really, really good. I've never seen them.

I'm sure their shows are pretty great. Yeah, it's pretty fun. But they have a larynx at the base of the blowhole, and that larynx is going to be able to sort of move and modulate sound by letting air kind of go through at different rates of speed. Yeah, and then they also have something called a melon, which is a big mass of fat in their forehead, which is pretty, yeah, it's pretty characteristic of dolphins look.

but that melon is actually able to focus sound like a lens. The little fatty lump moves around. They can move it, which is pretty cool, like those people who can move their forehead up and down. Right. I think that's essentially what they're doing, and it focuses the sound, including their echolocation. Yeah, and get this.

Here's another fact of the episode. I'll take this one. You can take the next one. Okay. They can use this to basically name each other. They can broadcast their identity and their location to other dolphins because they have signature whistles. So they come up with their own whistle. They make that sound and everyone knows that's Josh over there, Josh the dolphin.

Yeah. My name sounds like in dolphin. And talk about what mommies do too. That's another wowie. Well, they found that they use baby talk. They use higher frequency whistles and essentially use baby talk with their own calves, which is adorable. Yeah. Are we at echolocation, finally?

I think so. This is a pretty cool. This is the last fact. The rest of the stuff we're going to talk about is so dry. You might as well to stop the episode. No, not true. But you take this because it's a wowie. It's essentially just like bats, right?

It is. And they figured out that bats and dolphins are essentially not at all related. So they developed pretty much identical forms of echolocation independently. Yeah. It's an example of convergent evolution. But what they do is they produce these clicks. They use the melon to focus those things like a laser. And they can not only, so they're bouncing a sound wave off of something.

It's coming back. And then it is translated into a mental map. So essentially they're seeing. They're experiencing a form of vision like we would think. of it, but they're doing it through sonar, essentially, their own form of sonar. Yeah. And they, it's like really, really accurate, right? Yeah, I mean, they've done some studies and they found that they were able to distinguish

different disc sizes by as little as one-tenth of a centimeter or four-hundredths of an inch. Right, which is very small. And I thought that was weird. One-tenth of a centimeter. I was like, that sounds familiar. And then I realized it's a millimeter. I don't know why anyone would put it like that. That's why you have the metric system.

Yeah, well, we should ask Kyle. Isn't that bizarre? Yeah. So their echo location is quite amazing. And I've seen also that they can see internal organs in other animals. That's how penetrative, I guess, their echolocation isn't just how nuanced it is. I know Predator is heat-based, but I just, that's what I think of. That's funny you say that.

I watched that two days ago. The OG? Yeah. And I was like, this is definitely tied with, I guess, Commando for Schwarzenegger's best movie. I saw Predator, the original one, but I didn't, like, follow up with the whole Predator universe. No, I didn't either. I just watched the first one again. I was like, man, this is good.

I think those new ones are supposed to be good. a prey, and then that other one coming up. Oh, really? They're supposed to be good? That's what I heard. Isn't there, like, a predator versus Jason? Didn't it get to, like, as off the rails as that? They did predator versus alien, I think.

Yeah. I didn't see that either, and I love the alien universe, too. I guarantee Danny McBride's in that. Yeah. So, dolphins are very social, and that's one of the reasons also that people love them, because you often see them swimming in large pods. and seeming like they're having a good time together, it's because they basically are.

Pods can be as small as two or up to 1,000, but generally they're between 40 and 60, and they can form very long-time social relationships. Yeah, there's different kinds of pods. There's like, you know, the pod pod, the original one. There's a bunch of different dolphins that some have familial ties, some don't. There's juvenile pods where the kids reach, I guess,

the end of toddler stage, and they're like, go on, go form your own pod. So a bunch of them, about the same age, we'll form a pod together. There's Bachelor pods, which is usually two, sometimes three males that essentially just form their own jam and cruise around together, sometimes forming lifelong friendships. And all of them have their advantages, like, it's easier to hunt, that it's easier to defend against something trying to kill you. Yeah. It's easier to pass down knowledge from one generation to another, which we'll talk about in a second.

So there's all sorts of advantages, but because of their social nature, they do have a lot of traits that you're like, wow, that's really human-like. Yeah, for sure. This is, I told Emily about this one, and she was like, well, that's BS. But this is sometimes what happens. It's fairly rare, but sometimes males will team up and steal a female dolphin from another pod and basically, you know, keep her captive and prevent her from returning. And it looks like what they think is going on is like they have a situation where they need a female because their long gestation period is, and lactation keeps them from being available to breed for sometimes years at a time. So they're like, we got to breed. We're going to go take her and keep her here.

