You don`t just cannonball off the dock into a dolphin lagoon, the trainers at the Dolphin Research Center here warn visitors.
You must enter the water slowly, like a well-mannered guest, they say.
”How would you like it if someone jumped through the roof of your house?” they ask.
Most of the tourists who visit the grounds and lagoons of this family-operated research and educational center at the edge of the Gulf of Mexico in the Florida Keys pay $5 just to catch a glimpse of Tursiops truncatus, the bottlenose dolphin.
For an additional $45, however, four members of each tour group get to take part in a Flipper fantasy known as a ”dolphin encounter,” in which they are allowed to swim, politely, feet-to-fins with these mystical mammals of the sea.
Offered four times a day, five days a week, the encounters last only about 20 minutes and reservations must be made a month in advance.
Nevertheless, the encounters are enormously popular, even with the kind of people who normally don`t stand in line for anything.
Among those who have journeyed to the lower Keys to swim with the dolphins are conductor Leonard Bernstein (”He couldn`t keep his arms still in the water, and most of the dolphins didn`t like him”) and Olympians Greg Louganis and Matt Biondi (”The dolphins watched the athletes in the water as if `Wow, I didn`t know humans could do that.` ”)
Under the supervision of a trainer, the swimmers receive a ”kiss” from one of the half-dozen dolphins who appear from the depths. The participants are allowed also to shake hands-to-fins and send the dolphins leaping over a bar.
The ultimate thrill is a dorsal fin ride in which one or two dolphins
(depending on how you size up on dolphin sonar), tow a rider rapidly through the water like King Neptune on God`s own jet-skis.
Whether you`ve been exposed to dolphins only on television (”Flipper”
and ”Dolphin Cove”), the movies (”The Day of the Dolphin,” ”Where the River Runs Black,” ”Cocoon” and ”The Big Blue”) or live dolphin performances, actually swimming with them is an undeniable kick. Even if the initial face-to-face encounter with a 500-pound marine mammal is a bit terrifying and being kissed a bit like getting jabbed in the jaw with a soggy baseball bat.
Dolphins are hot these days. Some say dangerously hot. Ecological groups are concerned that dolphin encounters are being used for everything from New Age therapy to hawking hotel rooms. There are legitimate educational and scientific aspects to the encounters, they say, but things have begun to get out of hand.
Scientists book time with the dolphins at several Florida facilities to focus the attention of learning disabled children, who show increased concentration in the presence of the dolphins. Therapists have also found that dolphins are useful in calming neurotic mental patients. Marine biology students take week-long courses that include dolphin encounters.
But the marine mammals are also all the rage among the pseudo-scientists and cosmic self-seekers, dolphin trainers said.
The operators of Dolphins Plus, another educational and research center just up U.S. 1 from the Dolphin Research Center, have had to threaten legal action against groups who book time with their animals and then advertise in newspapers and magazines for ”healing sessions” with the dolphins.
”We call them the `crystal people,` ” said Lloyd Borguss, who operates Dolphins Plus with his son Richard. ”They have wanted to come in here and hold sessions, but we don`t allow that on the premises.
”I guess they like dolphins the way some people worship snakes and chickens,” he offered.
Although she does not work with crystals, New Age therapist Kim Rosen of Bearsville, N.Y., books encounter sessions with Dolphins Plus several times a year in conducting ”Interspecies Connection” four-day workshops at $675-per- person.
Rosen works through the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies to bring clients in contact with dolphins for their ”personal growth.” Two singers and a pianist perform spontaneous improvisational numbers during Rosen`s dolphin swims.
”The contact with the dolphin evokes inner journeys of the psyche, which I call visualizations,” she said. ”The contact with the dolphins evokes the inner child who has less fear and more spontaneity, creativity and lovingness than we adults.
”I could get metaphysical about it, but I try not to.”
Borguss said he also turned down a nudist group seeking to swim ”au naturel” with the dolphins.
”We could have sold tickets I guess,” he said. ”But our aim is to spread the word about the environment and ecology and more awareness about these animals so they are not taken too lightly.”
Dolphin encounter programs for the public began cropping up in the last five years as low-budget but well-intentioned places like the Dolphin Research Center and Dolphins Plus searched for ways to help fund the scientific study of marine mammals.
