It sounds very much like a scene out of a comedy film. My mind goes to that gerbil scene from The Nutty Professor 2. But this was actually very serious. A man says he's lucky to be alive after getting attacked by a sexually frustrated dolphin.
Speaking with The Telegram, Takuma Goto said the incident happened when he went swimming with a friend off the coast of Tsuruga in Japan. A lone sexually frustrated dolphin attacked them. Experts believe the dolphin may have been behind 15 attacks over the summer. Someone get it put on the registry.
According to Goto, he didn't expect the mammal to attack them. The two had been swimming at Crystal Beach when the animal first attacked his friend. Goto says his friend's cries alerted him to the danger of the animal.
"I knew it was not a shark, but it came straight at me," he said. "It attacked me and bit me. It kept attacking me and I genuinely believed that I was going to die. I was most worried that I was going to be dragged under the water and further out to sea."
Dolphin Attacks
Fortunately, a surfer eventually saved Goto from the dolphin attack. The man had several pretty gnarly injuries.
"The insides of my finger were popping out," he said. Goto ended up needing to go to the hospital and getting stitches on his hand.
Experts believe the animal was trying to communicate.
"It appears that the multiple incidents have been committed by the same individual dolphin," said Mari Kobayashi, head of the marine biology laboratory at Tokyo University of Agriculture. "It is believed to be a male Indo-Pacific bottlenose and we know that males sometimes communicate by biting each other, so it may be that it is trying to do this with humans. Also, this is a species that usually lives in groups, so it is possible it is lonely."
Apparently, the animal was just feeling lonely.
"Bottlenose dolphins are highly social animals and this sociality can be expressed in very physical ways," Dr Simon Allen, a biologist and principal investigator with the Shark Bay Dolphin Research project, told the BBC. "Just as in humans and other social animals, hormonal fluctuations, sexual frustration or the desire to dominate might drive the dolphin to injuring the people it interacts with. Since they are such powerful animals, this can lead to serious injury in humans."
