We have all heard stories about dolphins coming to the rescue and I wanted to tell some to my daughter who was worried about some of the creatures in the sea. She thinks about sharks so I wanted to explain that the mammals of the oceans may have more in common with us than we thought. When I read these stories though I thought she may have a point and showed her reruns of Flipper instead!

Here are some I came across:

Surfer Todd Endris needed a miracle. The shark — a monster great white that came out of nowhere — had hit him three times, peeling the skin off his back and mauling his right leg to the bone.
That’s when a pod of bottlenose dolphins intervened, forming a protective ring around Endris, allowing him to get to shore, where quick first aid provided by a friend saved his life.
“Truly a miracle,” Endris told TODAY’s Natalie Morales on Thursday.
The attack occurred on Tuesday, Aug. 28, just before 11 a.m. at Marina State Park off Monterey, Calif., where the 24-year-old owner of Monterey Aquarium Services had gone with friends for a day of the sport they love. Nearly four months later, Endris, who is still undergoing physical therapy to repair muscle damage suffered during the attack, is back in the water and on his board in the same spot where he almost lost his life.

“[It] came out of nowhere. There’s no warning at all.Maybe I saw him a quarter second before it hit me. But no warning. It was just a giant shark,” Endris said. “It just shows you what a perfect predator they really are.”

The shark, estimated at 12 to 15 feet long, hit him first as Endris was sitting on his surfboard, but couldn’t get its monster jaws around both surfer and surfboard. “The second time, he came down and clamped on my torso — sandwiched my board and my torso in his mouth,” Endris said.
That attack shredded his back, literally peeling the skin back, he said, “like a banana peel.” But because Endris’ stomach was pressed to the surfboard, his intestines and internal organs were protected.
The third time, the shark tried to swallow Endris’ right leg, and he said that was actually a good thing, because the shark’s grip anchored him while he kicked the beast in the head and snout with his left leg until it let go.
The dolphins, which had been cavorting in the surf all along, showed up then. They circled him, keeping the shark at bay, and enabled Endris to get back on his board and catch a wave to the shore.

Our finned friends 
No one knows why dolphins protect humans, but stories of the marine mammals rescuing humans go back to ancient Greece, according to the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society.
A year ago in New Zealand, the group reports, four lifeguards were saved from sharks in the same way Endris was — by dolphins forming a protective ring.
Though horribly wounded, Endris said he didn’t think he was going to die. “Actually, it never crossed my mind,” he told Morales.
It did, though, cross the minds of others on the beach, including some lifeguards who told his friend, Brian Simpson, that Endris wasn’t going to make it.

Simpson is an X-ray technician in a hospital trauma center, and he’d seen badly injured people before. He had seen Endris coming in and knew he was hurt.
“I was expecting him to have leg injuries,” he told Morales. “It was a lot worse than I was expecting.”
Blood was pumping out of the leg, which had been bitten to the bone, and Endris, who lost half his blood, was ashen white. To stop the blood loss, Simpson used his surf leash as a tourniquet, which probably saved his life.
“Thanks to this guy,” Endris said, referring to Simpson, who sat next to him in the TODAY studio, “once I got to the beach, he was calming me down and keeping me from losing more blood by telling me to slow my breathing and really just be calm. They wouldn’t let me look at my wounds at all, which really helped.
A medivac helicopter took him to a hospital, where a surgeon had to first figure out what went where before putting him back together.
“It was like putting together a jigsaw puzzle,” Endris said.
Six weeks later, he was well enough to go surfing again, and the place he went was back to Marina State Park. It wasn’t easy to go back in the water.

“You really have to face your fears,” he told Morales. “I’m a surfer at heart, and that’s not something I can give up real easily. It was hard. But it was something you have to do.”
The shark went on its way, protected inside the waters of the park, which is a marine wildlife refuge. Endris wouldn’t want it any other way.
“I wouldn’t want to go after the shark anyway,” he said. “We’re in his realm, not the other way around.”

