ONCE, SNORKELING OFFHAWAII’S BIG ISLAND, I was delighted when a dolphin slipped across my legs, his supple flanks cool and sleek as silk. Another juvenile dolphin streaked under my outstretched hand, belly-up as a sign of trust. But the third dolphin, perhaps the eldest male, shocked me with a sharp thwack of his tail flukes that sent me flying over a coral reef, as if to say, Excuse me, butwe’re busy having fun with our own kind.
As another pair of male dolphins encircled a female spinner, the trio swam in what’s called a “consortship,” an intimate alliance that guards the female from other mates. Some of these alliances last for fifteen or twenty years. I wondered if this trio was stable or more spur of the moment. Hard to tell. But their pleasure was evident, both between the two males who glided tightly together and the female swirling in their pectoral embraces. It all seemed so affectionate, fluid, and sensual—these undulating bodies underwater.
When I shared this encounter with a dolphin researcher friend, she smiled. “Oh, I’ve often been in a dolphin ménage à quatre or more. They’ll be right next to my kayak romping and exploring each other’s bodies . . . any excuse to have sex with something or some other body will do.” She paused and added, “But I don’t think it’s just about sex, more about sensuality. The feel-good part of life. That’s where they outshine us.”
Biologists spend a lot of time writing about the important role of sound and vocalizations in dolphin culture, but my decades of wild encounters have shown me such meetings are as much about touch as sound. In fact, new research is showing how dolphin echolocation is more like touching with sound than seeing with it. Both dolphins and humans engage in and enjoy what scientists call “the mammalian instinct for touch.” Skin is our largest organ, and it’s full of sense receptors that send vital information to the brain. Touch releases oxytocin, reduces stress, boosts the immune system, fosters a sense of security and safety, especially in the young. For newborns of many species, this touch is essential for growth, bonding, and social development. The fact that a dolphin’s satiny skin is twenty times more sensitive than ours indicates touch is perhaps even more crucial to them.
For dolphins, touch is also play. They engage in sensual or sexual activities multiple times a day. Though actual copulation lasts only nanoseconds, the socializing around these encounters—bumping bodies, mounting, goosing, petting, and genital rubbing—goes on and on. A recent Cambridge University article by Janet Mann, a behavioral ecologist who has studied Indian Ocean bottlenose dolphins for decades, notes that the main sexual bonds in dolphins are between males, and that such behavior helps establish trust and teach courtship strategies. In the 1980s, Mann began observing two male dolphins who had formed an extremely close and sexual bond. Cookie and Smokey are still together today, nearly forty years later.
Of course, queerness in the animal kingdom is well documented. Animals, it seems, have never been too hung up on gender constructs, and by now we should understand how sensual and sexual touch is not just about procreation. It can create the kind of close bonds that help a population, a species, thrive through attachment, social cohesion, and evolution. Much has been made of Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” with its misinterpreted and often racist, sexist emphasis on competition and conquest. But Darwin also observed that humans and animals, when suffering, empathically mirror each other’s facial expressions. Author and UC Berkeley psychology professor Dacher Keltner notes that Darwin’s most important philosophy could actually be called “survival of the kindest.” Keltner says, “To be a mammal is to feel the strongest of Darwin’s instincts—sympathy. The expression of sympathy, Darwin noted, was found in mammalian patterns of tactile contact.” Great emotion expressed through touch.
It certainly felt like sympathetic contact as more spinners accompanied our kayaks in that Hawaiian dolphin sanctuary. We laughed as I skimmed the waves with one hand. Several dolphins tossed sponges to each other for sport. I was surprised when the lone female spinner left the pod to slip away and stay alongside me as if to say, Let the bachelor pod play. It’s just us.
