Journey of the Pink Dolphins

by Sy Montgomery

  None of these sightings were anything like watching marine dolphins in aquaria. In a clear-water tank, you can always see the entire animal; and besides, the trained Atlantic bottlenose not only leaps obligingly out of the water for its audience, but often suspends itself halfway, its head and upper torso visible, like a person treading water in a pool. Neither did our glimpses match the images of botos we had seen in films, photos, or illustrations. These, too, either showed the entire animal or at least a large portion of the body. Many of the photographs were of animals that had been hauled out of the water in nets. One dolphin, which we’d seen in a book in Vera’s office, was actually lying on a mattress. Once we got to the floating house, we noted its fabric matched exactly those of the mattresses we were sleeping on. The documentary clips, I later discovered, were all filmed in semicaptive situations, when the dolphins had been cordoned off in clear shallows.

  But to us, the botos came only in fragments: Once, a pink tail waved at us as clearly as a person hailing a cab. Another time, about a hundred yards away, a boto raised his head out of the water, spy-hopping like a huge California gray whale. But mostly, all we saw was the top of a head, or the curve of a dorsal fin—not an entire creature, but a flash of color and shape. We had to learn how to see them, to develop what is called the search image—to process that these pieces really were dolphins.

  We looked desperately for markings that would allow us to identify individuals. This is a standard first step in studying animals, and often discovering the key characteristic to look for represents the first breakthrough. In studying mountain gorillas, Dian Fossey had found that each animal had an individual nose print. Studying African elephants, Cynthia Moss looked for distinctive notches in the ears. Tigers have individual patterns of stripes—and, some Indian researchers believe, individual footprints. Vera had tried to look for scars or notches on the dorsal fins of her dolphins. When a female is in estrus, males will fight viciously with one another, Vera explained, so there is ample opportunity to leave scars. So on our second evening, when we saw one dolphin with a particularly flat dorsal fin, and another with a V notched into his, we were overjoyed. But botos do not show their dorsals on every dive. In fact, they never seemed to reveal to us the same angle. We never saw those two again—or if we did, we couldn’t recognize them.

  Neither could we recognize animals by size. Sometimes, when an animal dove in an arching roll, we could tell when we were watching a particularly big or small dolphin. But botos don’t always dive this way. They can float up and sink down, the way helicopters fly, and in these cases only reveal the melon of the top of the head or the dorsal ridge. Once, we knew we were looking at a youngster: the head was so small. He would have been about a year old, as most births here occur from May through July, when the waters are highest or falling. But generally, we had no idea of size or age, because such a tiny fragment of the animal was visible at a time, and for only a short moment.

  The only clear feature of each sighting was color. Sometimes we were treated to a particularly vivid flamingo pink; other times, all we saw was a dark gray; many of the dolphins appeared to be mottled. But since we often had to look directly into the sun, and we almost always saw them at times the skies were changing, we knew even this could be an artifact of light. In fact, the dolphins actually do change color, though no one knows why: they may glow pinker with exertion, or with age, or their color might change with the temperature and turbidity of the water. “I know what our problem is,” Dianne said to me as the creatures seemed to morph before our eyes. “These aren’t dolphins. They’re chameleons.”

  No wonder so little is known about them. “Although Inia was first collected by Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira about 1790, little knowledge has been obtained since then about its biology,” Vera and her husband wrote in a paper detailing the first seven years of their work. Theirs was the first, and still considered the only, major ecological study to be published on the species. From pooling data with biologists studying boto in Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador, and from themselves patrolling thousands of miles of river at a leisurely seven miles per hour, the couple determined the boto’s range is enormous. The species is found in most of the major tributaries of both the Amazon and Orinoco, with the exception of the lower reaches of the Xingú River at the mouth of the Amazon and the southern half of the Tapajós. And when the wet season floods the land, the dolphins enter every riverine habitat in the Amazon basin, from grasslands to treetops.

