Kiwi the Spotted Dolphin

By Mary Easley

One day in September 1993, five dolphins became stranded on a Florida beach along the Gulf of Mexico. Among them were a mother and her calf.

These animals were not the bottle-nosed dolphins seen in aquariums. They were spotted dolphins. Scientists would like to know more about spotted dolphins, but the animals have avoided people.

Marine life experts rushed to help the dying animals. The experts knew they needed to move the dolphins. The stress of the move might kill some of the animals, but on the beach all of them would certainly die.

The people laid the animals on air mattresses in the back of a truck and drove them to a quiet lagoon. Later, everyone found out that the older dolphins had become stranded because each of them had an infection. All four of them died as a result of the trip. The calf was not infected, but she had followed her mother onto the beach. She was the only survivor.

The calf was about one month old and weighed 28 pounds. The experts and the many people who volunteered to help the calf called her Kiwi. While Kiwi swam about in the lagoon, the people had two problems to solve: They had to protect her and feed her.

Kiwi needed protection from sharks that prowl the Gulf of Mexico. To protect one another, spotted dolphins travel in packs, called pods, which usually have about one hundred dolphins. Kiwi had lost her pod.

The first job was to keep Kiwi in the lagoon so she would not swim into the gulf. A human fence of twelve people closed the open end of the lagoon. For three days, volunteers took turns standing in the water day and night while a real fence was built.

Feeding Times
The second problem was to figure out what to feed Kiwi. When her mother died, Kiwi was still feeding on mother’s milk. She could not hunt fish. She didn’t even have teeth to catch them.

No one had ever kept a baby spotted dolphin before Kiwi, so no one knew exactly what to feed her. Her feeding plan was developed by her main caretaker, Greg Siebenaler, curator of mammals at the Gulfarium in Fort Walton Beach, Florida.

Greg used a formula for baby bottle-nosed dolphins. He changed its ingredients until he had a formula that Kiwi would eat and that she seemed to digest easily.
Kiwi could not drink from a bottle. In nature, the mother dolphin’s mammary gland squirts milk into the baby’s mouth. To feed Kiwi, volunteers poured the formula into a tube and then blew it into her mouth.

Kiwi at Play
Kiwi was an active calf. She played hide-and-seek and often tried to break through the line of people guarding her.

When she was very young, Kiwi was already doing some of the things that dolphins are known for. She would “spyhop” by working her tail to raise her head out of the water. With her head up, she would look from side to side.

She made clicking sounds, which dolphins use like sonar to locate objects in their surroundings. This practice is similar to the way some bats find their way at night. Kiwi also developed her own whistle, as most dolphins do. In the wild, dolphins use their whistles to communicate with one another.

And Kiwi leaped into the air. She started with small jumps and then took larger and larger ones. But she leaped without looking and did not seem to know where she would land. Once she landed on a volunteer’s head.

Kiwi’s caretakers enjoyed her playfulness, but they also had the serious work of keeping her healthy.

The Big Move
Kiwi had to be moved out of her comfortable lagoon and into an aquarium tank before winter. She was healthy now, but a move could still hurt or kill her because she often became overly excited and hard to control.

Kiwi’s caretakers had to get her used to traveling so she wouldn’t become afraid and hurt herself. Many times over several weeks, they caught her, placed her in a water-filled carrier on a truck, and drove the truck for short distances.

In late October, Kiwi was moved to her new home at the Gulfarium. Kiwi’s caretakers lowered her into the carrier. Patty Stetner, head volunteer, slipped into the water beside her. Throughout the trip, Patty sang a song that almost always calmed Kiwi: “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. . . .”

A New Home
At the Gulfarium, Kiwi lived in a tank that was filled to a shallow depth. In the low water, people could go into the tank to play with her, care for her, and feed her.

About three months after the stranding, Kiwi started to develop teeth. Greg weaned her from the formula to a diet of capelin. These fish are high in two nutrients that dolphins need—protein and fat. Kiwi refused to eat them unless their bony fins and tails had been removed. In the wild, spotted dolphins eat squid and flying fish. Squid have soft bodies, and flying fish have soft fins with no bones.
Greg knew that Kiwi needed a mother to teach her. He chose one for her: Bubbles, a bottle-nosed dolphin.

Kiwi and Bubbles bonded immediately. Even though they are two different kinds of dolphins, they acted like a normal bottle-nosed dolphin mother and calf. They cruised around the tank together most of the day, swimming side by side, often touching. From time to time, they chased each other.

Kiwi sometimes rode on Bubbles’s back in a pattern called slipstreaming. Mother dolphins carry their young in this way to protect them from strong ocean currents. At other times Bubbles would push Kiwi around the tank with her snout. And Kiwi would sometimes play by herself, leaping wildly into the air.

Growing Up
Now, Kiwi is almost three years old and healthy. She weighs about 130 pounds and will probably grow to about 150 pounds. Adult spotted dolphins are small in comparison to bottle-nosed dolphins, which average 360 pounds.

Kiwi has started to look more like an adult spotted dolphin. She has developed some spots around her beak and on her belly. Her beak has grown longer, and the edge of it is white. Her head has darkened, and she has developed dark rings around her eyes that look like a bandit’s mask.

Swimming with People
Kiwi still loves to swim with people. She swims into their arms and rests her head on their shoulders. She grabs them by the hair or swimsuit and pulls them around in the water.

When any volunteers start to leave the tank before Kiwi is done playing, she tries to stop them by swimming in front of them or blocking the ladder. If that fails, she begins to breathe very quickly through her blowhole, apparently pretending to need help.

Kiwi has found a home at the Gulfarium. She will not be released into the sea. If she were let go, she might not be accepted into a new pod, and she would have no protection from sharks. Also, she did not have a spotted dolphin mother to teach her how to protect herself. Marine life experts think the teaching of young spotted dolphins goes on for two to four years.

Kiwi is learning tricks, but she does not perform for the public. Instead, she’s closely protected. Only scientists and volunteers are allowed to see her.
Because people rushed to save her, Kiwi has survived. And because of Kiwi, scientists can observe a spotted dolphin up close for the first time.