By now, you've heard of a lil' Oscar-winning movie called The Shape of Water, which tells the love story between a woman and a fish-type creature.
And lest you think a love story between a human and an aquatic creature is purely in the realm of fiction, we have a very real and even crazier real life story for you: "The Dolphin Who Loved Me: The NASA-Funded Project That Went Wrong."
Basically, the tl;dr is this: In the 1960s, NASA financed a project to try to teach dolphins to speak English. YES, actual dolphins took lessons and underwent training to get them to vocalize words and communicate with us humans.
To give them a boost, the researchers gave the animals LSD. Seriously.
That by itself is already crazy enough, but there's more: Margaret Lovatt, one of the researchers on the project, became very close to a male dolphin named Peter.
How close, you might ask? Let me tell you: It was TOO close. They even started living together in a half-flooded lab facility, so that Peter could swim about freely.
It was Lovatt's idea. She argued that if she could be around the dolphins at all hours, they would be more interested in making human sounds. So she moved into the lab, waterproofed the upper floor, and flooded part of the interior so that Peter could live with her.
Soon, Lovatt and Peter's relationship took on a slightly different tone.
According to Lovatt, she felt no discomfort in performing the act, saying that it was done with "a lot of respect," and that it was more "sensuous" than sexual.
After a few years, interest in the language project began to wane. Results weren't promising, and the LSD wasn't having the desired effect on the dolphins. So NASA withdrew funding.
At the project's end, Lovatt's role was done away with. The dolphins, Peter included, were transferred to other labs.
And, stuck in a smaller tank with hardly any light and without Lovatt, Peter killed himself.
Dolphins are not automatic breathers like we are – every breath is a conscious effort. So dolphins can hold their breath until they die, if they want to.
Lovatt wasn't totally upset when Peter died, because she didn't want him to suffer. "Nobody was going to bother Peter, he wasn't going to hurt, he wasn't going to be unhappy, he was just gone. And that was OK," she said.
Peter's vet put the dolphin's death down to a broken heart, caused by a "separation from Lovatt that he didn't understand."
You can read the full story at The Guardian.
For more translated content and BuzzFeed International goodness, subscribe to Inter Webz: our new bi-weekly newsletter bringing you the best of the 'net from around the world.
This post was translated from Portuguese.