Yeah. There's just high competition for females. So it's not the most tasteful dolphin fact around. So we'll follow that one up with a more heartwarming one where, They also have been observed in plenty of instances to engage in altruistic behavior, like social behavior, where they don't leave behind, like, sick or injured friends. Yeah, go ahead. Tell them about that one thing. I think this was in the mid-2000 aughts, I think, whatever.

There was a group of 11 dolphins that essentially swam together to form a raft with their injured companion in the middle. to keep them from, like, sinking and dying. Wow. Yeah. And, I mean, that's pretty amazing altruistic behavior. I think they've also seen other ones do that, too. It's not like this is a one-time thing. So that's a pretty, I mean, there's a lot of animals that are out there like, oh, you're sick, good luck dying.

We're moving on. Yeah, or I'll eat you. Exactly, yeah. Dolphins don't do that. They try to take care of their peeps. Amazing. All right. I say we take our second break.

Oh, okay. And we come back with more on the Amazing Dolphin right after this. So, Chuck, one of the great things about dolphins is that we know that they play. It's not anthropomorphizing. it's they're playing juveniles play with one another they sometimes play with their parents they'll swim around in the head of another dolphin

and just kind of tease them we talked about them teasing fish earlier what is that all about yeah I mean sometimes imagine that you're on an airplane and all of a sudden you hear this attention passengers

the pilot is having an emergency and we need someone anyone to land this plane Think you could do it? It turns out that nearly 50% of men think that they could land the plane with the help of air traffic control. And they're saying like, okay, pull this, until this. Pull that. Turn this.

It's just, I can do my eyes close. I'm Mani. I'm Noah. This is Devin. And on our new show, no such thing. We get to the bottom of questions like these. Join us as we talk to the leading expert on overconfidence. Those who lack expertise, lack the expertise they need to recognize.

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Today, we have a very special guest with us. Our new super secret bestie is the diva of the people. The diva of the people. I'm just like text your ex. My theory is that if you need to figure out that the stove is hot, go and touch it. Go and figure it out for yourself. Okay. That's us.

That's us. My name is Curley. And I'm my mom. In each episode, we'll talk about love, friendship, heart breaks, men, and, of course, our favorite secrets. Listen to the Super Secret Bestie Club as a part of the Michael Thura podcast network available on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. They've been observed doing that. Like, they'll go up and not eat a fish, but they'll, like, get the fish's tail in its mouth and being like, kind of like, I got your nose. And then they'll swim away and the fish is like, what just happened?

Yeah, and then I'm swimming porpoising in the waves of ships that are traveling fairly fast. They think essentially that's for for thrills and kicks. Yeah. That's so cool. Yeah, it's pretty cool. There are also gay dolphin behaviors as well where those male friends for life in the Bachelor Pod still have sex. I mean, isn't that the whole point in the Bachelor Pod? I think so.

You know? Yeah. That and playing video games together afterward. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, they, they, this is where, you know, gets a little sexy, but they, basically on a daily basis, they've observed dolphins exhibiting what's called non-conceptive sexual behavior. So they're not trying to reproduce. They're getting together and having a good time for the fun of it. Yeah, and that NCSB for the churchgoers, that also includes masturbation. Apparently captive dolphins do that every day, which makes, sense because they've got nothing else to do, so they're just kind of bored. But they will use walls, other dolphins. They'll use trainers sometimes for stimulation. Yeah, and that actually

happens. Yeah, I saw too. They might lean up against a washing machine from time to time. Pretty good. Is that real? Is that just a trope or is that real? I'm sure it's happened. All right, let's clean this thing up. Well, actually, we can't clean it up because we're about to talk about something else like that. We're talking about dolphins' intelligence, and we know they're smart, and a lot of that comes from a guy named Dr. John C. Lilly in the 1960s who really put dolphins on the map in a bigger way by saying that they're probably as intelligent as we are. He did some pretty awful experiments like injecting them with LSD. He mapped unsidated dolphins' cerebral cortex with probes. And he was involved in a very infamous experiment in 1963.

I said it was the 70s. It was the 60s when he got a woman named Margaret Howell Lovett and paired her with a dolphin named Peter in a flooded apartment so they could live together and learn more about each other. Yeah, so Lily was obsessed with the idea that dolphins could learn English, not just to understand it, but to speak it. Because sometimes apparently they'll mimic people speaking a little bit with one of their squeaks. So he's like, they clearly want to communicate.

