The History of the Dolphin
By ASHLEY MONTAGU
I have met with a story, which, although authenticated by undoubted evidence, looks very like a fable. Pliny the Younger
The history of the dolphin is one of the most fascinating and instructive in the historiography and the history of ideas in the western world. Indeed, it provides one of the most illuminating examples of what has probably occurred many times in human culture—a virtually complete loss of knowledge, at least in most segments of the culture, of what was formerly well understood by generations of men. “Not in entire forgetfulness” in some regions of the world, but certainly in “a sleep and a forgetting” in the most sophisticated centers of the western world.
Dolphins are mammals. They belong in the order Cetacea, suborder Odontoceti, family Delphinidae. Within the Delphinidae there are some twenty-two genera and about fifty-five species. The count includes the Killer Whale, the False Killer Whale, the White Whale, and the Pilot Whale, all of which are true dolphins. There are two subfamilies, the Delphinapterinae, consisting of the two genera Monodon monocerus, the Narwhal, and Delphinapterus leucas, the White Whale or Beluga. These two genera are distinguished by the fact that none of the neck vertebrae are fused, whereas in all remaining genera, embraced in the subfamily Delphininae, at least the first and second neck vertebrae are fused.
It was Aristotle in his History of Animals (521b) who first classified whales, porpoises, and dolphins as Cetacea, τὰ κήτη οῖον δελφις καὶ φωκαὶνα καὶ φάλαινα. Aristotle’s account of the Cetacea was astonishingly accurately written, and quite evidently from firsthand knowledge of these animals.
While most dolphins are inhabitants of the seas, there are some that live in rivers, and quite a few that are denizens of fresh-water rivers removed many miles from the sea. With one exception the diet of dolphins is principally fish. The one exception is Sotalia teuszii, which lives in the Kamerun River, and is believed to feed exclusively on vegetable matter. The Ting Ling dolphin (Lipotes vexillifer) lives in Ting Ling Lake, six hundred miles up the Yang-tse-Kiang. Another dolphin, the Susu or Ganges dolphin (Platanista gangetica) of Brahmapootra, the Ganges, and the Indus, has lenseless eyes and is almost blind. The fresh-water dolphins belong in the family Platanistidae.
It is of interest to note that, in connection with the vegetable feeding habits of the Kamerun dolphin, Lycophron, in his Alexandra, makes his dolphins feed on trees, and Ovid, in the Metamorphoses (III, 1, 202), describes a flood in which the dolphins take possession of the woods. Nonnus Panopolitanus, in the Dionysiaca (VI, 265-266), also describes dolphins as feeding on trees.
The normal range of length of dolphins is from 5 to 14 feet; the larger species, the whales, are considerably longer. Brain weight is between 1600 and 1700 grams in the familiar dolphins, and reaches 9200 grams and more in the whales. The large brain is associated with what, all observers familiar with these animals agree, is a quite considerable intelligence.
Here we must pause to make a plea for the proper usage of common names. The term “porpoise” refers to the small, beakless Delphinidae, which have a triangular dorsal fin and spade-shaped teeth. The name “dolphin” embraces all other members of the family, except the larger forms, which are called whales. The porpoises mostly belong in the genus Phocaena, the best known species of which, the Common Porpoise (Phocaena phocaena), never reaches a length exceeding 6 feet and weighs 100 to 120 pounds. There are some six species. The finless black porpoise constitutes the only other genus with a single species Neomeris phocaenoides.