  The couple also collected carcasses of dead botos. They measured them. They dissected the bodies. They measured the organs. They counted the parasites. Vera was particularly eager to look in their stomachs to see what they ate; a 1970 report claiming that botos compete with fishermen had sparked her initial interest in the species. Less than half the fish they eat are commercially important, Vera found, and these are taken in relatively small quantities. For botos can eat almost anything: with big, conical teeth and strong jaws, a boto can break a turtle shell. In several stomachs, she has found rock-hard armored catfish with erectile spines. Botos will take some fifty species of fish, and in a single meal might consume more different kinds of fish than other species of dolphin might eat in a lifetime.

  But, as important as these findings are, Vera’s papers still detail a litany of unknowns: “Virtually nothing is known about the physiology of Inia . . . its overall abundance is unknown . . . where these animals go during the dry season is unknown . . . there has been little research on Inia in most of the countries where it is found . . . there are insufficient data to be analyzed for trends for any population. . . .” No one knows when the breeding season is, if there is any. No one knows the structure of social groups, if they exist.

  At the Meeting of the Waters, Vera found she could not even begin to chronicle the dolphins’ lives. “They are not easy animals to study in the main river,” she explained to us later. “It’s too wide.” The animals seemed to flicker at the edge of our consciousness—a movement at the corner of the field of vision, a spume of breath that lingered after the animal dove, fragments we could not hope to unite into meaning.

  But occasionally, a glimpse called to us, like a snatch of vaguely remembered melody. One day at 5 P.M., after Nildon had stilled our boat by wedging it into the crown of a drowned careru tree, three of them came. Two swam close together; a third seemed to have arrived alone. In Vera’s research, most of the botos sighted were solitary, and groups greater than two were seldom encountered. Twelve to 26 percent of the observations Vera analyzed were pairs like this one: probably, she concluded, mother and calf. The bond between mother and offspring is very close; Vera has found they stay together for at least two and a half years. We had seen photos of mothers and young swimming together, often one on top of the other, their long snouts touching, one flipper trailing along the other’s flesh, the way a child holds a parent’s hand simply for the comfort of touch.

  Four times the two botos surfaced within fifty yards of our boat, inches from one another, and I imagined—though I could not see—that they swam touching. For they are sensuous animals. An observer at Germany’s Duisburg Zoo, which has housed two botos since 1975, recorded the dolphins blowing curtains of bubbles through which one or the other would then swim; in one case, the elder dolphin, Vater, grabbed a scrub brush, left in the tank as a toy. Pulling it quickly downward through the water in his mouth, he created, along the whole length of the handle, a rising curtain of prickling and glittering air bubbles. The younger dolphin, Baby, then rose in the water and rolled in the bubbles, “obviously with great pleasure. . . . The purpose of the air bubbles,” wrote Wolfgang Gewalt, “seems to be the benefit of a special kind of caressing massage, similar to whirlpools.”

  In captivity, botos are inventive lovers. After foreplay in which the male nibbles gently at the female’s flippers and flukes, they make love in at least three different positions: head-to-head, head-to-tail, and at right angles; they may indulge in this forty-seven times in three
and a half hours. Both sexes masturbate, the male rubbing his penis against objects, the female inserting objects into her vagina or pressing against them. Males sometimes use the sensitive penis as an exploratory probe, even inserting it into another dolphin’s blowhole. The botos’ pursuit of sensual pleasures, Gewalt wrote, seemed “more highly developed than any similar behavior known up to now from other cetaceans, either free living or kept in the Zoo.”

  And then we saw the young dolphin slowly roll in the water. Languidly, the baby turned, revealing a chubby pink belly and paddle-shaped flippers spread akimbo. For a long moment, with his mother beside him, the yearling floated at the surface on his back, as if he were savoring the feel of sun warming his skin, and then, equally, the way the river reclaimed his body in its cooling welcome.

