FOR THE RECORD, while dolphins in the real world have become infamous for the particular way they assault other animals and each other, I’d never joke about that kind of thing in Awful Hospital, and that’s not canonically the threat posed by dolphins in its continuity.
Besides, truth is, that narrative gets exaggerated just because dolphins have such a wholesome image. In actuality almost all social mammals are like that. Mammals are brutal as shit.
Dolphins ARE a whole lot more infanticidal than the average animal, though, and slaughter other, smaller dolphin species because they trigger the same baby-killing instinct.
This is especially true for pygmy whales, whose corpses often wash ashore covered in dolphin bruises.
Dolphins, from their perspective, literally run across mysterious pods of babies out in the middle of nowhere and think “welp, these gotta go.”
garbidge said: I wonder what purpose such an instinct would serve
When they lose their babies, the females enter heat again, so by repeatedly killing all the babies that aren’t theirs, the males can get more sex and are thus more likely to pass on their own genes. Lots of other mammals do this too, including cats, dogs, seals and primates.
Us mammals are the worst animals ever, no contest.
Female horses specifically mate with a lot of males within the same time frame just so the father of their young will be ambiguous, so the males will look at it and think “well it’s possible it’s mine so I won’t kick it to death”. That’s a real thing female horses take into account, to the point that if they’re not able to make the father ambiguous (only given access to one male to mate with, surrounded by other males) they’ll abort the pregnancy because they don’t want to have to deal with that shit.
Mammals are fucked up & kill babies a lot
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