by Diana Reiss
I'll make that connection with events recorded some two thousand years ago at Hippo, a Roman colonial town on the north coast of Africa, not far from modern-day Tunis, and similar events witnessed just fifty years ago at Opononi, a small town on the north coast of New Zealand.
Pliny the Elder wrote the story of a boy and a dolphin at Hippo, and he said in a letter he wrote to his poet friend Caninius that the tale "is true, though it has all the qualities of a fable."8 The young boys of the town loved to play in the waters, and one game they especially liked was seeing who could be carried farthest out to sea. One boy, bolder than the rest, was far out to sea one day when, to his consternation, a dolphin approached him. The dolphin at first swam around and under him, and then dived, rose under the boy, took him on its back, and swam much farther out. The boy was, quite properly, terrified. But then the dolphin turned around and took the boy safely back to the beach, where the other boys were in awe of what had just happened. Did their friend have supernatural powers? In the days that followed, the dolphin reappeared in the midst of the boys, but they were too timid to get too close. Eventually, the original dolphin rider mounted the dolphin again, and it repeated its previous feat. The dramatic spectacle of the boy riding a wild beast of the sea attracted large crowds of spectators. Unfortunately, managing the crowds of strangers proved to be a financial burden on the town's budget, and sadly the elders secretly decided to do away with the dolphin.
At Opononi in New Zealand, two thousand years later, a young female dolphin, who came to be known locally as Opo, cavorted with young girls and boys in the sea, just like the dolphin at Hippo. Opo seemed to like to be touched and sought out the gentler youngsters for special attention. Jill Baker (a girl at last!) was Opo's favorite, and she would always leave the company of the other children when she entered the water. Although Opo didn't engage in dramatic feats of swimming far out to sea, she did allow Jill, and a few others, to ride her. Two mammal species, separated by ninety-five million years of evolutionary history, playing together, enjoying an extraordinary bond of great simplicity, a rapport that stretches across the ages.
In his survey of the history of dolphins, the eminent anthropologist Ashley Montagu cited the story of Opo and other such contemporary examples, and said, "The so-called myths of the ancients were based on solid facts of observation and not, as has hitherto been supposed, on the imaginings of mythmakers."9 Yes, storytellers often fall to improperly anthropomorphizing. And, yes, some storytellers no doubt embellish their tales. What storytellers don't? But at its core, the connection between humans and dolphins is undeniable and reaches back thousands of years.*
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In the early Christian church, images of dolphins represented positive values such as salvation, teachings about grace, the beauty of the human soul. But before many centuries passed, the reverence and respect for dolphins as sacred beasts that was so prominent in ancient Greece and Rome began to fade away. It's not that reverence for the dolphins had been universal in those ancient times. Dolphins were fair game for the hunt in a few places, which was what led Oppian to condemn it in such forceful terms, but among the leaders of civilization and culture, the bond was indeed powerful. However, starting in the second half of the first millennium and into the first half of the second millennium, all that changed. Stories such as the ones you've just read began to wane. As the force of human activity moved to the beat of dominion over the Earth, as natural resources were seen more and more as ours to exploit, rather than protect, dolphins moved from being sacred to being mundane, just another resource to be exploited for our material benefit.
In the early nineteenth century Frédéric Cuvier, younger brother of the great French zoologist Georges Cuvier, noted the dramatic slide in respect dolphins had suffered from ancient to modern times. Dolphins went from being viewed as a "gentle, good-natured and intelligent animal, most responsive to benevolent treatment" to being dismissed as "merely a voracious carnivore, whose ends are solely those of feeding, resting and reproducing, and whose instincts serve no purpose other than the satisfaction of those needs." It is much easier to slaughter animals if you think of them as voracious carnivores rather than gentle, good-natured, and intelligent creatures.
