According to the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-D blueprints, Cetacean Ops is located on deck 13 and the dolphins habitats extend between decks 13 and 14 and include their own lifeboats.
Yo what the fuck
Imagine the ship is destroyed and people come find the escape pods and they’re all filled with dolphins.
The ship is under attack, most of the crew:
Meanwhile, in cetacean ops:
To be fair, in the star trek movie (the one with the whales) the crew of the enterprise find out that whales are not only sentient, but actively have been communicating with aliens for years and are probably the first mammals on the planet to have made first contact, so to speak, so it seems pretty plausible that after that whole escapade starfleet was like “you know maybe we should look into the other cetaceans too to make sure we don’t make THAT sort of blunder again” and upon finding out they were intelligent, it seems eminently likely that, being citizens of earth, they would be granted the same rights as everyone else in the federation, including the right to join starfleet itself.
I imagine it would probably be a point of pride for starfleet to have dolphins on their ships, as another ambassador species of earth known for being charming. They probably have to stay mostly in their own sections shared with other aquatic creatures for water reasons, but there’s probably communal areas where they can just hang out with other officers.