  How I wanted to join them! Vera had spoken with us of this same longing: “Sometimes it is my desire to swim with them,” she had told us in her office at INPA, “but there are piranhas. The water looks nice, but I always think of the piranhas.” She has friends who have been badly bitten. She has found botos with crescent-shaped hunks taken out of the skin, the work of razor-sharp teeth. “And when we catch the boto to freeze-brand, we make a circle with our net,” she had told us. “We pulled the net out—this new net, a beautiful brand-new net—and it came out like a rag! The piranhas destroyed it!”

  Anything might be in these waters, she had warned. “You may feel something touching you, but you do not know what it is. It can be a piece of wood, it can be a grass, it can be a snake, it can be a piranha, it can be a stingray—it can be a shark. We have caught in the Solimões River four huge sharks—two meters and a half. And it’s a marine shark! It comes in the Amazon and can be found all the way to Iquitos in Peru. They’re almost the same color as the water. When they come here, they get the mud on the skin. So I will not swim with dolphins!”

  Never before had I felt so separate from water. There was us; there was the surface; and there was the impenetrable world below. Anything might be in these waters. I remembered the legends about the boto’s enchanted underwater city, which people deeply fear. But their fear is tinged with desire. I had read that shamans will sometimes seek out dolphins, contacting them in dreams or in ecstasies induced by hallucinogenic drinks or snuff, and ask them to show them the secrets of the Encante. The people know the river is dangerous. But beneath the river, they say, is a place of unimaginable riches, the treasures of lost souls, pleasures to quench every desire. The dolphins there preside over a world where there is no longing, only music and singing and dancing. Sometimes, it is said, you can hear snatches of their songs.

  Sometimes we heard strange sounds underneath us. The bottom of our boat was a stethoscope to an unknown beneath. Early one morning, we heard the high-pitched whine of an electric current. What could it be?

  “Pescada,” answered Nildon. (“Fish!”)

  Then we saw one dolphin take off like a shot beside our boat. “Muito rápido!” exclaimed Nildon. “El boto fazer compras.” (“The boto is shopping.”) He was chasing a fish.

  After we had watched them for an hour, the dolphins disappeared at 6:34 that morning. We waited and waited. Kingfishers zoomed like arrows across the brown water. An electric green parrot screamed from the top of a tree. We listened to fruits falling into the water. But we saw no more dolphins, heard no more breath.

  By 8:45, the heat was gathering like a cloud of gnats. The dolphins did not return. So we headed to Marchantaria, the floodplain lake named after a grassy island there, six miles upriver along the Rio Solimões.

  Vera had picked five checkpoints from which she tried to identify individuals as they entered and left the lake. This time of year, Vera had told us, the botos come to the lake following fish, who go there to eat the fruits dropping from the trees in the flooded forest.

  Our days and nights on the river were punctuated by the splash of the ripe fruits the trees released into the river. In the rainy season, there is fruit for everyone: the monkeys and parrots, the fruit bats and bamboo rats, the dainty brocket deer and the strange, snouted tapir, a four-toed forest dweller who looks like a cross between an elephant, a rhino, and a pig. But the trees do not make their fruits for birds or mammals to eat and disperse, as most fruit trees do. To carry their seeds to the locations where they will grow and feed these many mouths, the trees here make their fruits for fish.

  Nowhere else on earth do fish depend on seeds and fruit for a major part of the year. But in the Amazon, the trees release their seeds to voyage on the water, and more than two hundred species of fruit-eating fish migrate into the flooded forest to gorge and to spawn. The fruit embarks on a journey of rebirth, and its splash is the first note in an unheard symphony of accommodations between water and trees, trees and fish, fish and mammals.

