From the day the bottlenose dolphin calf was born six weeks early, skinny and weak, his mother didn’t seem to know what to do with him. She had never given birth before.
The calf might have died in her care, as is most often the case with first-born dolphins. But he was lucky. His mother’s mother, present at his birth Oct. 19 at Brookfield Zoo, took charge of his care almost immediately.
She showed him how to swim to the surface to breathe, kept him from crashing into the sides of the pool and maneuvered him to nurse from her mammaries, where he has taken all his nourishment ever since.
On Friday the zoo opened the underwater viewing portion of the Seven Seas dolphin arena to let zoo visitors see the now fat and peppy calf swimming with his experienced grandmother, Tapeko, and novice mother, Kaylee.
Zoo officials aren’t sure such a maternal arrangement has ever happened before, at least in captivity, and zoo researchers have seized the opportunity to observe the dolphins 24 hours a day.
They hope to learn more about little-known aspects of dolphins, such as how often their babies nurse, and delve into the troubling mystery of why dolphin babies from first-time mothers almost always die.
The calf so far is known only as K.01, a bit of shorthand the zoo researchers use to denote he was born in 2001 to Kaylee, an 8-year-old dolphin who also was born at Brookfield.
More than a year ago, the zoo brought in two 18-year-old male dolphins on breeding loan, hoping they would impregnate Kaylee and her mother, 18-year-old Tapeko. Both females did become pregnant.
“We hoped that both females would give birth about the same time,” said Melinda Pruett-Jones, the zoo’s chief mammal curator, “so Kaylee could learn tricks of motherhood by watching Tapeko.”
The original due dates for the babies were in December, but hopes of dual births were dashed early in October when Tapeko delivered a stillborn calf.
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Then at 7:30 a.m. Oct. 18, keepers arriving for work at Seven Seas found K.01 swimming weakly in the pool. They believed he had been born just an hour or two earlier.
The calf swam at one side of the grandma, Tapeko, and Kaylee swam on Tapeko’s other side. Both mom and grandma were whistling and the baby would whistle back.
“But it was Tapeko who kept the calf from swimming into the walls of the pool and directed it up to the surface to get a breath of air,” said Pruett-Jones.
Soon after birth, a baby dolphin usually takes up a position next to its mother, where it is effortlessly pulled along by the adult’s wake, a technique called slipstreaming.
“The babies really need to conserve energy in order to survive their first few days,” Pruett-Jones said. “We could see that this guy was having trouble slipstreaming with two adult females jockeying around him.”
Keepers soon feared for K.01’s survival, because he seemed to be weakening even before he’d had a chance to nurse.
Kaylee, the mother, was physically ready to nurse her calf, but Tapeko was swimming between them. And Tapeko, whose mammaries were still swollen from her own pregnancy, was encouraging the calf to nurse.
“We had to decide fairly quickly on a course of action, or we weren’t going to have a calf for either female to take care of,” said Pruett-Jones.
Mother moves out of way
Four hours after discovering K.01’s birth, keepers moved his real mom to a different pool, isolating the calf with grandma. Within hours, Tapeko had him restfully slipstreaming at her side and nursing whenever he was hungry.
The mother seemed to accept the arrangement. She ate normally and showed no signs of distress from not being with the calf.
Kaylee also willingly let keepers take the samples from her with a breast pump, presenting an extraordinary opportunity for scientists to examine milk from a first-time dolphin mother.
Brookfield research biologist Randy Wells suspects the milk may hold clues to the reason why so few babies of first-time dolphin mothers survive.
Wells, who has been studying wild bottlenose dolphins off Sarasota, Fla., for more than 30 years, notes that many ocean fish pick up and carry deadly manmade toxins such as PCBs. When dolphins eat the fish, the toxins are transferred to their blubber.
It appears, Wells said, that lactating mothers flush the poisons from their systems through their milk.
“One wonders whether first-time mothers, which have accumulated toxicants over a period of 5 to 12 years, may be giving their newborns such a hefty dose of poison that they cannot survive,” he said.
Generally the females give birth every three years, Wells said, so after the first birth, the levels of accumulated toxins may stay too low to harm subsequent newborns.
Even though zoo and aquarium dolphins live in pristine environments, the only proper diet for them is fish caught in the wild, and it is impossible to test each fish for toxicity. Thus the captive dolphins are vulnerable to the same toxic dangers wild dolphins face.
Milk holds key to research
Normally, keepers would never risk upsetting the nursing and bonding process between mother and calf to collect milk for research.
“Kaylee’s milk,” said Wells, “will be one of the first chances we’ve ever had to look at levels of toxins first-time mothers might be passing to their calves.”
A week after Kaylee was sequestered, keepers felt the calf was thriving and had adequately bonded with its grandmother, so they let Kaylee rejoin them, hoping she’d learn some maternal skills.
“She was really clumsy, at first,” said Greg Dye, assistant marine mammal curator, “swimming too slow when she had the calf at her side to allow it to slipstream, but now she maneuvers him all over the pool.”
Now the calf shares equal time with mom and grandma. Tapeko, who has given birth four times, patiently demonstrates to Kaylee how to guide the calf.
Kaylee also is correctly rubbing against the calf to show him where to try feeding. If he does try, keepers think it may stimulate her to lactate again.
Who, then, would he consider to be his mother?
“We don’t know; this is all new territory for us,” said Cindy Flaherty, a zoo research biologist taking part in the 24-hour-a-day observations.
But Flaherty suggests K.01 might soon announce who he considers his mother.
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Whistle will show who’s who
Within months of birth, calves adopt a signature whistle that they will emit for the rest of their lives when they want to identify themselves to other dolphins.
“In the wild,” said Flaherty, “they move back and forth from different social groups. When an individual approaches a group it has not been with for some time, it emits its signature whistle so everyone knows who is coming.”
Female calves always devise a whistle completely different from their mother’s. Male calves, however, almost always use one that is almost identical.
“In the next few weeks, it will be interesting to see the signature call this calf starts using,” said Flaherty. “It could be similar to Kaylee’s or to Tapeko’s. Then we’ll know who he thinks his mom is.
“Maybe he’ll adopt parts of each of their signature whistles. We don’t know. I think he is going to end up with a very close relationship with both mom and grandma.”