Dolphins on Whales, and Other Animals Riding Animals
In the wild, animals interact with each other in surprising ways.
Remember “weaselpecker,” that hard-to-believe photo of a weasel riding a bird, Rescuers-style? Those types of animal interactions go viral because they seem rare to us. Yet the phenomena of species riding other species isn’t actually that unusual.
In 2004 and 2006, researchers documented two instances of a humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) giving a lift to a bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) near Hawaii.
Researchers came up with three possible reasons why this might have happened: Either the whales were being aggressive, they were trying to help the dolphins in some way, or they were just playing around.
Given the slow speeds at which the whales raised the dolphins out of the water, researchers don’t think that these lifts were
