Treehugger recently posted 10 Reasons Why Dolphins Are Undeniably Awesome. This is all nice and well but this does overlook some key aspects of dolphins that should be recognized. Good luck trying to sleep tonight when you start thinking about dolphins.

1. They gang rape femalesAs Miriam wrote before XXfactor, “Dolphin sex can be violent and coercive. Gangs of two or three male bottlenose dolphins isolate a single female from the pod and forcibly mate with her, sometimes for weeks at a time. To keep her in line, they make aggressive noises, threatening movements, and even smack her around with their tails. And if she tries to swim away, they chase her down.”

Being horny is all fun and good until you are the unwanted recipient. Horny dolphins can target human swimmers . Demi Moore is rumored to have had a close encounter of the finny kind.

This combined with the #2 is more than enough to scare the bejebus out of me. I thank Christopher Moore and his book Fluke for painting a vivid mental image of this.

Again quoting Miriam, “In Scotland, scientists found baby harbor porpoises washed up with horrific internal injuries. They thought the porpoises might have been killed by weapons tests until they found the toothmarks. Later, dolphins were caught on film pulping the baby porpoises-the dolphins even used their ecolocation to aim their blow at the porpoises’ vital organs.”

5. Dolphins kill their own babies. Males are known to kill off babies. In one study, 5 juvenile bottlenose dolphins had fatal injuries consistent with a bottlenose dolphin attack. Infanticide by males may occur within dolphins, as it does in other species, because females become immediately ready for pregnancy after the death of infant. The study also suggests that violent interactions with harbour porpoises (near 100 incidents in this study alone) by bottlenose dolphins may occur because they confuse infants of the two species.



6. Dolphins never sleep. Yep dolphins can stay awake for five days straight with no loss of mental acuity. And after missing all that sleep they don’t even need to catch it up with little dolphin naps. So great, horny dolphins are probably awake while I’m sleeping. Just fantastic.



7. Dolphins are voracious predators. Dolphins are not some crystal and patchouli wearing vegan. Nope they are stone cold meat eaters. The feed in packs so no fish or squid can escape. Hunts are coordinated and focused on decimating prey. Dolphins are inventive and creative and nothing is safe. Not even us on land.



Sure dolphins love to play and that is sooooooo cute. Of course, when all those cute toys become boring what should a dolphin do? Use a baby shark as a volleyball

9. Dolphins are sexually transmitted disease bags. Yep dolphins are just full of STD’s. h/t to SFS 10. Freakin dolphin and rainbow art. I blame dolphins for this trend. This stuff is all horrible, a blight on human existence. It’s so bad I think it actually discourages people from becoming marine biologists. And let’s not even start with dolphin and rainbow tattoos. Or the “very unique” dolphin on the ankle tattoo! There is only one cool dolphin tattoo.

Also now that you are primed make sure you take a look at The Oatmeal’s Five Very Good Reasons to Punch a Dolphin in the Mouth