The National Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 allows for the capture and display of bottlenose dolphins for purposes of research and education. The dolphin encounters had been allowed to operate under these permits.
The wrath of the dolphin protectors was roused, however, when at least two high-priced hotels-Hawk`s Cay resort in the Florida Keys and the new Hyatt Waikoloa mega-resort in Hawaii-set up dolphin encounter programs as attractions for their guests.
Although both sides appear to have great concern for the safety and well- being of the dolphins, the opponents of dolphin encounters have sometimes been guilty of strident overstatement in the heat of the controversy.
”Dolphin encounters are getting to be like the reptile farms in South Carolina,” said Eugene C. Bricklemyer of Ocean Ecology, an arm of Greenpeace U.S.A.
”How do you deny the Day-Glo Motel in Des Moines a dolphin permit when you issue one for a hotel in Hawaii?” he said.
Last summer, at the behest of the concerned groups, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and its National Marine Fisheries Service placed a moratorium on new permits for dolphin encounter programs. Current permit holders were notified late last year that their licenses will expire Dec. 31, 1989.
In the meantime, biologists for the fisheries service are trying to decide whether to license more dolphin enounters, shut them all down or greatly restrict them.
”When the Hyatt applied for its permit there was a great deal of public comment, and we decided we did not know enough about the potential impact of these programs,” said Georgia Cranmore, an ecologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service.
Wanda Cain, one of the federal biologists participating in the dolphin encounter evaluation, said she has found little evidence that they are harmful to man or beast.
Greenpeace`s Ocean Ecology division has raised questions-some without much foundation-that dolphin encounters could subject human swimmers to disease and, because of the dolphin`s undiscriminating sex drive, even possible sexual abuse.
The critics claimed that the dolphins might be exposed to human ailments and exploitation and that the wild population might be diminished.
The concern of Bricklemyer`s organization is shared even by many of those who operate dolphin encounter programs: that dolphins are in danger of becoming the marine equivalent of Easter chicks, novelty creatures that humans may just love to death.
”It would be absurd to do away with the programs all together, but I agree one hundred prercent that this type of program has to be regulated,”
said Jane Rodriguez, who owns the Dolphin Research Center with her husband, Mandy.
Greenpeace cites the experience of Kathleen J. Forti of Virginia Beach, Va., who said she was assaulted ”and felt both battered and raped” by a dolphin while participating in a licensed encounter program.
In May of last year, Forti took part in a four-day workshop at Dolphins Plus in Key Largo.
Dolphins Plus charges $40 for its one-hour lecture and 20-minute dolphin encounter. Unlike most of the other dolphin encounter programs, theirs does not include performances or tricks by the dolphins. The owners believe those antics give an aura of a ”traveling side show” to what is supposed to be an educational experience, Borguss said.
After an orientation session at the Key Largo facility, Forti and several other workshop participants were allowed to enter a seawater pool with a group of dolphins, she said.
”No sooner did I get in the water than a dolphin came up behind me, grabbed my leg and started shaking forcefully. It scared me, as it increased in intensity,” Forti wrote in a letter in July to William E. Evans, U.S. Undersecretary for Oceans and Atmosphere.
”I thought I was under some kind of attack. I saw to my astonishment that it was a male dolphin and he was trying to mate. The more I tried to get away, the more he latched on,” she wrote.
”I was not the only woman this dolphin acted out the same behavior with. One woman was so upset she tried to get out of the water only to have the dolphin grab her scuba fin and try pulling her back in.”
The owner of Dolphins Plus, Richard Borguss said that the dolphin cited by Forti has been known to attempt to mate with human swimmers.
He made no apologies for Forti`s experience.
”That`s her problem,” he said. ”She was warned that the dolphins might rub against her, or whatever. If she did not like it, she could have gotten out of the water, nobody forced her to stay in.”
The unbridaled sexuality of dolphins has not been proclaimed in seaquarium shows or in Hollywood depictions, but it is commonly discussed among marine mammal experts who joke about ”Flipper`s secret life.”
At the Dolphin Research Center, participants in the dolphin encounter are warned not to rub the bellies of their lagoon hosts, but unless they persist in knowing why, the reason is not provided.
