Nicole Isaacs was out on the ocean off Los Angeles when a dolphin surfaced next to the boat and didn’t leave.
Something was clearly wrong. Isaacs, an avid diver, looked closer and saw deep red gashes in the dolphin’s skin. Then she and her companion spotted the cause: two remoras, also called suckerfish, had latched directly into the dolphin’s flesh and were feeding on it. Remoras typically hitchhike harmlessly on larger marine animals, but in this case they had attached to wounds and the dolphin was convulsing from the pain.
Isaacs was pregnant at the time. She looked at the other woman. “Should I get in with him?”
She got in.
What followed over the next several minutes was equal parts chaotic, heartbreaking, and extraordinary, all of it captured on video and posted to her TikTok account @nicoleisaacsofficial on January 28, 2026, where it has since been viewed 13 million times.
The dolphin, to Isaacs’s astonishment, seemed to understand what was happening. When the women entered the water and approached, she rolled over and held still. “She began to fully cooperate and turn over for us to make it easy to grab the remoras,” Isaacs wrote in the video overlay. The rest of the pod circled at a distance while they worked.
Getting the remoras off was harder than expected. They moved quickly and reattached easily. At one point Isaacs caught one and swam it back toward the boat to hand off to the captain — and it slipped out of his hands and latched onto her instead. “I was pregnant and freaking out,” she says in the video. It eventually released her, swam back, and reattached to the same dolphin. It took multiple attempts before both were finally removed 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 throughout, suddenly reappeared all at once and began swimming in loops 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 doesn’t generally advocate touching wild animals, but that the circumstances made intervention feel necessary and that the pod’s response confirmed for her that it was the right call. “The most insane day of my life on the ocean,” she wrote. “I trusted my instincts and did what I thought was right.”
One viewer put it simply: “A totally untrained dolphin cooperating and letting you tend to her just out of sheer trust and desperation — I’m just shook.”
You can follow @nicoleisaacsofficial on TikTok for more entertaining content.
