by Diana Reiss
Although I didn't know it when I arrived at Marine World that fall, both the female dolphins in the research pool were pregnant. This was an unexpected bonus, because it offered me the opportunity to observe the development of vocalization, echolocation, and social behavior of young dolphins right from birth.
My immediate issue on that last day of July was whether Terry, the older of the two mothers-to-be, was going to calve any time soon. About a month earlier, Terry's belly region had become quite distended, a sign that birth was not far away, a matter of weeks. My coworkers and I had seen her flexing and crunching occasionally over the previous few days, behavioral signs of an impending birth. That told us that delivery was imminent. Everyone at the pool was in a state of high alert, and more than a little anxious. During the previous few years there had been several births among the performing dolphins, but for various unrelated reasons, none of the calves had survived. I was determined that Terry's and Circe's infants weren't going to suffer the same fate, especially as these were my first dolphin births. Drawing on my experience as a set designer, I constructed a playpenlike contraption around the research pool that could be hoisted into place at night. I wasn't going to have any baby dolphins flying out of the pool on my watch!
It was early evening on July 31 and I had been at the pool for forty-eight hours straight. When I could, I slept on a cot in the research lab, a small eight-by-twelve-foot office perched on a grassy mound about fifteen feet away from the dolphin pools. My staff and I anxiously watched and waited for Terry to go into full labor. I was exhausted, and I needed to get a change of clothes. Terry had been off her feed earlier in the day, which is also sometimes—but not always—a sign of imminent delivery. I discussed the options with my research assistant Bruce Silverman. Did I have time to run home, check on my two cats, who were being fed by my neighbor, and grab some fresh clothes? Or would it be better to wait and go tomorrow? Of course neither of us knew for sure. Terry was still flexing and crunching, but not as often as she had over the past few days. We figured it would be at least another day, maybe more. "Okay," I said to Bruce, "I'll risk it. I'm going to the city. Call me if anything develops."
I jumped in my car, and in forty-five minutes I was at the door of my apartment in San Francisco. I could hear the phone ringing. I fumbled with my keys, flung the door open, and snatched up the phone. It was Bruce. "Terry is giving birth right now," he said. "Come quickly or you'll miss it." I grabbed a change of clothes and raced back. When I got there, Terry was swimming calmly around the pool, solicitous of her newborn calf at her side. I had missed the birth!
Terry had given birth before, and she looked like a competent mom and knew exactly what to do. A good thing, because newborn dolphins are a little unsteady, as all newborns are, even ones as precocious as these. They come into the world after a twelve-month gestation period, and they must immediately go to the surface to breathe and then be able to swim well enough to keep up with their mothers. They are the aquatic equivalent of newborn foals, a little wobbly on their (metaphorical) feet. Terry guided her newborn calf by steering his swimming direction with her whole body, occasionally stroking him with her pectoral fin, an act of maternal comfort and reassurance. At one point the calf veered off course and rammed into the side of the pool. Terry was immediately at the calf's side. I heard calls that I later understood were distress whistles. Was it Terry or her calf? I didn't know.
Terry seemed to be actively adjusting the calf's breathing rate by occasionally putting her rostrum over his blowhole. Very soon the calf's breathing rate was down from an initial eight or nine breaths a minute to a more natural three to five. Within a few hours the calf was interested in nursing, following his instincts to search for the creases that concealed his mother's nipples, another anatomical adaptation for a streamlined body. The little guy blundered around awkwardly at first, bumping against Terry's body, trying to insert his thin tongue into the crease at the corner of his mother's jaw and then into the crease where the back edge of her pectoral fin met her torso. Terry patiently rolled over on her side and oriented her body so that the calf's rostrum was next to her mammary slits, which are on either side of the genital slit, near the tail. He immediately slipped his tongue into the crevice, formed a watertight seal, and began to suckle. We breathed a sigh a relief. The calf had passed his first hurdle. Before long the two folds across his body, the fetal folds, would disappear as he put on blubber fueled by his mother's rich milk.
Meanwhile, Circe was showing signs of imminent delivery. She had begun flexing and crunching just before Terry had given birth. Circe was much younger than Terry and had not given birth before. So this was to be a first for both of us, because I was determined not to miss this one. I was going to stay on-site until the calf was born, however long it took.
