Speedo proves poor fit for rescued Florida dolphin

A lucky adolescent male bottlenose dolphin is back to living nude and free in Florida’s Sarasota Bay after making a potentially fatal wardrobe choice early this summer.

The 10-year-old dolphin, known as Scrappy, probably owes its life to a Brookfield Zoo marine mammal research team that works year-round in the bay.

The drama began July 6, when a member of the team working in the bay spotted Scrappy unaccountably and uncomfortably swimming around while wearing a black, Speedo-brand man’s bikini swimsuit.

“He must have found the swimsuit floating in the water,” said Randall Wells, a population biologist who runs the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program for the Chicago Zoological Society, Brookfield Zoo’s parent organization.

“Somehow he got his head and torso through the waist and one of the leg holes of the suit, and it was hugging him right where his pectoral fins and body meet.”

The project team, which has been tracking and observing 150 resident dolphins in the bay for the past 36 years, began looking for Scrappy every day. They feared the tight-fitting, non-rotting synthetic cloth suit could injure or kill the dolphin as “drag” force from swimming pushed it into the soft skin in front of the pectoral fins.

“Eventually it could cut deeply enough to sever arteries, causing him to bleed,” Wells said.

When the swimsuit was still stubbornly clinging to Scrappy after three weeks, the team got an emergency rescue authorization from federal officials who monitor its work in the bay.

Scrappy’s capture turned into an all-day ordeal for the depantsing team Wells organized Aug. 3. Five fast boats carrying 31 people raced across the bay after the animal, trying to surround it with a net.

In one close call, the net got caught in a boat propeller, allowing the dolphin to swim away. In a second encounter, Scrappy adroitly evaded the net by leaping over it. Late in the day they were able to bring the dolphin aboard a boat.

The suit had made cuts a half-inch deep and three-quarters of an inch long in front of each fin. Scrappy was visibly underweight and also had a fresh, visible but non-serious shark bite, both conditions probably caused by a hampered ability to swim because of the suit.

“We had been prepared to take him ashore to our veterinary hospital,” said Wells, whose team works out of Sarasota’s Mote Marine Laboratory research facility. “But that is the last thing we wanted to do. We don’t like to have our dolphins becoming familiar with humans, which can happen during extended veterinary care.

“We felt his injuries weren’t that serious, so after we removed the swimsuit, we cleaned the wounds and gave him a strong antibiotic. Then we attached a small radio tag to one of his fins and, after about half an hour, we let him go.”

With the radio tag, his team can locate the animal easily every day, Wells said, and Scrappy, who as an immature male still lives mostly by himself, has shown no ill effects from his wardrobe experiment.

“One of the comedians on our team said the lesson in all this is that Speedos can be a threat to more than just good taste,” Wells said.