In his 1973 book The Cosmic Connection Carl Sagan pondered what our unrestrained slaughter of dolphins and whales told us about ourselves. Noting that there was emerging evidence that dolphins and whales were far more intelligent than most people had thought possible, he said: "They have acted benignly and in many cases affectionately toward us. We have systematically slaughtered them. Little reverence for life is evident in the whaling industry —underscoring a deep human failing." Know Thyself.
A shift in attitude toward dolphins and whales was afoot as Carl was writing those dark words, a gradual stirring of an ancient but long-dormant worldview. As modern scientists began to uncover and document the remarkable abilities of the dolphin mind, the nonscientific public rediscovered the visceral connection with dolphins and whales that the people of ancient Greece and Rome had seen as part of the natural order of things.
Stories of dolphins saving shipwrecked sailors and keeping sharks at bay when swimmers were in trouble once again began to rise in our consciousness. In the early 1970s, the eerily beautiful songs of the humpback whales struck a primordial chord in all but the most hardened listener. Whale-watching tours and swim-with-dolphins programs were in the nascent stages of what has become a multibillion-dollar business. I know from my own experience the profound feeling of being with a "presence" when I am with dolphins. It is almost impossible to put into words. But I think I know what it means:
Know Thyself, each and every one of us. Know Thyself as a species with privileges and responsibilities on this Earth, responsibilities to recognize and honor the inherent value of other species.
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Today, tragically, dolphins and whales are being brutally slaughtered and driven toward extinction by modern and otherwise civilized humans. Despite a brief moratorium on whaling in the mid-1980s, today whaling is still practiced by many countries and territories, including Canada, the commonwealth of Dominica, the Faroe Islands, Greenland, Grenada, Indonesia, Japan, Norway, the Philippines, Russia, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, the Grenadines, and the United States. Moby-Dick is an American classic about the brutal practice that was discontinued, though there is one exception: each year, nine indigenous Alaskan communities are permitted to hunt a total of fifty bowhead whales. I'm sharing the scientific and personal experiences I've had with dolphins—these remarkable minds in the water—in the hope that you will become as convinced as I am that they deserve global protection and respect.
2. First Insights
SUMMER 1977.
As I lay in the darkness under oppressively humid tropical heat, I could hear the soft murmur of crickets in the nearby grove of torchwoods; the trees' sweet aroma hung in the air. My simple thatched cabin was dark as pitch; the only light came from a few stars shining through the wooden louvers of the window that overlooked the lagoon just outside. Every few minutes, the constant, soft ratcheting of the crickets was interrupted by another sound: chuff. It was way past midnight, and sleep was nowhere near. I'm a night owl anyway, so I'm used to late hours. But this night it wasn't my nocturnal habit that kept me up. Chuff. It was eager anticipation.
Earlier that day I had arrived in Little Torch Key, about twenty-five miles from Key West, Florida, to conduct my first study of dolphins. There were two of them, a male and a female, both bottlenose dolphins. They were to be my companions and mentors of a sort for the next month. During that first day I sat by the edge of the lagoon, quietly observing their behavior, and that night I could hear their breathing—chuff—as from time to time they broke the water's surface and exhaled and inhaled through the blowholes on the tops of their heads.
My recently formulated life's goal was not modest: I wanted to understand the dolphin mind and learn how these highly social animals communicated. What little was known a
bout these realms at this point came principally from the work of John Lilly, who'd pioneered research in dolphin communication and intelligence. He had initiated his investigations more than two decades earlier and used a combination of electrophysiology, acoustic analysis, and training techniques to study dolphin intelligence and the potential for communication with other species.
