Is it a Dolphin or a Porpoise?

Why Environmental History Celebrates Human Nature.

My big-brained family doesn’t argue the small stuff like toilet seat lids, movie rentals or the Florida Gators versus the FSU Seminoles. Instead we argue, passionately and prolifically, about things like the current usage of the Manatee Trust Fund, whether “Big Joe” the stuffed alligator at Wakulla Springs was the largest in the state, if the oldest cypress tree stand on the continent is really at Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary—and the latest and greatest squabble—that bottlenose dolphins like Flipper are not porpoises.

It’s been ugly. Part of the reason is that even the internet has failed us. One family member working a school field trip asked a biologist from the Atlanta Aquarium to email us the answer to the question. Like searching the internet, both sides could find things in the biologist’s answer that seemed to prove their differing position. There’s the stance that people enjoy “Porpoise Shows” throughout the state. There’s the line of reasoning that dolphins are really fish and that’s why restaurants had to start calling them mahi-mahi so customers would not think they were grilling Flipper. And my favorite contention, that Florida Statutes Section 15.038 (2) maintains, “The porpoise, also commonly known as the dolphin, is hereby designated as the Florida state saltwater mammal.”

Some of us know the Florida Legislature consistently screws things up. That same section (1) states that “The manatee, also commonly known as the sea cow, is hereby designated the Florida state marine mammal.” We won’t get into what’s the difference between saltwater and marine mammals and how a legislative body reaches a compromise on which water mammal is cuter.

Finally, I contacted an old colleague I knew back in her days at the Dolphin Research Center. When I was living in Broward she was commuting up from Marathon in the Keys to work on her Master’s at Nova Southeastern University. I remembered her thesis was on bottlenose dolphins. Peggy Sloan is now the Director of North Carolina Aquarium at Fort Fisher. I asked her to give us the answer and also enlighten us why finding the answer was so difficult.

As we awaited Sloan’s response, I couldn’t help but think of Federal Judge Hoeveler and his “Clean-Up the Everglades” mandate. Would the dissenters be able to find a loop hole? Here’s what Sloan sent in her ruling:

It is the age old question “dolphin or porpoise,” and so the answer is predictably complicated. Once upon a time, up until the 1950s and 1960s, bottlenose dolphins were identified as porpoise. And so, many older people who grew up referencing “porpoise” in a generic way still use the term. However, dolphins and porpoise are two distinctly different species. Here is the breakdown:

Toothed whales (Odontoceti) include Sperm whales (Physeteridae), Beaked whales (Ziphiidae), Dolphins and “blackfish” or pilot whales (Delphinidae), and Porpoises (Phocoenidae). . . There are 18 species of Delpinidae in the US Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico, including the bottlenose dolphin, and one species of porpoise, the harbor porpoise. Unless it is incredibly lost, you’ll never see a porpoise in Florida as they only range as far south as North Carolina.

A great reference is the Guide to Marine Mammals & Turtles of the US Atlantic & Gulf of Mexico written by Kate Wynne & Malia Schwartz and published by Rhode Island Sea Grant.

Uh hum. Listen up people. When you are out on the boat or watching the shorelines you are not seeing porpoises. You are seeing dolphins. Not the beloved and undefeated Super Bowl winning dolphins in Miami, and not a food Americans typically eat. (Guess what side I was on?) It’s ok to use the word dolphin for different things.

It’s like the word “marine.” Sometimes it means a body of salt water and sometimes it means a person in a uniform. But it is incorrect to call a freshwater spring (where manatees typically hang out in the winter) a marine environment.

To me the dolphin argument is like the Chick-fil-A ad campaign complete with 3-D billboards and people dressed up like black and white Jersey cows. The cows are encouraging people to eat more chicken. People seem to be eating it up (pun intended) and apparently think the corporate branding is adorable. It could be. except for one small detail—the black and white cows depicted in the campaign are dairy cows. Fast food restaurants do not serve the cows that provide milk! It makes me crazy—especially since when I point this out to people, everyone looks at me like I’m a kill joy with no sense of fun.

And so, I was the only one of the Team Dolphin side that was elated by Sloan’s ruling. The rest of Team Dolphin really wondered why I had bothered to argue. “We’re talking about a scientific classification,” one family member said to me with a tone that made it sound like she thought I should up the Lexapro. “Science is about facts. There are no gray areas.”

Science annoys me for that exact reason. It probably should be able to help ease my mind like it does for some folks, but science has a habit of failing me.

Case in point: the Florida-Boy fishermen in the family. Despite Sloan’s edict (and Team Dolphins’ intellectual superiority), they are not going to stop fishing for dolphin. They maintain they will never ever fish for a mahi-mahi—unless of course they are somewhere in Polynesia. Their line of reasoning follows their stance on Jew Fish. They will never say the words “Goliath Grouper” while on the water—which is why their children will probably never use the words out there either.

This is why I love Environmental History. It’s the study of science, but also accounts for the cultural confusions that impact and affect the natural environment. When you look at it that way, environmental science not only has to consider—but to hold its ground must also showcase—the gray areas.

I still feel bad for the real porpoises though. It’s just not fair that they get their name stolen from them and are left looking like the ugly cousin because they aren’t as popular. Same thing goes for the poor ole brown cows—and they are the ones that get eaten!