“Look dolphins!” Cue the squeals of joy and the fumbling of  iPhones to capture the playful cetaceans as they dip in and out of the ocean.

“Look a shark!” Holy shit quick get out of the sea…. sweating, panic and possible heart failure.

 

Well in my bid to turn you all into shark fanatics I’m going to throw shade over another species.

The dolphin; playfully frolicking in the waves, leaping and spinning. That’s when they aren’t saving capsized sailors, or playing with dogs in a harbour. They sound like the saints of the sea, well sorry to burst your dolphin loving bubble but these guys are muderous, sexual predating arseholes.

The creeps can stay awake for days without even the slightest loss of mental or physical strength. The two halves of a dolphin’s brain can sleep in “shifts” so that one part remains awake while the other is sleeping. Thats just weird.

Let’s start with their cute little faces, that smile is equipped with 80-100 teeth to grab their prey. A dolphins got to eat I hear you cry but hang on that beak doesn’t just get used for feeding it’s also used for clubbing seals to death for fun. They don’t just stop at seals there are many reports of them turning on their cute cousins the porpoise. One video from Monterey bay in California showed bottlenose dolphins indulging in a porpicide blood bath just for kicks.

If blood sports weren’t enough don’t worry the dolphin is about to take an even sinister turn. In Shark Bay Australia, gangs of male dolphins single out a female and coercively mate with her. Head butting, charging and bitting the female into submission. The gangs of males can be as big as 14 trapping the singled out female and taking it in turns to have sex with her.

When there are no females around they have been known to turn on another male instead and it gets worse, there is one more gem lurking in dolphins’ mating behaviour. A 2004 paternity analysis of the Shark Bay population revealed that they occasionally practice incest, real nice!

Next up, dolphins murdering their own children.

During 1996 and 1997, 37 young bottlenose dolphins washed up on beaches in Virginia. Superficially, there appeared to be nothing wrong with them, but necropsy revealed evidence of “severe blunt-force trauma”. Infanticide is real in the dolphin world, “calf tossing” would have seen these dolphins banged up for at least 10 years if they managed to escape the death penalty in the state of Virginia.

So next time you romanticise of enjoying an ocean encounter with these guys beware flipper is an arsehole!

To finish and now that I have totally thrown dolphins under the bus I take it all back. It’s funny to humanise animal behaviours but let’s remember nature is not cruel nor callous just simply indifferent.