That's why he injected him with LSD. That's why he had Peter live with Margaret. and she was supposed to teach him how to say hello Margaret. Apparently, though, the lessons would get interrupted because Peter was rather Randy Dolphin. He was captive, after all. So Margaret Howell of it became known as the woman who would manually satisfy her. Relief. And she was like, yes, I realize this is a very odd behavior.

and apparently Hustler picked this up and wrote all about it, this crazy thing that was going on. And she was like, look, I'm trying to actually interact with the dolphin, teach the dolphin this, and Peter just can't focus on anything else. So it's like an it, you scratch it, and then you move on. And of course, that's what everybody talked about. But eventually the funding dried up, and Peter was essentially just kicked out of the apartment.

is separated from Margaret, who he'd essentially adopted as either a pod member or his girlfriend or something. He had a very strong attachment to her, and they just ripped him away from her, and it did not go very well. No, he did not say so long and thanks for all the fish. He, very sadly, appeared to have taken his own life.

He just kind of sunk himself to the bottom and didn't breathe anymore. Yeah. How sad is that? Oh, dude, I mean, you put this dolphin in an apartment with this woman, and then that happens. Yeah. And then he seemingly kills himself. Yeah. That's awful.

Yeah. I mean, if you ever see a dolphin in captivity, it's a really horrible thing to see, especially if it's like just indoors. It's just, it's worse than other animals, I think, and I don't think any animal should be kept in captivity. But dolphins seem to be, it's just worse, you know? Yeah. I mean, to me. When you're talking about an ocean dwelling species, that's a big area.

Right, yeah. But they are smart, sort of a long way of getting around and saying we know they're super smart. We've seen their vocalizations and their social relationships and how they can learn and mimic things. But, you know, saying like they're as smart as humans, it's just a weird, people should stop comparing animals to humans like that. Yeah, that's a great point, Chuck. I mean, they're their own thing. Let's understand them on their own turn. Exactly. Meet them where they're at, as they say.

We do know they use tools. There is just, there's some dolphins that have been shown to basically attach a sponge to their rostrum, their beak or their schnaz, when they're hunting forging for food on the seafloor to basically cushion it. Isn't that neat? Yeah. It's amazing, like a little bumper. Yeah, but even more amazing than that is that not all dolphins do that. Some groups do that and that they learn it from. the other members of their pod,

which is a cut-and-dried version of culture that fits essentially all of the boxes for culture. And culture is very rare in the animal kingdom, and dolphins seem to display it at least through the sponge tool use. Yeah, for sure. So this is sort of the saddest part of the episode is when we talk about captive dolphins

and kind of what's... How humans have kind of screwed it all up, as usual. But there has been dolphin entertainment for a long time, since the 19th century, but things really grew after the TV show Flipper in the 1960s. There were three dolphinariums before that, and by 2009 there were 100 all over the world. And while trade is illegal in the U.S.-Mexico and Europe, they are captured at different, you know, places in the world, and we're going to talk about some specifically, like Japan and Taiwan.

But the rate of mortality is disputed. If you want to look at SeaWorld's research, they're going to say it's really not that different. If you're going to look at research by people who used to work at SeaWorld and don't anymore, they'll say, no, male orcas live 15 years less in captivity and females as much as 30. So just, I think that speaks for itself. And there was also a 1988 study, Chuck, in the journal Marine Mammal Science. And it found that about half of captive dolphins die within 90 days of being captured. So this is not, they're just not a species or a family or a type of animal that should. should be held in captivity, and yet they are.

SeaWorld very famously in 2016 said that they were no longer going to breed orcas, but that they weren't about to retire the orcas that they still had left. Yeah. That was largely thanks to the documentary Blackfish, which you've never seen that. Go watch it right now. Yeah, really good one. But they still have captive breeding programs for their dolphins, and those don't seem to be going anywhere either.

Yeah. Some people, you know, make an argument that, you know, studying these things in captivity is like how we learn about them, which is obviously true to a certain degree. But dolphin experts will say, hey, you're not learning about their real habitat if you're studying a dolphin in captivity because they're in captivity. Like their behaviors change, like, you know, all kinds of things are different because they're swimming around in a pool rather than the ocean. Yeah. Like imagine putting a human in a solitary confinement long enough for them to become. totally insane and studying their behavior and extrapolating it onto the rest of humanity. That's essentially what the critics are saying that people who study animals in captivity

