A Life with Dolphins, Betty Brothers' Story

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to meet with a woman in the Florida Keys who had spent over 30 years living with two dolphins. It was an amazing visit and I came away with a wonderful story about an incredible woman. She gave me permission to tell her story.

The famous dolphin researcher Dr. John Lilly described Betty Brothers as the only human to have documented such a long term relationship with dolphins. Betty is a feisty little lady with white hair, beautiful skin and sparkling eyes. She has an energy and love of life that belies her age. She's 87 years young.

A resident of the Florida Keys since 1952, she cared for two dolphins in a lagoon beside her home, feeding them twice a day and living with them for more than a quarter of a century.

I read a book she wrote, "Dolphins Love our Florida Keys Home" while on vacation in the Keys. After some research and talking to the "locals", I discovered she still lived there on one of the smaller keys a few miles from Key West.

I called and spoke with her on the phone several times and, because of my interest in dolphins, she agreed to meet with me.

"Feel my muscle," Betty told me, rolling up her sleeve. It felt very strong.

"Swimming," she explained.

For more than twenty-five years, she swam every day with her dolphins in a small bay between two keys.

Her face is animated when she speaks of Dal, the female and Suwa, the male dolphin.

She told me she had one of her books for me and took a copy of "Dolphins Love Our Florida Keys Home" from her book shelf. Asking how I spelled my name, she wrote, "Best Wishes," drew a dolphin and signed her name.

She is an excellent artist and her work is displayed in every room. During the next two hours, she told many interesting stories. I took notes but listening to her was so fascinating I hoped I could remember everything she said.

She spoke about her old Keys home on the Atlantic side. The abandoned house still stands on a spit of land beside US1. She and her first husband, Bern, blasted coral rock with dynamite and excavated the foundation and the rest of their property from the sea. Immediately south of the house, the lagoon where she and her dolphins lived, played and swam still exists, an overgrown, silent reminder of an extraordinary lifetime intimately shared with another species.

She said the roof finally leaked so badly she had to have huge 55 gallon barrels to catch the rain. It finally became too difficult for her to live there because she couldn't go up and fix the roof herself as she had done years before. When a local marina offered to purchase the house, she sold it. She spoke of her dolphins with love. She very clearly recalled two incidents she wrote about in her book.

One involved Dal, doing a scientific experiment on her with sounds. The dolphin made continuously higher pitched sounds until Betty couldn't duplicate them.

Then Dal returned to the frequency she could repeat. The dolphin did this three times, establishing the exact high and low sounds her human could hear. She also remembered one evening when she was forcefully towed back into the lagoon by Dal three times while they were swimming in the bay.

Finally, she decided to stay in the lagoon believing the dolphin knew something she didn't. It doesn't go any further into this story in her book but she told me she later learned what Dal had been afraid of that night. A friend, living aboard a sloop anchored in the bay, had seen and heard several killer whales migrating through the Keys that same evening.

Killer whales eat anything they want. Dal was aware of their presence and insisted her human come back to safety three times before Betty finally acquiesced.

She told me about living in the Keys in the 50's and how they made a living. She and her husband built and rented three smaller cottages which are still there and are still being rented by the marina that now owns them. She also ran her own real estate office.

She sold lots and, when something didn't sell, she bought it herself. She owns a lot of real estate! Her interesting book ends with Dal's first baby dying shortly after its birth. I asked what happened after that, how long they lived and how and where they died.

Betty explained that, as the baby dolphin was being born, Dal leaped out of the water and the baby was expelled. Dal and Suwa brought the baby to the surface several times.

The last time they surfaced the baby was upside down and it was dead. It was quite hard for Betty to devise a way to get the dead calf out of the lagoon.

Dal swam everywhere with its tail in her mouth dragging it behind her. After several days, Betty had to trick the dolphin into letting go of it. The baby was buried on their beach. Her female dolphin never had another calf. Dal died six years before Suwa at the approximate age of 28. She beached herself on the edge of the lagoon by the Betty's feeding dock and where she simply stopped breathing. She had not shown any signs of being sick.

The University of Miami requested that Betty donate whichever of the dolphins died of old age first. She had reluctantly agreed even though it was hard for her.

After many months of autopsy studies, they reported everything they had found. She learned that her female dolphin had cysts on her ovaries which probably contributed to her being unable to conceive again after her first baby died.