And here is another one:

In June 1971, Yvonne Vladislavich was sailing on a yacht in the middle of the Indian Ocean when suddenly the craft exploded. She was thrown clear but the vessel sank and she was left completely stranded. Far from the shipping lanes, there was no hope of rescue. Terrified, she treaded water, awaiting certain death. Then she saw three dolphins approach her. To her astonishment, one of them swam underneath her and buoyed her up with his own large body. Gratefully she held on to the dolphin’s sleek, smooth body. The other two dolphins swam in circles around her to protect her from sharks.
The dolphins carried and protected her through the warm waters for many hours until they arrived at a marker-buoy floating at sea. They left her on the buoy and she was soon picked up by a passing ship.
It was calculated from the position of the buoy and the position of her yacht when it exploded, that the dolphins had carried her and kept her alive through 200 miles of dangerous seas.
International Dolphin Watch
Bill, a resident of Oxford, England, had suffered from clinical depression for more than 10 years. Horace Dobbs, who runs International Dolphin Watch, decided to take Bill out in a boat off the Pembrokeshire coast to see if watching dolphins would have a positive effect on the man. A dolphin swam right up to Bill, although there were 20 other people in the boat.
Communicating with this creature began to lift his depression. “I felt wanted for the first time,” Bill said. “There were no questions asked.” The dolphin stayed with Bill. “The message I received was, ‘I need you and you need me. Let’s share our lonely worlds together.’”
Bill was so impressed with the experience that he decided to swim with another dolphin off the coast of Ireland. Bill now returns to swim with that dolphin every year.
Dolphins’ Comprehension
Dolphins understand the difference between play and a serious situation. Once, the crew of the boat Aquanaut had to give up its plan to practice lifesaving techniques in the ocean because a playful, happy dolphin kept interrupting the activities.
Later in the day when a member of the boating party got into serious trouble, the dolphin gently supported the man on the surface and helped a crew member tow him to the diving ladder. But that was not the end of the dolphin’s concern. The dolphin swam alongside the ship and watched quietly until he could see that the man had recovered.
“Perhaps, in some way, I owe my gold medals to the dolphins. In their trusting and playful way, they taught me the subtleties of swimming technique.”
–Olympic gold medalist Matt Biondi, who swims with the dolphins
Adapted from Random Acts of Kindness by Animals by Stephanie LaLand (Conari Press, 2008).
In Greek stories and old sea stories, there are dozens of claims of dolphins helping drowning sailors, rescuing people from sharks, and making themselves useful as guides through treacherous waters. The “treacherous waters” guiding can be ascribed to the dolphin’s needing a similar water depth as many boats.
Dolphins and other cetaceans also help injured members of their family groups and newborn babies to the surface by swimming under them and nudging upward, just as some reports describe them doing with humans. Interestingly, there are some real reports of dolphins helping other cetaceans. In 1983 at Tokerau Beach, North-land, New Zealand, a pod of pilot whales ran aground during ebb-tide. The Zealanders who lived there came out and did their best to keep the whales alive, sponging their skin and calming them, until the tide came back in. But even then the whales were having trouble orienting.
Dolphins came to the rescue. Somehow, a pod of dolphins who were nearby figured out what was happening. They swam into the shallows, putting themselves at risk, and “herded” the pilot whales out to sea, saving 76 of 80 whales. Five years earlier, a similar incident had occurred at Whangarei harbor. If dolphins are smart enough and helpful enough to save other cetaceans in that manner, why not humans.
Real-Life Cases: Dolphins Saving Humans
You’ve seen it in Flipper and other popular culture stories; dolphins rescuing humans from drowning or sharks, keeping them safe from harm. But does it really happen?
The answer is, surprisingly often.
Several years ago, in the Gulf of Akaba, a British tourist was rescued by three dolphins from sharks. Near the Sinai Peninsula, a ship captain had stopped his boat so several passengers could watch dolphins playing. Three of the passengers decided to swim with them, and one stayed a little longer than the others. To his horror, he was bitten by a shark – and more were coming. Suddenly, three dolphins placed themselves between the tourist and the sharks, smacking the water with tails and flippers, and drove the sharks off so the man could be rescued.
In 2004, a group of swimmers were confronted by a ten-foot great white shark off the northern coast of new Zealand. A pod of dolphins “herded” them together, circling them until the great white fled. There are several other examples from the area of Australia of similar incidences.
In another case in the Red Sea, twelve divers who were lost for thirteen and a half hours were surrounded by dolphins for the entire time, repelling the many sharks that live in the area. When a rescue boat showed up, it appeared that the dolphin pod were showing them where the divers were; they leaped up in the air in front of the rescuers, jumping toward the lost people as if to lead the boat onward – as, according to old stories, they often did with endangered ships in treacherous water.
Because we can’t talk to dolphins, we can’t really fathom what their motives are in these situations. It is, however, very possible that they are indeed trying to help and protect fellow mammals in the ocean to safety. If this is true, it means that they are the only animals, besides humans, which show true altruism.

Teach. Watch. Protect.