In 1960 Lilly speculated that in the near future, the human species would establish communication with another intelligence, "non-human, alien, possibly extraterrestrial, more probably marine; but definitely highly intelligent, perhaps intellectual."1
He envisioned humans establishing an interspecies dialogue with dolphins. In what may seem like a sci-fi scenario, Lilly acquired a house by the sea on St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, flooded its lower floors with seawater, and transformed it into a live-in laboratory where he and his assistant Margaret Howe attempted to teach dolphins to speak English. Lilly housed his dolphins under what would now be considered inhumane and unacceptable conditions—in small, shallow pools. I literally cringe every time I see images of those one-and-a-half- to four-and-a-half-feet-deep pools and the coffin-size Plexiglas testing tanks. But these were the 1960s, and scientific consciousness of what constitutes proper husbandry for dolphins was in its infancy. Lilly speculated that the large and complex-brained dolphin, known for its proclivity for vocal imitation, would, like a human child, be able to learn English if provided with the correct social conditions. To test this, he conducted an experiment during which Margaret Howe lived with a young male dolphin, Peter, for several weeks. Of course, they did not share a level playing field of social interactions and exchanges. Nor was she rearing Peter, as had been attempted previously with chimpanzees to see if they could learn language if brought up in similar conditions as a human child. Instead, she held a fish bucket and trained the dolphin to imitate the number of syllables, or "sonic bursts," that she produced, rewarding him with fish when he got it right. The dolphin was able to master the task, and the results were published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America in 1968 under the title "Reprogramming of the Sonic Output of the Dolphin: Sonic Burst Count Matching."
In any case, Lilly was the first person in modern times to recognize that dolphins have large, complex brains, that they are highly intelligent, and that they are adept vocal mimics. He was the lone pioneer in this field for many years, and he deserves credit for sparking scientific and public interest in dolphins, their brains, and their intelligence and communication abilities in his early writing, from 1954 to 1968. His suggestion that humans could no longer claim to be the only superintelligent beings on the planet proved to be prophetic. He also professed that dolphins' ability to mimic sounds combined with their intelligence would enable them to learn and use English words. This idea was so fantastic to me when I read it in 1977 that I rushed out and bought a record that Lilly had made a few years earlier, Sounds and the Ultra-Sounds of the Bottle-Nose Dolphin. I still can bring to mind Margaret Howe's rich Southern accent as she said to the dolphin, "One, two, three, foe-er," the dolphin responding with four bursts of sound in the same rhythmic pattern. However, I soon became keenly skeptical of the idea that this line of work would ever go anywhere. Indeed, Lilly, who died in 1986, never achieved his dream of having a conversation in English with dolphins.
As unorthodox as his approach was, Lilly was responsible for establishing and stimulating research in the science of dolphin cognition, and through his popular writing he ignited the public's interest in dolphins and their amazing abilities. In his own visionary and eccentric way, he opened up the real possibility that somehow we humans might be able to communicate with a species very different from us, and vice versa.
I wanted to explore that possibility. How? I wasn't quite certain yet. I was aware of the groundbreaking attempts at the time to teach language-like codes to species other than our own. For instance, Allen and Beatrix Gardner and their graduate student Roger Fouts taught a young female chimpanzee, Washoe, to communicate using a modified version of American Sign Language; David Premack at the University of Pennsylvania taught the chimpanzee Sarah to use a code of visual symbols (Premack's theory of mind, the ability to infer the intentions, beliefs, and desires of other individuals, has been highly influential); Irene Pepperberg worked with Alex, an African Grey parrot, whose burgeoning verbal abilities gave her a window into his mind. Yet I already had an inkling that this realm of research was viewed by some as less than scientific. (The antagonistic undercurrents regarding some of these studies exploded into public view with extraordinary force and animosity just three years later, in May 1980, at a now famous conference at the New York Academy of Sciences.)
I was determined to pursue a rigorous line of investigation in my own work, whatever I did, so much so that colleagues have sometimes teased me as I doggedly gather one more piece of evidence to support an already pretty secure conclusion. At the same time, I knew in every fiber of my being that communication between two individuals is a social process, facilitated by familiarity and trust between them. After just a few days of observing the two dolphins in that lagoon on Little Torch Key, I began to feel that familiarity and trust, especially as I recognized that they were also observing me. I sensed a familiarity in our interactions, a pattern of behavior that seemed easily recognizable. I had become entranced with the writings of the British anthropologist, social scientist, and thinker Gregory Bateson, a man who, among his other accomplishments, spent some time observing the social interactions of dolphins at Sea Life Park Hawaii. A phrase from his last book captured what I was experiencing in these first encounters with dolphins and would continue to experience throughout my work with them: "What is the pattern which connects all living creatures?"2 The pattern that connects; the recognition of familiarity.
