Word: dolphin
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...husband not to fall for the bump-and- rob ploy when the yellow Ryder truck rammed them twice from behind. Keep driving, she told him. But none of it did any good. Ever since Hurricane Andrew lumbered through the area last year and ripped all the lightposts from the Dolphin Expressway, the section of road where the Rakebrands found themselves at 12:30 a.m. has been tar black at night. And perhaps it was this inky cover that encouraged a frustrated teenager to pull out a sawed-off rifle and blast a .30-cal. slug through the window and into...
...intelligent, sensitive mammals that deserves special treatment? Norway's action has raised these questions anew; so has the release of Free Willy, the sentimental movie about a boy who rescues a killer whale from a rundown aquatic theme park. (O.K., a killer whale is technically more of a giant dolphin than a whale, but the distinction is mostly academic.) A phone number flashed on the screen during Free Willy's closing credits, offering information on how to join a campaign to protect whales, drew 40,000 calls the first weekend alone...
Only . . . statistics, and even the view from rooftop level, give little idea of the sheer extent of inundation. That can really be glimpsed only from the air, as by the crew of a U.S. Coast Guard Dolphin helicopter that flew over the St. Louis area last week to survey the damage and scout places where it might later land to evacuate flood victims. The seemingly endless expanse of water made visual navigation difficult by submerging the landmarks pilots usually look for. Long stretches of highway and railroad tracks were invisible; river islands had disappeared; the river channels themselves could...
There's no denying, though, that Free Willy is a clever movie toy for the kid market. Most of the time Willy is played by Keiko, a killer whale (actually a type of dolphin) that the company found in a seaquarium in Mexico City. But frequently Keiko is spelled by a stunt double: a high-tech robot coated with 3,000 lbs. of eurythane rubber. (There is also a Turbo Willy - -- essentially the top of the whale, with mammoth hydraulic propellers on the bottom.) How real were the fake Willys? Persuasive enough so that the real Willy got the hots...
Because of their big brains, genial smiles and noble foreheads, dolphins have long attracted human champions quite willing to credit the marine mammals with all sorts of higher mental abilities. To a hard-nosed scientist, however, the noble forehead is a housing for sonar gear, the upturned smile is an adaptation that makes it easier for the animal to scoop up fish, and it is open to question for what purposes the animal uses its large brain. Herman and others working with animals have been criticized for using linguistic terms like word or syntax when some cruder system may describe...