Woman remains hospitalized after dolphin jumps in boat

Dec 26, 2006, 20:41 GMT

Wellington - A woman remained in intensive care in hospital Wednesday after being critically injured by a dolphin, which leaped out of the sea onto a pleasure boat off the New Zealand coast.

The incident on Tuesday has stunned dolphin experts. Liz Slooten, an Otago University marine mammal biologist who has studied dolphins for two decades, said the incident was 'more rare than being struck by lightning.'

'The number of dolphins that injure, let alone kill, a human would be one in 100 years,' she told the New Zealand Herald.

She said dolphins seldom become aggressive in the company of humans, but could get agitated or confused when a large number of boats were around.

The 27-year-old woman, who has not been named, was crushed and seriously injured when a 3-metre long bottlenose dolphin leaped aboard the boat as it cruised near Slipper Island, about 8 kilometres off the Coromandel Peninsula.

The animal smashed the windscreen on the 5.5-metre runabout injuring another woman who was cut by flying glass before falling back into the sea and swimming away apparently unharmed.

The woman who was most seriously injured suffered a cardiac arrest before being flown to a hospital in Auckland by a rescue helicopter. She did not fully regain consciousness during the flight, the Herald reported.

Barbara Needham, whose family owns Slipper Island, told the newspaper that a pod of dolphins had been in the area for a week and people had been swimming and taking boats out to see them.

'They've just been fantastic, doing aerial displays and everything,' she said.

'The dolphins seem to be attracted by boats, so whether there were too many boats and not enough room for everybody, I don't know,' she said.