are doing. It's tough to disagree with that as far as I'm concerned. Yeah. They're also used by the U.S. Navy. They're the second largest holder of marine mammals in the United States behind SeaWorld. Yeah. They started this program, the Marine Mammal Program for the Navy in 1959. And by the 1980s, they had over a hundred hundred hundred dolphins. I think that number is ticked down to, like, the mid-70s-ish now. But, you know, if you've heard stories of, like, dolphins used in war with, like, lasers on their head, they don't have lasers on their head, but there have been some verified

reports that dolphins have, like, blow guns on their head. Oh, was that verified? I know that there's certainly rumors. Well, not verified as in, like, the U.S. Navy verified it, but I think there have been people that are like, no, this is happening. and they've observed it in the Soviet space as well. Well, for the most part, what they're used is to either identify mines, like find and identify mines because their echolocation can detect the void

inside the casing of a mine that's buried under mud and they'll go tag it essentially or they'll look for swimmers or divers who are trying to sabotage like a ship or something and they'll go up and basically bump them and put a tracker on that diver and then let the Navy people take over and track that person. So the Navy's like no dolphin has ever killed a person in combat.

It just has never happened. But there is one recorded instance of a dolphin killing human. And from what I can tell, it sounds just. Yeah, this was in 1994. There was a dolphin near South Palo, Brazil, that was named Tiao, and he was very friendly and gregarious and was well known around that area for, like, hanging out with people

and had a lot of bad human interactions as a result of that. This guy was harassing him, apparently. There was also a case where he injured 29 swimmers. They were trying to ride him and put popsicle sticks in his blowhole. This guy was harassing him, and he basically nosed him in the abdomen, and the guy died from internal bleeding. Yeah, like Tiao, he wasn't a naval dolphin, by the way. He was just, this is just the one example of somebody,

of a dolphin killing a person. But, yeah, he was very, very friendly and he had to put up with a lot of crud. But he would, he would dish it back out if you pushed him past the point of no return. He apparently, after the guy died, Tiao is left, and they haven't seen him since. He fled the interview. Yeah. He's fleeing the interview. Mm-hmm.

Uh, dolphin watching is also, you know, you might think like, hey, that's a pretty innocuous thing to ride around a boat and look at these things. Right. Uh, there are companies that supposedly do it responsibly, but that's after like, you know, we had to get involved and say, hey, you can't feed them. That happened in the early 1990s. Uh, like, they're getting hit by boats because they're trying to, like, say, hey, you want to see some dolphins? Let's chum the water or whatever. Uh, or not chum or whatever they use. And, um, they put, like, time limits and distance limits.

If those are followed, then, you know, that's better. But any kind of boat activity like that is just going to disturb their normal activity. And if there are too many boats around, these dolphins will just be like, all right, I got to relocate somewhere, maybe far away. And maybe they're not even able to do that safely, you know. Yeah. Yeah. In that sense, it's still not enough regulation or protection of the dolphins. But you can make a pretty good case that the United States.

States has some good laws in place that do protect dolphins. There's one that was passed in 1972, the Marine Mammal Protection Act. And among other things, it basically said, you're not allowed to eat dolphin in the United States. They used to hunt dolphin and eat dolphin, and apparently people who have eaten dolphin are like, this is pretty good. But you can't do that in the U.S. anymore, not since the swing in 70s. And some people are like, well, you're eating dolphin when you eat canned tuna. That seems to be quite untrue. People say that? Yeah. There's a canned tuna that says it's dolphin safe. That doesn't mean that dolphins aren't being caught and bycatch. It means that there's no dolphin in your tuna. But there are types of

tuna fishing that are much safer for dolphins than others. So if you care about that and you love can tuna, look for a can tuna that says it's either pole caught, pole and mine caught, troll caught, free school or school caught, or fad-free. Any of those are much less likely to accidentally catch and kill dolphins when they're fishing for tuna. That's right. I always thought tuna was chicken up the sea, no? Did you ever see that episode of Jessica Simpson and Nick Lechase? Nope. there was it was insane like i saw that one and like what one i don't even know what you're talking about oh she was confused she was eating a can of tuna

of chicken of the sea tuna and she's like i thought it was chicken but then he's like no you know it's tuna she's like no i know it's tuna but i thought it was chicken and it just like you're you'll start bleeding out of your ear if you try to follow it too closely uh interesting it was something that show was actually surprisingly good you watched it yeah back in the day that surprises me it surprises me it surprises me Me too, now that I think about it. Yeah, Josh of Now wouldn't watch that, right? Probably not, no.

Josh of your? Yeah, yeah, for sure. Hey, I watched Brett Michaels' Rock of Love. Did you? That's my one reality TV show, Scar. Okay. That's not, that's, yeah, I was going to say it's not too bad. It's pretty bad.

