Pregnant diver jumps in to help a bleeding dolphin near her boat. Then, the entire pod surrounded her.

Nicole Isaacs was not planning to become a wildlife rescuer that day. She was out on the ocean off Los Angeles with a friend when a dolphin appeared alongside their boat, barely moving, covered in deep red gashes.

"Are you hurt?" Isaacs asked, almost reflexively, leaning over the side. When the dolphin rolled onto her side and revealed the wounds, Isaacs' voice broke: "Oh, no! I think [she's] hurt! She got bit. I'm sorry, baby. I don't know what to do. It's dying."

That raw, unscripted moment is now sitting at over 13 million views on TikTok, posted by Isaacs (@nicoleisaacsofficial) in late January. And it's not hard to understand why.

What the two women eventually spotted were remoras, also called suckerfish, latched directly into the dolphin's flesh. According to A-Z Animals, as reported by The Mary Sue, remoras typically hitchhike on marine animals and cause only minor skin irritation. But these had burrowed into visible wounds, and the dolphin was convulsing.

Isaacs, who was pregnant at the time, stood at the edge of the boat and asked her friend, "Should I get in with him?" Then she got in.

What followed was a painstaking negotiation between two humans and a wild animal in pain. The dolphin, remarkably, seemed to understand what was happening. "She began to fully cooperate and turn over for us to make it easy to grab the remoras," Isaacs wrote in a text overlay on the video. Anyone who has ever tried to earn the trust of a frightened animal knows how extraordinary that kind of stillness is.

A woman swims in the oceanCanva

Things got chaotic at one point. Isaacs caught one of the remoras and swam it back toward the boat, but when she handed it to the captain, it slipped free and latched onto her instead. "It slipped out of the captain's hand and latched onto me. I was pregnant and freaking out," she says in the video. The remora eventually released her, swam back, and reattached to the same dolphin. It took multiple attempts before both were finally hauled on board for good.

The dolphin's response was immediate. She leapt out of the water. Then the rest of the pod, which had been circling at a distance the entire time, suddenly reappeared and began swimming around the boat. "All of the dolphins reappeared out of nowhere and swam around us to celebrate," Isaacs wrote.

In her caption, she was careful to note that she does not generally advocate touching wild animals, but added that she believed the circumstances warranted it, and that the pod's reaction confirmed she had made the right call.

A happy-looking dolphin popping out of the waterCanva

The comment section lit up with a question that's been bouncing around the internet ever since: did the dolphins trust Isaacs partly because she was pregnant? It's not as far-fetched as it sounds. According to a report in NBC News, dolphins use echolocation to detect shapes and movement in their environment, including potentially a developing fetus. Neuroscientist Lori Marino of Emory University told NBC News she finds it "extremely plausible" that dolphins can detect a human pregnancy this way, though she cautioned that a controlled study would be needed to say so definitively.

"Awwww dolphins can sense when a human is pregnant!!! They were fully protecting you as you helped their friend," one commenter wrote. Others were more focused on the rescue itself. "A totally untrained dolphin cooperating and letting you tend to her just out of sheer trust and desperation, wow, I'm just shook," wrote @alanalwagner. @mkbu218 added, "The fact that the dolphin knew to just twist in the direction of your hand placement."

It's also worth noting that a scientist on TikTok, @theexcitablescientist, posted a response video with the caption "Leaving wildlife alone is usually the best way to help them." It's a fair point, and one Isaacs herself acknowledged. The nuance here is real. But so is the video of a dolphin leaping out of the water the moment she was free of pain, with her whole pod rising around her.

Some things are hard to argue with.

This article originally appeared earlier this year.