I felt a rush of gratitude at what felt like being chosen. Soon we were joined by several other females, one of whom had a calf in tow. The affection between them all was obvious. Lots of trills, creaks, chirps, and ultrasonic chatter. While her calf is still in the womb, a dolphin mother teaches it her own signature whistle; after birth, the calf will find his own identifying whistle, his name. I sang out, making my own attempt at a signature whistle. And the spinners sang back. When the mother dolphin tucked her calf under a protective fin as other females—aunties—encircled us, I was reminded of sad Tahlequah, the orca who carried her dead calf for seventeen days in a moving grief ritual. Along her journey, her family pod swam near the mourning mother to touch her flanks, feed, and tend to her.
Swiss American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whose work on death, dying, and the stages of grief are well known, also considered touch crucial. It’s communication beyond words, easing isolation and emotional pain, and offering physical consolation to those facing uncertainty, anxiety, and death. She tells the story of bewildered doctors asking a hospital aide what she was doing with patients because the person’s vital signs stabilized and they were in less pain after her visits. The aide responded, “I touch them. I just touch them.” A light hand on a shoulder, gently holding a bare and often cold foot, a comforting tap on the arm.
While touch is essential to our development, many aging and elderly humans and animals don’t receive enough of these social and health benefits. Many of us become starved for touch. Perhaps this is why some people find sleeping with their pets offers some cross-species comfort. “. . . [S]he never felt she was sleeping with the wrong dog,” writes Judith Collas in one of my favorite poems. It’s no wonder our country emptied out animal shelters during the COVID pandemic, so many looking for furred bedmates to help stave off loneliness as we braved our fear and isolation.
Once I was called to speak to a group of wildlife advocates who were so burned out from their work protecting endangered species that they were in despair. I asked them to gather in small circles: “Tell me a story of your first memory of fur.”
Faces lit up with pleasure. Many of them spoke about beloved childhood pets before turning back to their conservation work. A previously taciturn wildlife shelter vet marveled at the soft fur of a wolf pup whose mother had been shot. A cougar researcher spoke about feeling the dense fur of a wild cat’s tawny pregnant belly, swollen, warm, and alive with her squirming kittens. An arctic fox scientist described the luxurious, silken undercoats that insulate the animals from intense cold down to their very paws.
Touch, even the memory of it, has the power to restore our sense of wonder and belonging. Our purpose, even. In this sympathy of touch, we feel more connected, less alone in what Loren Eiseley calls our “long loneliness.” We remember we are part of all that is alive and sentient.
BACK ON THEBIG ISLAND’S SANCTUARY, we kayaked far out into the warm waves until evening came. Another trio of spinners splashed up to greet us. Languidly, they glided alongside, their synchronized breathing a soft hush, hush, hush as they rose and dove together. Dreamily, we all floated along in the glass-smooth bay, together in flow, our paddles barely touching the surface, like pectoral fins slicing the still water. The dolphins lay on their sides looking up at us, those wide-open, unblinking eyes holding us in their intimate gaze. To be seen and studied by another species, a wild animal, is to be witnessed in a way that feels new, startling. The experience is both familiar and alien, mirrored by a mind that is equal to our own.
We stayed on the water long after sunset, not wanting to leave this floating communion. Above us the star-studded heavens unfolded, dark water reflecting constellations rarely seen in our bright cities—Pegasus, Cassiopeia, and my favorite, the seven bright sisters of the Pleiades. Around us we felt the spinners’ shifting energies as they readied to hunt. Two males suddenly leaped up, spinning in sync then splashing down around a female. Belly to belly, their pectoral fins embracing, they rolled before streaking off like silver torpedoes.
At last, we left the spinners and slowly paddled home, their sonar echoing off our kayaks like the haunting ping of panpipes. In the fragrant tropical night, my body sang, vibrating like a drumskin. Perhaps this is what it is to be human, or dolphin: to reach out for another skin with the part of oneself that is the most vulnerable, most mortal. It may take all our lives to fully possess our own skin, let alone appreciate another’s. But we can practice, memorizing the feel, the pulses, curves, and hollows, as if our hands can hear and see and somehow let be, even while embracing.