Quotes from Susan Casey

In the annals of bad ideas, this is one for the hall of fame: trawling giant nets through water thousands of feet deep to catch thumb-size fish and wads of gelatinous tissue that nobody wants to eat, but that we could grind up to feed the farmed fish we're now being forced to breed because of our previous indiscriminate trawling with giant nets.

Maybe it is selfish of me to want the sea for myself, to want the waves rushing only for me, to want every word strung into jagged loops of poetry to flow from my only tongue, but the world has emptied me out ; what is more filling than the sea who continues to drown itself

Delphinidae, or oceanic dolphins, are the largest family of toothed whales, containing approximately thirty-seven species that range from the four-foot-long Hector's dolphin to the twelve-foot bottlenose dolphin to the twenty-five-foot orca, or killer whale.

Porpoises are a separate band entirely, although in the past the words "dolphin" and "porpoise" were often used interchangeably. The seven species of porpoises, or Phocoenidae, are smaller, and distinct from dolphins. The road to Honolua Bay was red dirt against a gray sky, and it wound up the bluff in a series of steep switchbacks. I pulled over at the top, where the grade leveled off in a clearing. Usually

Porpoises are a separate band entirely, although in the past the words "dolphin" and "porpoise" were often used interchangeably. The seven species of porpoises, or Phocoenidae, are smaller, and distinct from dolphins.

But a strange thing happens when your worst nightmare is realized: nothing much is left to scare you.

It was a pod of spinner dolphins, forty or fifty animals, swimming toward me. They materialized from the ocean like ghosts, shimmering in the ether.

However brief my dolphin visitation had been, it was stuck to me, lodged inside my head. It was as though I'd been hit by lightning and that one strike had zapped clean through my brain, replacing its usual patterns and wavelengths and nerve impulses with a dolphin highlight reel.

I couldn't forget the way the pod had sized me up, or their peculiar squeaking, creaking language, or how ridiculously fun it was to just cruise along with them.

I got the impression there was somebody home behind each set of eyes, and the effect was surreal.

As they swam by me, they seemed to exist in a more hazily defined realm than our own hard-edged terrestrial one.

They inhabited what ancient Oceanic peoples called "the Dreamtime," a gauzy, blissful place located somewhere between our generally-agreed-upon reality and any number of sublime alternate states.

Certainly, dolphins have a laundry list of capabilities that qualify as magical. They can see with their hearing, deploying biological sonar to effectively produce X-ray vision: dolphins can literally see through objects.

They know when another dolphin—or a human being—is pregnant or sick or injured.