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I am seeing this post go around facebook with 33k likes and 62k shares:

”The famous Italian diver Enzo Mallorca (sic) dove into the sea of ​​Syracuse and was talking to his daughter Rossana who was aboard the boat. Ready to go in, he felt something slightly hit his back. He turned and saw a dolphin. Then he realized that the dolphin did not want to play but to express something. The animal dove and Enzo followed.

At a depth of about 12 meters, trapped in an abandoned net, there was another dolphin. Enzo quickly asked his daughter to grab the diving knives. Soon, the two of them managed to free the dolphin, which, at the end of the ordeal, emerged, issued an "almost human cry" (describes Enzo). (A dolphin can stay under water for up to 10 minutes, then it drowns.)

The released dolphin was helped to the surface by Enzo, Rosana and the other dolphin. That’s when the surprise came: she was pregnant!

The male circled them, and then stopped in front of Enzo, touched his cheek (like a kiss), in a gesture of gratitude and then they both swam off.

Enzo Mallorca ended his speech by saying: “Until man learns to respect and speak to the animal world, he can never know his true role on Earth." ~ Vangelis.”

Overall I don't think that a diver encountering a dolphin entangled in a net is unlikely, but I think there are a lot of embellishments in this facebook story compared to what probably happened in real life.

Larian LeQuella
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This seems embellished somewhat, there is an account of it on the Sea Shepherd site: "Years ago, while we were diving, a male dolphin guided my daughters Rossana and Patrizia, and myself, almost leading us by our hands, and gave us the chance to save a female dolphin who was tangled up in the meshes of a swordfish net. I maintain that his brain waves influenced our minds. What is certain is that our arms were the stretcher by means of which we carried that poor exhausted animal, wracked by contractions, to the surface. As soon as she was on the surface, after breathing out foam and blood, she gave birth to a dolphin calf under the watchful eyes of her mate. The little one was led to his mama’s nipples by gentle strokes of the adult dolphin’s beak. I like to think that on that day we reunited a family. Such rage permeated my being when I became aware of the illegal mass slaughter of cetaceans in Taiji, along with the one perpetrated illegally by the Japanese whaling fleet in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary, that I can only condemn – without any extenuating circumstances – those pirates of the Rising Sun, real pirates who bring death and irremediable destruction to the seas of this world."

https://seashepherd.org/news/sea-shepherd-welcomes-legendary-free-divers-to-our-board-of-advisors/

General Eclectic
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