So she toweled and toweled her hair, but it was thick and, even in the Caribbean sun, took an hour to dry. With her hair turned to the sun, she sat there waiting, mostly deaf, occasionally turning to check behind her.

FOUR
March 1958
Orlando, Florida

Of course, there were dangers associated with anesthesia, the art of bringing a living being halfway to death. Those dangers increased when working with a new species, one with unknown sensitivities.

Thus, when it came to the second dolphin, Blum switched to Diazepam and injected only a third of the previous amount.

This smaller amount of Diazepam took longer to work. The animal shivered and struggled, but once it went to sleep, it also stopped inhaling. They stood over it, listening to its heart and waiting, Tibbet staring at his wristwatch.

After five minutes they tried intubating it, but the muscles around the blowhole were strong, meant to hold back the pressure of the sea. The flesh inside so delicate.

As Blum explained later to the director, these animals did not die in vain. The information from these deaths would result in a peer-reviewed paper explaining this discovery: that dolphins were the first species known to have voluntary, rather than involuntary, respiration. In the sea, they had to control when to breathe, to ensure they did not inhale water while sleeping or unconscious. His published paper ended up recommending any operation on dolphins (and potentially all cetaceans) use only a local analgesic and strong restraints. Published in Neuroscience, a well-read periodical, the paper probably saved dozens of animals from a similar fate. He felt proud of that achievement.

Of course, to ensure publication, to feel confident that the first two results weren’t just an artifact of sample size, they had to use a small amount of anesthesia on a third.

They injected barely enough ketamine to put a five-year-old child to sleep. The dolphin, weighing over 300 pounds, must have been extremely sensitive. Or maybe the vein into which Blum injected the anesthesia had somehow disproportionately affected the blowhole. There was so much to learn.

The animal continued to breathe, but only through the left side of its blowhole, jerking convulsively with each inhale. It vocalized also, a high sort of squeaking noise, the sound of balloons rubbed together. The noise ascending higher and higher, echoing in the narrow restraint tank, until the humans could no longer hear it.

At this point, the woman who cared for the dolphins came sprinting back around the corner, returning from the office where she’d phoned the favorite lunch place of the director of Marine World, asking the cashier to tell him there was an emergency, come back now. She was sobbing and incoherent. Blum never understood the logic of this type of female reaction (his wife Babs sometimes got like this when the children were hurt). Crying reduced a woman’s ability to communicate just when she needed it most.

The woman’s breath was labored, reminiscent of the dolphin. She called it Nellie and pleaded with the men to bring this dolphin back to the tank, to see if it could recover there.