On a Saturday morning in October 1987, a local fisherman called DRC with the news that he had brought a dolphin into the Sugarloaf Marina, some 15 miles north of Key West. This was not the dolphin fish that local fishermen usually catch in the Keys, but the mammal dolphin, and a very small one at that.
The fisherman had discovered the dolphin swimming slowly on the surface in a channel just off Sugarloaf Key. Since the dolphin appeared sick to the fisherman, and he had seen several large bull sharks in the area only a short time before, he had maneuvered the boat slowly over to the small creature. The dolphin responded by swimming close to the boat and allowing the fisherman to pick her up gently and place her into the boat without a struggle. The fisherman, rather astutely, kept the dolphin cool and wet in his boat for the 30-minute ride to the marina, where the DRC team soon met him.
The tiny dolphin fit easily in the back of a station wagon for the return trip to DRC, thus eliminating the search for a transport vehicle. Her unique characteristics included a long, slender snout, two-toned markings of light and dark gray, and a small, elongated body. What had been reported as a baby bottlenose dolphin turned out to be a different species all together. Although there was disagreement amongst several researchers, the authority on this type of dolphin identified her as a Stenella attenuata, commonly referred to as a Pantropical spotted dolphin. Her length of 4’5” placed her age around 12-14 months—too young to have the spots that are characteristic of the adults.
Upon arriving at DRC, we tried to feed our thin new charge. She was so small, she could be held in one arm and fed with the other. The dolphin was apparently hungry, because she ate quite well. She was named Dart, because of her slender, tapering shape, and the way she darted around.
The marine mammal veterinarians whom we consulted could not believe that the baby Stenella had even survived the trip. No member of this species had ever survived in human care because of a low tolerance to stress. Little did they realize Dart was to beat the odds and live with the DRC family for three years, finding a place deep in our hearts and the hearts of our visitors. Dart arrived at DRC at the height of the dolphin/tuna controversy, and became the “spokes-dolphin” for our letter-writing campaign. Dart helped save many dolphin lives by inspiring people to take a stand against the frightfully high mortality rate of spotted dolphins in the Eastern Tropical Pacific. The total mortality figure for incidental dolphin kills in 1988 was almost 79,000; in 1999 it was less than 2,000.
Why Dart stranded is uncertain. She was a young animal, judging by her size and lack of spots. Perhaps Hurricane Floyd, which swept the area two weeks prior to her stranding, had separated Dart from her mother and the rest of her pod. We can only speculate.
Dart seemed to be failing shortly after her arrival at DRC. She was lethargic; she was not eating. It didn’t look good. Back then, we used a pool at DRC adjacent to our dolphins’ pools for small stranded animals, a practice we since have discontinued to prevent any possibility of disease transmission to our colony. Dart was in a shallow pool next to our maternity pool, where a mother dolphin named Bee lived. Bee, who was pregnant at the time, seemed fascinated with her small neighbor, spending a lot of time watching her through the divider fence. Once we felt we had nothing to lose, we opened the gate to see what Bee would do.
Bee immediately went to Dart and began swimming with her in the echelon position, which a mother dolphin will use to guide her calf. From that time on and continuing after the birth of Bee’s own calf, Dart was a member of the family. Is this why she survived? We don’t know, but it was clear that she had been accepted into our bottlenose dolphin pod. Not only that, but Dart clearly accepted the human family at DRC. She was often the first at the dock when we came to visit her pool, whether for a formal session, or just to play.
We could not in good conscience release Dart because she would have been no better off than when we rescued her. It was unusual to find this kind of dolphin in the coastal waters of the Florida Keys since Stenellas normally inhabit deep oceanic waters of the Atlantic and Pacific. We could not locate a pod of her species close enough to DRC to minimize the transport time and stress that could so easily have killed her.
We lost Dart in November of 1990 to a raging viral infection that came on very suddenly. She never gave us a clue that something was wrong until about two days before she died. We tried the best that marine mammal medicine had to offer, but it was too late to help.
Dart was truly one-of-a-kind. For such a small creature, she left an awfully big hole in our lives when she left us. Though we still miss her, we will always cherish the three years she spent with us: for the pivotal role she played in the dolphin/tuna issue, the tremendous opportunity she gave us to learn about her species, and, most of all, the privilege of getting to know a bright and delightful being.