It was pretty bad, but that's your boy. Oh, yeah, he's one of them. The whole crew is my boys. Yeah, C.C., the gang. That's right. Bobby Dolph and Ricky Rocket. I got it. Nice work, Chuck.

Dolphin hunting, though, still happens in other places around the world where we promise to talk about it a little bit. But there are drive hunts, very infamous ones that happen in Taiji, Japan, and the Faroe Islands. And there's another great documentary from 2009 called The Cove about the Japanese hunt. And it's awful to watch, but they round up just thousands and thousands of dolphins and corral them and sell some to Dauphinarians and slaughter the rest. You've seen it? I don't think I could see it, man.

Yeah, don't bother. You know the deal. There's also another documentary from Netflix called Seaspiracy. Not the best name ever, but it's about the Ginda Drop, which is an annual dolphin hunt in the Faroe Islands off of Denmark. And it's essentially the same thing. They're driven into a corral and then killed by knife. and I think in 2021

1,400 dolphins were killed in the Ginda drop that year, which was a record with knives. Jeez. I know. We did talk about bycatch a little bit. There was a study in 2020

that found that since 1950 over 80% of Indian Ocean dolphins may have been killed as bycatch, 80% with about 80,000 total cetaceans caught each year. And then there's ghost fishing which we did an episode on,

and that's, you know, when just the fishing industry as a whole ends up killing, you know, animals in the ocean. Ship strike and predation and starvation and getting caught up in nets and lines and all that awful stuff. Yeah, when they abandon their old fishing gear, they can't use anymore and it just floats around and can kill animals in the sea for hundreds of years. It's nuts.

We should end this on a high note, Chuck. So just a reminder, that dolphin moms use whistles to baby talk with their dolphin calves. That's right. And they play with each other. Yeah, for sure. That's it for dolphins, everybody. Hopefully you like this one.

We loved it. We might just do it again. Who knows? But in the meantime, while we figure that out, it's time for listener, ma'am. This is a, you remember the Volkswagen episode in the Lemon ad? We weren't sure exactly what that was all about. Oh, yeah. We heard from a lot of people.

This is from Lori, and I'm trusting Lori because Lori is an advertising copywriter. Oh, good. She says, hey, guys, confusion about the famous VW Lemon ad created by Bill Bernbach at DDB. The body copy is about VW's preoccupation with every detail. Each bug goes through a rigorous inspection process. 189 checkpoints. If there's any issue at all, no matter how small, the car doesn't leave the factory. So the car in this ad has a scratch on the glove compartment, so it's a lemon.

Apparently, there was fine print in the ad that explained this. One more thing, though, guys, all good ad campaigns begin with an insight, a simple sentence, a nugget of emotional truth, that determines how the brand speaks to consumers and how consumers relate to the brand. The insight for the VW Beetle, you don't buy a beetle, you adopt it. Oh, wow, that's neat. We just got Don Drapered by Lori. Yeah, we did. Way to go, Lori. That was a really great email.

That's hats off to you. Yeah. And Lori is a BW Beetle owner as well, so she ticks all the boxes. For sure. I trust Lori. That's a new stuff you should know, T-shirt. Agreed. Also, Chuck, I want to take a second to put in a correction, which I think we mentioned before, from the Zizian episode.

Uh-huh. So in it, I talked about Eliezer Yukowski, who is kind of like his machine intelligence research institute was kind of at the center of the Zizians. Like, that's where they all met. Yeah. and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute is trying to figure out how to create an artificial intelligence that is friendly to humans, that's aligned with human goals and doesn't wipe us out.

And I said that Eleazar had basically thrown in the towel and was like, this is not, it's too late, we're not going to make it. We got an email from Mallow Borgon, who was the CEO of Miri, and he said, hey, you got it a little wrong. Eliezer's book that's coming out It's called If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies It's not about throwing in the towel

It's saying like we're right there on the edge But there's still time We can still figure out how to make an AI A super intelligent AI That doesn't wipe out humanity And here's how and let's get busy now It's kind of like a call to arms To get humanity in action

So I definitely flubed that one And a huge thank you to Mallow for letting us know, but also letting us know really gently. Yeah, he's really nice about it. Yeah. So the book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. It's by Eliezer Yudkowski, who is an amazing thinker, and his collaborator, Nate Sores, comes out September 16th if you want to go buying it.

Fantastic. Fantastic. And if you want to get in touch with us like Mallow or Lori, you can send us an email to send it off to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the IHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Why are TSA rules so confusing?

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