My agenda, then, as I embarked on my journey was to learn everything that was currently known about dolphin communication and behavior, and then to go beyond those frontiers into the unknown, into the realm of dolphin mind. I wanted to explore the far reaches of their minds, to dive into those unknown waters and find out what they can do and what they know. A few years earlier, Thomas Nagel, a professor of philosophy and law at New York University, had published what would become a classic paper in the realm of animal behavior and cognition and philosophy. It was titled "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" He explored the notion that perhaps there were experiences beyond human understanding, intellectually and viscerally. We can try to imagine, he argued, what it would be like to be blind and equipped mainly with exquisite sonar (echolocation) for navigation and detecting insect prey; we can try to imagine what it would be like to eat bugs night after night and hang upside down in a cave during the daylight hours; and we can try to imagine what it would be like to flap our arms and fly with superb agility. But this exercise suggests only what it would be like for a human to be a bat, not necessarily what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Part of my long-term goal was to achieve the apparently impossible: to know what it is like for a dolphin to be a dolphin.
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When I arrived in Little Torch Key that summer of 1977, my Honda station wagon was loaded with heavy-duty equipment for recording underwater sounds: a big J-9 hydrophone, a huge eight-track reel-to-reel recorder, and forty tapes. I was a doctoral student in the Speech and Communications Department of Temple University and I had received a two-thousand-dollar biomedical research grant for women in science from the National Institutes of Health to conduct observations and record the vocalizations of two semi-feral bottlenose dolphins. Such a modest sum wasn't going to provide me with the kind of equipment I needed for recording dolphin whistles, however. I rustled up the equipment by way of the military's technology transfer program; I called dozens of military bases around the country until I located everything. I had my own form of sonar to zero in on the equipment; I already had experience in recording and analyzing human speech. My goal during my month in Florida was to further develop expertise in recording and analyzing dolp
hin whistles. But during that first week, all the expensive (and now completely obsolete) equipment sat in my little thatched hut, unused. I had thought long and logically about how to carry out this mini research program, how to document the patterns of dolphin behavior and record the whistles that accompany them. But the approach I finally adopted really came from my gut, my intuition.
Scientific methods vary. Each one typically demands that a researcher adopt a well-established, regimented approach to collecting data. In the field of animal behavior, for instance, a researcher may observe an individual animal or a group of animals at set intervals (say, every thirty seconds) and then choose items from a predetermined catalogue of behaviors, called an ethogram, that describe those behaviors; this sequence of behavioral snapshots becomes the raw data for analysis. Another option is to videotape the ongoing and interactive behavior of animals and then analyze the behavior back at the lab. I didn't use either approach. Instead, during the first week of the project, I spent a lot of quiet time sitting by the edge of the lagoon, simply observing the two dolphins, mentally noting what they did when they swam separately; how they interacted together, as they so often did; and how they interacted with me, as they were so obviously keen to do. I wanted to absorb something of their overall patterns of behavior, not tabulate them in the conventional manner.
These creatures were so strange to me in so many ways—in their physical form, how they moved, and what was going on in their minds—that I was, figuratively speaking, blind and deaf to their behavior. It was like working with aliens. By initially simply observing them, being with them, rather than studying them, I believed I would be able to begin to close that gulf between us so that I could start to see and hear their alien world a little bit. Only then, I reasoned, would I be in a position to act the conventional scientist with them, aided by technology and routine observational regimens. I hadn't had any role models in this new (to me) realm of animal behavior. I was guided, in part, on behavioral research methods by the writings of Princeton ethologist Jeanne Altmann. But largely, I was on my own.* It was a humble start. In the years to come I would greatly enjoy rich collaborations with colleagues and students.
