Nature’s Most Depraved Mammal Was Never the One You Suspected

Everything the Flipper mythology sold us was technically accurate and also deeply incomplete. Dolphins are intelligent. They save drowning sailors. They’re curious, sociable, warm-blooded—all of that is real. What the documentaries left out is that they also fuck decapitated fish, which puts them in a category I wasn’t prepared to share with a creature I thought was basically a sea therapist.

I genuinely don’t know how to file this information. I stand in the supermarket feeling vaguely guilty about buying a cucumber that’s the wrong shape, while dolphins are out there in unclaimed international waters doing things that would get a human arrested in thirty-seven jurisdictions. The ocean has no HR department and apparently no limits, and the dolphin has understood this from the beginning.