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Learning to Hear and Speaking to the Animal World

This story of a diver and a dolphin is being shared across the worldwide web. The tale has gone viral and here we also jump in -- and follow up with the story retold in a speech verifying the account of Enzo Maiorca about a dolphin and dolphin family saved. Enzo also speaks of his experience with a Grouper in the Mediterranean as an intense, life-changing moment. We are reminded of a story told by Aldo Leopold of a dying Wolf with 'fierce green eyes' , as a formational moment that forever changed the life and work of Aldo... who went on to change the direction of the environmental movement...

”The famous Italian diver Enzo Maiorca dove into the sea of Syracuse and was talking to his daughter Rossana who was aboard the boat. Ready to go in, he felt something slightly hit his back.

He turned and saw a dolphin. Then he realized that the dolphin did not want to play but to express something.

The animal dove and Enzo followed.

At a depth of about 12 meters, trapped in an abandoned net, there was another dolphin. Enzo quickly asked his daughter to grab the diving knives. Soon, the two of them managed to free the dolphin, which, at the end of the ordeal, emerged, issued an “almost human cry”.

(A dolphin can stay under water for up to 10 minutes, then it drowns.)

The released dolphin was helped to the surface by Enzo, Rosana and the other dolphin. That’s when the surprise came: she was pregnant!

The male circled them, and then stopped in front of Enzo, touched his cheek (like a kiss), in a gesture of gratitude and then they both swam off.

Enzo ended his speech by saying: “Until man learns to respect and speak to the animal world, he can never know his true role on Earth.”

Enzo retold his story in 2011 during a Sea Shepherd campaign to defend the Bluefin Tuna.

Here’s a transcript of what he said, as published by Sea Shepherd:

“Years ago, while we were diving, a male dolphin guided my daughters Rossana and Patrizia, and myself, almost leading us by our hands, and gave us the chance to save a female dolphin who was tangled up in the meshes of a swordfish net.

“I maintain that his brain waves influenced our minds. What is certain is that our arms were the stretcher by means of which we carried that poor exhausted animal, wracked by contractions, to the surface.

“As soon as she was on the surface, after breathing out foam and blood, she gave birth to a dolphin calf under the watchful eyes of her mate. The little one was led to his mama’s nipples by gentle strokes of the adult dolphin’s beak.

“I like to think that on that day we reunited a family.”

• https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10157426774566720&set=a.31379386719&type=3&theater

Enzo also spoke of the “rage” he then felt with the “illegal mass slaughter of cetaceans in Taiji, along with the one perpetrated illegally by the Japanese whaling fleet in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary”. (see The Cove)

Enzo is immortalized in Le Grande Bleu (The Big Blue), a fictionalised account of the friendship and rivalry between champion free divers Jacques Mayol (played by Jean-Marc Barr) and Enzo (played by Jean Reno). Enzo was known throughout the Mediterranean as the ‘King of the Abyss’.

At his funeral a message from Sea Shepherd France’s President Lamya Essemlali was shared... about another of Enzo’s stories which she hoped would inspire others.

Enzo had told her:

“I was diving in the shallows not far from the cape that reaches out to the open sea south of the bay of Syracuse. That morning I happened to spear a grouper (fish). A strong and combative grouper. On the bottom a real titanic struggle broke out, between me who wanted to take its life and the grouper who tried to save itself. The grouper was caught in a cavity between two rocks, trying to understand its position, I ran my right hand down the fish’s belly. Its heart was pounding in terror, mad with fear. And with that pulsing of blood I realized that I was killing a living being. Since then my spear-gun lies like a derelict, an archaeological item, in the dusty basement of my house. It was 1967.”

“Enzo Maiorca was a man who gave his heart to the sea. He understood her magic better than most and knew that the Ocean was the foundation for all life on this planet.”

"A single kind of blue-green algae in the ocean produces the oxygen in one of every five breaths we take"

~ from "The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean’s Are One" by Sylvia Earle / National Geographic

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