"How long have you been expecting?"

The Skipper's inquiry was simple enough, as the charter boat under her command skipped across the Pacific waters of Kaikoura Canyon, an underwater canyon off the Coast of New Zealand that helps bring rich marine life close to shore.

The occasion was 30 paying customers, including my daughter Sydney, while on break at an academic conference, setting out to swim with the dolphins, not the caged variety, which may suffice for post-worthy Facebook, Instagram, etc. pictures but doesn't make a lick of sense to me, but rather, among the truly wild ones, 500 Dusky Dolphins, in fact, playing about in the wild blue sea.  

The mother, taken aback by the Skipper's question, which was actually more of a declaration:

“Clearly, ma'am, you're pregnant; I'm just wondering for how long"

as she climbed up the boat's rear ladder, halfway in the waters, halfway out.

The mother hadn't informed her husband as of yet. Her carefully planned "reveal" was intended, initially, to take place over a candlelight dinner later that week, but the cat now being evidently out of the bag, so to speak, prompted a curious, somewhat curt reply, especially because she wasn't even showing, and had offered up no verbal clues to that end:

"How on earth did you know?"

The Skipper, familiar with these creatures' peculiar patterns and behaviors, replied,

"The group of five dolphins circling in a ring around you, the last 30 minutes, did you wonder why you and not the others? Like they commonly do, they sensed that you've got a baby in your tummy. That's why they tenderly nurtured both of you, instinctively creating a protective barrier around the two of you.”

Turning rather technical, the Skipper explained that through echolocation mechanics, dolphins, especially dusky dolphins, emit high-frequency clicks that bounce off objects in their environment. They can "see" inside bodies by interpreting the returning echoes, much like an ultrasound. Echolocation allows them to perceive differences in tissue density. In expecting mothers, the uterus expands, amniotic fluid accumulates, and the baby boy or girl develops changes that would alter the acoustic profile of the abdomen.

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Where am I going? What's the point of me sharing all this?

Even the created order, like Dolphins, know, especially the Dusky ones off New Zealand's Pacific Coast-Life, is good. All of life is very good. Like God summarized at the close of each day He created, "And it was so." Akin to what Jesus articulated in John 10:10: "I came that they may have life, and abundantly so."

We can learn a lot from Dolphins; they have much to teach us, do they not? In conjunction with basic human intuition, we know keenly that life is to be tenderly nurtured by all of us. It's nice to be reminded. We've been conditioned as a race to carry out certain functions, naturally, that can be as simple as placing a protective barrier around a mother and her child.

So it makes me wonder…Dolphins Get It, Instinctively, but Do We?

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