  The trees here have evolved ways to make their fruit attractive to fish and easy to find. Most fruits float. Many of the fruit trees, such as laurels and cinnamons, produce fragrant organic latexes, oils, resins, and acids. The fish wait beneath these trees, drawn by the scent. Some, like the tambaqui, have developed nasal flaps on the upper part of the snout to help them smell these fruits. To crush the seeds of the seringuera tree, tambaqui have molars like those of horses, and huge, powerful jaws. Others, like the ancient, black-armored catfishes, swallow the stonelike seeds of palm fruits whole and digest the fleshy covering. The seeds pass through the gut and are defecated whole, where they can germinate in a new location. There, once the waters recede, they do not have to compete with the parent tree, or attempt to fight its shade.

  “It is tempting to hypothesize that fish and trees have evolved in a mutualistic relation,” Michael Goulding, one of the leading experts on Amazon fish, has written. The sustaining relationship between fish and trees here has certainly been noted by the people who have lived for centuries along the rivers that flood these forests. One of the central myths of Amazonian people is the story of the World Tree, which in many river cultures is said to be full of the water that gave birth to the Amazon and its fishes. As a Shipibo myth tells it, the world began this way: When the sun first emerged, it hit the branches of the World Tree, which released its luscious fruits into the lake like rain. Fish rose to the surface to eat the fruit. From the bites the fish took emerged all the species of birds in the world—connecting the water with the sky.

  And at the edges of the day—at the times when dolphins come, at the times the clouds gather—the world re-creates itself from water anew. The scientists now tell us that life itself lifts up from the water, like a spirit, to seed the clouds. Oxford and East Anglia University scientists have proposed that a gas emitted by many algae—dimethyl sulfide—evolved to allow small tropical microbes to rise from the water and take to the air. And this same gas, they note, is well known as the primary natural source of airborne particles around which water droplets form to create clouds. The organisms do this, suggest the scientists, for the same reason trees make fruit: to speed them on their journeys toward new life. In the heart-quickening thunderstorms that soaked our nights in Brazil, these tiny lives were riding the rain back to earth.

  The legendary Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus, whom Aristotle considered two centuries later to be the founder of the physical sciences, believed that all matter consists ultimately of water; that is easy to believe here. Despite Vera’s warning, I put my hand into the soupy lake: it feels thick and alive, not just fluid, but tissue, like skin and blood. This is not merely a medium for life, I thought: the water is life, itself alive.

  Travelers have long written of being overwhelmed by the immensity of the Amazon. “A vast inland sea,” as explorer Henry Walter Bates called it, the river stretches 4,000 miles, discharging fourteen times the daily flow of the Mississippi. Its jungle spreads for 2.5 million square miles—“a forest the size of the face of the full moon,” anthropologist Wade Davis observes. But to me, the immensity of the Amazon was here at my fingertips, as I put my hand into the living water. The immensity of the Am
azon is in its unfathomable wholeness, a wholeness forever giving birth to a universe unimaginably strange and perfect and unseen. And this, I knew, was the source of my longing to follow the dolphins: though I was drawn by the fragmentary glimpses they had shown me at the surface, I was compelled by their siren strangeness, their immersion in the wholeness of the unknown world below.

  After forty-five minutes’ travel, we arrived at a flooded meadow. The tassel-like seedheads of the grasses smelled sweet as orchids. Egrets flashed bright against the sun. There is another INPA floating research station here, and we stopped by to speak with some visiting German scientists to see if they had seen botos. They had seen two that morning, and more would be coming soon: as the rains continued, the water was expected to rise another meter in the next week.

  We journeyed farther, the motor at a low purr as we scanned the water. Each small wave seemed to gather itself into a promise, seemed to darken and quicken, as we prayed for a pink fin to arise, like the limb of a baby breaching from a dark womb. But then the wave would dissolve into itself, and hope vanished as completely as a fruit swallowed by a fish.

  The sun was so hot it stung our skin. Sweat poured into our eyes as we squinted into the glare. Each night, our sleep had been fragmented by lightning storms and downpours. As Dianne swore in various languages, we had had to get up and secure the shutters in the middle of the night. Once awake, we then realized ants were crawling on us, a fact that had mercifully been concealed while we were asleep. So we were exhausted as well as hot.