Bolivian River Dolphins Get Weird with an Anaconda
It’s easy these days to think that we have everything figured out. Just Google it, or look it up on YouTube University, right? Wrong. The world is still full of mystery, and one thing we don’t know much about is the Bolivian river dolphin. What we do know about them is this - they like to get weird with snakes.
In August of 2021, a group of researchers along the Tijamuchin River in Bolivia witnessed, and captured with their cameras, a pod of Bolivian river dolphins playing with a Beni anaconda. A couple of the dolphins from the pod, which appeared to include both adults and juveniles, held the anaconda in their mouths at opposite ends of the snake while swimming around the river. It was like the dolphins were each holding one end of a jump rope, except in this case, the rope was a two meter long aquatic snake. The researchers recently published a research paper about what appears to be the first known documentation of dolphin snake play, which begs so many questions.
Hey, let’s not make this look awkward, people are watching. Photo: Omar M. Entiauspe-Neto
It’s not unusual for animals to play, especially dolphins. As a surfer, I’m used to seeing oceanic dolphins ride waves and launch out of them with big smiles on their faces. In this case, the researchers aren’t sure if the dolphins were playing, training the kids, hunting, or engaging in some social-sexual behavior. Yeah, like I said, weird.
What are they Doing Over There?
Let’s take the awkward sex part first. By analyzing the photos after the encounter, the researchers observed that the adult male dolphins were aroused during the play. One hypothesis is that they were engaging in some form of courtship.
Another hunch is that the dolphins were hunting. It’s tricky to know if this is accurate because we don’t fully understand the Bolivian river dolphin diet. This is partly driven by the murky waters they live in, but also because researchers typically only catch two to five second glimpses of these animals at a time above the surface. It’s known that river dolphins are carnivorous, but in this case, it wasn’t clear whether or not the dolphins ate the snake after they played with it, even though they suspect it died from the play.
Other possible explanations the researchers cite for the behavior include pure play, or perhaps that it was instructional in some way to the juveniles in the pod. Because, for some odd reason, sexual hunting play is good for the kids?
From a nature connection perspective, I’m always awestruck by the lengths we humans will go to witness some oddity of nature halfway across the world. For example, the researchers went deep into the floodplains of Bolivian Amazonia in hopes of catching merely a two to five second glimpse of part of a dolphin. However, the anaconda incident went on for about seven minutes. Either way, the researchers had total commitment to microdosing nature. Also, because they had their cameras, it wasn’t just another day on the river.
As a nature photographer myself, one thing I’ve noticed is the ability of the camera to help connect to nature on a deeper level. Even before you take a photo, scanning the landscape cultivates your awareness to look for unusual patterns in your environment, which in turn makes you more present in the scene. Then, looking through the eyepiece also narrows your focus, a known stepstone toward inducing a flow state, which again takes us deeper into the present moment.
Hopefully, the work of these researchers can serve as a reminder for us to go and experience firsthand what Google doesn’t yet know about our world. If we stay curious, we open ourselves to the weird, wise, and wonderful aspects of nature, in our backyards and beyond.
The Rabbit Hole
Entiauspe-Neto, OmarM., Steffen Reichle, and Alejandro de los Rios2022.“A Case of Playful Interaction betweenBolivian River Dolphins with a Beni Anaconda.”Ecologye3724.https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.37244of4ENTIAUSPE-NETOET AL.
