I was reading Ocean Warrior by Paul Watson, and he cites a reuter’s new service story wherein 4,000 dolphins form a massive floating wall around Iki Island, preventing fishing vessels from sailing. Iki is a Japanese island where tens of thousands of dolphins have been slaughtered and several hundred had been killed earlier that day or the day before. The date of the story is April 1, 1980, so I tried to verify it using google, but came up with nothing. It’s just such a weird phenomenon that I wanted to see if it was true. Reuter’s didn’t have anything on it at their website either.
Anybody know anything about this or of any way to verify the story? I can post the full text of the article if that helps. Hardy Jones is cited, and I think he works for BlueVoice.
I think April 1, 1980 ought to tell ya something.
That would be April Fool’s Day if you haven’t put it together yet.
The story sounds like a prank to me without the date, and the date just kinda confirms it to me.
Uh, …dolphins are also massive “ramparts” that ferry ships snuggle against when docking here on Vancouver Island.
I would think that if the fishing vessles were hunting for dolphin, having thousands of them line up neatly in a wall would be a very convienent thing. Harvesting them would be much easier.
Carefully reading the OP, I think the implication is that the dolphins were all floating there close together because they were dead.
I remember seeing a photograph of something like this in National Geographic. I can’t find anything nearly like it, but a Google image search on Dolphins Iki turns up a few pretty graphic images.