Dolphin

Greek and Roman tradition treats the dolphin with unusual warmth and consistency. Dolphins rescue the drowning and carry the dead safely across the water; in Herodotus a dolphin saves the poet Arion, thrown overboard by a ship's crew, and bears him to shore on its back. The oracle at Delphi took its name from the story that Apollo first came there in the form of a dolphin, leaping aboard a Cretan ship to bring its crew as his priests. The dolphin's evident intelligence and its habit of approaching boats made it, for the Mediterranean world, the friendliest of wild animals and a reliable emblem of safe passage and rescue.

Modern cognitive science has given the dolphin's old reputation for near-human intelligence real experimental support: bottlenose dolphins are among the very few non-human animals shown to recognise themselves in a mirror, passing variants of the mirror self-recognition test in research led by Diana Reiss and colleagues, a capacity otherwise documented mainly in great apes, elephants and magpies, and their echolocation, a biological sonar built from clicks and returning echoes, lets them build a working picture of their surroundings with a precision no human instrument matched until relatively recently.

Christian art took up the Mediterranean dolphin as a figure of the soul's safe passage, showing it on sarcophagi sometimes wound around an anchor, the anchor of hope, the dolphin of the soul carried home, together a discreet emblem of salvation. A very different dolphin belongs to the Amazon: the boto, the pink river dolphin, is believed in riverine Brazilian tradition to take human form at night, appearing as a charming, well-dressed man who seduces women at parties before returning to the water, a belief still current and quite unlike the benign rescuer of the Greeks. The same family of animals thus anchors opposite meanings, guardian of souls in one tradition, dangerous shape-shifter in another.

The dolphin's friendly reputation fed directly into a specific piece of modern regulation: because certain tuna fishing methods, particularly purse-seine nets set around dolphin pods in the eastern Pacific, killed large numbers of dolphins as bycatch through the mid-twentieth century, public pressure led to the US Dolphin Protection Consumer Information Act of 1990, which created the dolphin-safe label now printed on tuna cans, a piece of consumer-facing law that exists because enough people cared, in a way they generally have not for less charismatic bycatch species, specifically about this one animal.