Dolphins have long inspired people with their intelligence and joyful playfulness. But these magnificent sea creatures do more than inspire people. Dolphins also help people in need, reaching out to humans with compassion in ways that some people consider to be miraculous.

Here are some of the ways that believers say God is at work performing miracles through dolphins:

Rescuing People From Danger

Throughout history, people have reported dolphins helping people in perilous situations at sea -- from people who were drowning to people being attacked by sharks.

Dolphins have miraculously saved the lives of drowning people since ancient times by swimming underneath them to hoist the people on their backs and then carrying them close to shore. Demonstrating critical thinking skills, the dolphins have helped the people but avoided harming themselves by coming up on a beach where they could get stuck in the sand. They’ve often done so by flipping the humans they’ve rescued off their backs into areas shallow enough for the people to breathe and crawl up to beaches safely.

Sometimes dolphins help people who are clinging to life preservers (such as rafts or inner tubes) stay afloat in the ocean until other humans arrive to rescue them. For instance, a Cuban boy named Elian Gonzalez made news headlines worldwide in 2000 when he described how dolphins miraculously prevented saved his life after the boat he had been traveling in from Cuba to the United States sank and most of the other passengers died. As Elian clung to an inner tube in the water, he encountered a pod of dolphins that encircled him and took turns boosting him up whenever he started to lose strength and start to slip into the water, making it possible for him to keep holding onto the inner tube until human rescuers arrived.

Many people who’ve faced shark attacks have reported encountering dolphins who miraculously stopped the attacks by driving the sharks away from the humans. Dolphins in pods usually do so by encircling sharks to intimidate them into swimming away. Individual dolphins scare sharks away from people by ramming their snouts into sharks’ vulnerable gills, injuring them until the sharks swim away.

When U.S. surfer Todd Endris was attacked by a great white shark off the coast of California in 2007, a pod of dolphins swam over to Endris while the shark was biting his back and one of his legs. The dolphins formed a ring around Endris, slapped the water furiously around him, and leaped over his head, until the massive shark finally let go and swam away. Endris made it back to the beach, got medical care, and survived.

Therapy Work: Emotional Healing

Some dolphins work in therapy programs designed to help people heal from emotional pain such as depression of post-traumatic stress disorder. After spending time playing with dolphins or even swimming with them, people often report feeling significantly calmer and more joyful than they did before. Those healing effects can take root in their lives over time as they continue to interact with dolphins, leading to healthier emotional states that help them develop lasting, healthy attitudes. Moreover, the emotional healing that people experience when interacting with dolphins can trigger the release of many healing chemicals in the body (from endorphins that relieve pain to interferons that help prevent cancer), leading to physical healing in their immune, endocrine, and nervous systems that helps them fight off a wide variety of diseases.

Therapy Work: Physical Healing

People suffering from diseases such as autism and cerebral palsy have shown significant improvement in their physical communication skills (such as speaking and using body language) after spending time with dolphins, people dealing with high blood pressure have experienced lower readings after interacting with dolphins, and people suffering from some types of allergies (such as skin conditions) have reported that spending time with dolphins has improved their health.

Using Sonar

Dolphins use their God-given sonar abilities to miraculously help people find objects underneath the sea that people couldn’t find on their own. Through a type of sonar called echolocation, dolphins can sense where sound waves move and interpret information in relation to the sound waves. They use that ability in the wild to locate and communicate with each other (with high-frequency clicking and squeaking sounds) in the water. When helping people, dolphins can use their echolocation skills to find objects for which people are searching. Dolphins have shown the miraculous ability to locate and distinguish the size, shape, and composition of different objects across far distances underwater, giving people the detailed information they need to find and interact with objects in the ocean.

Some human organizations officially partner with dolphins to find objects in the sea. For instance, dolphins serve in the United States Navy’s Marine Mammal Program, locating underwater mines (from a safe distance, using their sonar skills) that are set to explode when ships pass over them, so the navy can then send robots down to defuse the mines before they can harm people.