Betty believed the calf had died because there were not more dolphins around her during the birth. There is often a "midwife" assisting when dolphins give birth in the wild. Dal's immaturity and isolation may have been responsible for the loss.

After Dal's death, Suwa was not as sweet a dolphin. Betty believed Dal taught him everything she'd learned from her humans in a very short time after he was introduced to her lagoon. As his lifelong mate, she kept him calm and tranquil.

After losing her, Suwa mourned and became aggressive. Betty stopped swimming with him, fearing his behavior would lead to her being injured.

She still spent time with him at the feeding dock and from inside the tiny boat she kept in the lagoon. Because she was worried he might hurt someone else, she put up warning signs and a fence around the entire lagoon so no one would accidentally gain entry and try to swim with him.

A few years later, that is exactly what happened. A man visiting from upstate decided he was going to swim with a dolphin anyway.

Whether drunk or just plain reckless, he was almost killed for his stupidity. Fortunately, his cries were heard at the house. Betty and her family managed to get the man out of the lagoon.

It took him awhile to recover and he was taken to the hospital. A year later, he sued Betty. She said this was a very stressful time in her life. As she waited for the case to go to court, she worried about Suwa being taken away from her.

The trial was set and postponed several times but Betty and Suwa finally had their day in court. With a completely native Key West jury, the outcome was predictably unusual.

The jury stated that Betty was guilty of having a "dangerous" dolphin and she was fined $200. She was then found not guilty because she had posted signs and fenced off her "dangerous" dolphin.

The man was a trespasser on her property who had ignored her signs and fence. He was swimming illegally in her lagoon. He and his expensive attorney returned to North Florida with $200.

It was a wonderful outcome after such a stressful time and Betty made sure that, for the rest of Suwa's life, he was protected and cared for safely.

After the trial, Suwa's health began to fail. A friend who had dolphins on Sugarloaf Key examined him and told Betty he was not well.

After observing the male dolphin, a few experts suggested that Suwa have a shelter to protect him from the sun and they began building a structure.

Before they could finish it, Suwa disappeared. Betty and her family searched for a long time but they couldn't find him. She hoped he had found a pod of dolphins in the bay and gone off with them.

A few weeks later, there was such an odor from the lagoon that Betty realized he had been there all along. They found his decayed body beached on some rocks near the house, as close underneath her bedroom as he could get.

Instead of burying him, she and her family decided they would take him out to the Atlantic and bury him at sea. Extracting him from underneath the house wasn't easy.

She placed a rope around his body, behind his flippers, and he was pulled into the lagoon, through the tiny inlet and out into the bay. As they towed her beloved dolphin slowly behind their Chris Craft outboard, Suwa's body did an extraordinary thing. With one last leap in the air, he appeared to have returned from the dead.

In that moment, Betty realized that dolphins are so aerodynamically built to fly they aren't really leaping out of the waves, they are lifted up by the very nature of their anatomy.

Passing by a tiny resort on Little Palm Island, they heard a party in progress. Lights and music filled the ocean air. Later, when they were out so far that no lights from land could be seen, Betty untied the rope that held her beloved friend, said a prayer and watched him slip below the surface in the darkness. Her long life with this beautiful dolphin was over.

As she told me this last story, twelve long years after he was gone, her eyes clouded for a moment. Then she smiled and it seemed the incredible memories of these two magnificent creatures were enough to keep her from sadness and sharing them with me somehow made them seem closer.

I spent several hours listening to the stories of her incredible life with her dolphins, her travels and her two wonderful husbands. She told me she had the good fortune of finding not one good husband, but a second man, just as intelligent, loving and kind as the first. He too is gone now and she shares her new home with her Rhodesian Ridgeback, a protective dog who barks at every boat on the canal that passes their home.

She told me, at 87, she doesn't have much time left. Before that, I hope we will share many more conversations. She gave me an old framed photo of Suwa, rolling in the water beside a pelican. They looked as though they were flying in formation across the lagoon.

After saying goodbye to her and driving away, I thought about all the stories she shared with me.

It was clear that, although she had the devotion of two wonderful husbands, the true loves of her life were two beautiful, silver gray dolphins named Dal and Suwa.

Copyright 5/30/06, Carol Clark

Photo Credits: 

Suwa and Betty circa 60s photo by a family member

Betty at 87 (and pretty great looking!) by Carol Clark