”If you stroke their tummies, they get aroused and say, `Don`t mind if I do,` ” said Lynn Calero, a Hyde Park native, who is medical director at the Florida center.
”I have been bumped around the water by male dolphins several times, and it is not pleasant,” she said.
She said they have had no complaints from swimmers of sexual harrassment by the dolphins.
Greenpeace also distributes a report of a veterinarian developing a skin condition after performing an autopsy on a bottlenose dolphin with the same skin affliction.
The veterinarian`s condition cleared up without treatment. Other marine mammal experts said there is a great difference between casual contact while swimming with the dolphins and direct contact during an autopsy.
”We hired one of the best marine mammal veterinarians in the country, and he found no evidence of disease transmission between dolphins and humans,” said Mike Wood, curator of the Theater of the Sea on Islamorada in the Florida Keys, which has a dolphin encounter that charges $50 per person and also helps fund research.
Another concern of the groups opposed to dolphin encounters is that if such programs are allowed to flourish, the demand for dolphins might diminish their number in the wild. This is a particularly troubling issue at a time when natural catastrophes, such as the red tide algae poisoning of thousands of dolphins on the East Cost, are already taking a toll.
Biologists with the National Marine Fisheries Service counter that the federal government restricts the annual ”take” of wild dolphins with a quota system that in recent years has allowed no more than 2 percent of the wild population to be captured. Dolphins, as might be expected, also breed well in captivity.
The operators of the two resort-affiliated dolphin encounter programs dispute critics` claims that they exploit the mammals for their own profit.
The Hawk`s Cay resort on Duck Key in the Florida Keys is the only encounter program without a federal permit although it has been allowed to operate while its application is pending.
In addition to nightly room rates of $190 to $285, guests at Hawk`s Cay may pay $40 for a 30-minute swim with the resort`s dolphins in a seaside lagoon. Dorsal fin rides are included in the program, which has educational aspects, according to its operators.
While the program at Hawk`s Cay had been an irritant to some who doubt its educational value, it was the issuance of a permit to the $350 million Hyatt Regency Waikoloa that set off howls from Greenpeace that ”Soon, every Tom, Dick and Harry will be running out and capturing dolphins.”
Since then, the Hawaiian resort`s national advertising campaign has fueled the flames with its prominent display of the mammals and references to a ”private lagoon where you can swim with tame dolphins.”
Although critics tend to view the Hyatt dolphin program as a commercial corruption, it was conceived and is now operated by two internationally prominent marine mammal veterinarians; Dr. Jay Sweeney of San Diego and Dr. L. Rae Stone of Mesa, Ariz. Both of them consult for aquariums and marine attractions around the world.
According to Dr. Stone, the veterinarians wanted to create the perfect habitat in which to study marine mammals, but they lacked the money to build it themselves. In resort developer Chris Hemmeter and the Hyatt Corporation, they found a willing partner with the money to finance their dream.
Hemmeter and Hyatt incorporated it into the Hyatt Waikoloa, which accommodates 3,000 guests and is the third largest ”city” on the island of Hawaii. Room rates at the resort range from $195 to $2,500 a night.
Participants in the Hawaiian dolphin encounter pay up to $55 to swim with the dolphins-but not ride them or be towed by them-for 10 minutes. The swim is preceded by an educational lecture. The public is allowed into the Hyatt program and groups of school children are given free admission.
The veterinarians operate the concession and pay a percentage of their profits to the resort. Dr. Stone said that their encounter is a marriage between commercial and scientific interests that benefits all parties.
”If we can get organizations like the Hyatt to participate in dolphin research, that benfits all of us. Corporate America has the power to solve environmental issues, why should these facilities be limited to nonprofit groups?”
The veterinarians are planning dolphin research studies in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Education, several universities and private groups, she said.
Visiting marine mammal scientists are provided free accommodations with approval by the veterinarians. Like most of those involved in dolphin encounter programs, Stone is a member of Greenpeace and she finds it ironic and frustrating to find herself at odds with her comrades.
”Politically, some of the Greenpeace leaders are against dolphins in captivity for any reason,” she said. ”But in the larger picture, I think we are all on the same side.”