I didn't have to wait that long. The morning of the second day after Terry gave birth, Circe was off her feed. We were ready. We had video cameras and audio recorders running continually, and my research staff was monitoring Terry and her calf, making sure that things were going as they should. I sounded like a play-by-play sports announcer as I recorded minute-by-minute commentary of Circe's every move. By early evening Circe was swimming in tight circles, sometimes doing corkscrew movements in the water, and looking a little frantic. Terry, who'd been close to her calf constantly since his birth, left him for a few seconds to swim alongside the apparently anxious Circe. Then Terry resumed her vigilant mothering of her own calf but continued to watch her companion from a distance. Finally, I saw the first real sign of birth, the appearance of the baby's tail fluke from the birth canal.
Some days earlier, we had made an important and potentially disastrous decision. Aquarium practice is to keep male dolphins away when females give birth because the males can sometimes be aggressive to newborn calves. The male in this case was Gordo, father of both Terry's calf and Circe's yet-to-be-born calf. He was the gentlest of dolphins, a real sweetheart. It would be difficult to incorporate him into another social group at the aquarium; he was an older male dolphin, and the change would have been very stressful. So I followed my gut and let him stay. Now, as Circe's first birthing began, Terry herded Gordo to the side of the pool, literally pushing him against the pool wall. She positioned her infant between Gordo and her own body, right below where I was standing near the pool. Terry and I both watched Circe. I could see the baby's tail fluke moving back and forth a little, peeking out of the genital slit. Then more of the tail, the tail stock, emerged. All of a sudden, with a burst of blood, the baby was out.
The baby bobbed about in the water, obviously in need of help. Circe, who began swimming aimlessly around the pool, looked in need of some help as well. There was quite a crowd of us watching, including our veterinarian and many of the research and marine mammal staff, and we were all thinking, Circe, go and get the calf! Dolphin lore holds that females are hard-wired to push their newborns to the surface, a supposedly powerful instinct that some believe underlies the instances when dolphins save drowning sailors or others in trouble in the sea. Yet it appeared to us that Circe (like many other dolphins I've since observed) had no instinct to do any such thing and that she was completely bewildered. I was listening to the dolphins on my headset via hydrophones; the pool was strangely silent. Terry, still pressing her calf against Gordo and pinning them both to the side of the pool, had her head turned at almost a right angle as she looked at Circe. Suddenly, Terry produced a long, complex whistle that began and ended with her personal contact call, a whistle a bit different in unique ways from the basic contact call of each of the others in the group, used as if to signal Hey, it's me! and perhaps even more. Circe instantly snapped into action: she immediately swam to the floundering baby and started to tend to him just like any good dolphin mother. Terry's whistle had been a combination call, a stringing-together of her contact call and a series of sounds that meant nothing to us but clearly meant something to Circe.
Had Terry recognized Circe's inexperience and bew
ilderment and given Circe instructions on what she was supposed to do? I still can't say, but it certainly looked that way. In any case, the two mothers and their babies began to swim together, beginning a companionship that was to last for a very long time. Continuing my tradition of naming dolphins after the Greek gods and goddesses, I named Terry's calf Pan and Circe's calf Delphi. Pan and Delphi became "the boys," as we fondly called them.
***
At the time Pan and Delphi were born, I was founder and director of Project CIRCE—the Cetacean Intelligence Research and Communication Experiment. I had completed my doctoral research with the first Circe in France in June 1982 and then returned to the States, where I spent the summer months writing up my dissertation. After receiving my PhD, I wanted to build the underwater-keyboard system that would, I hoped, enrich the lives of captive dolphins, providing them with increased choices and control over their toys and activities while at the same time enhancing our scientific knowledge of their cognitive abilities. I had already envisioned the keyboard: it would hang vertically before the dolphins with visual symbols on its face. When the dolphin pressed its rostrum to a specific key, it would hear a specific computer-generated whistle and receive a specific object or activity. Quite simple, really—like a dolphin vending machine, but one that would work underwater and would interface with a computer in the lab so I could collect and track the dolphins' use of the keyboard over time. I was eager to get started and I wasn't interested in doing the usual postdoc stint in another lab. I was ready to start my own work, but that required the right social group of dolphins. I would have much preferred to study dolphins in the wild, but this work had to be done with dolphins in an aquarium setting. I had to get up close and personal with the dolphins and run controlled studies that could be carefully documented and analyzed. Someday I hoped to do fieldwork to learn about the secret social lives of wild dolphins. Yet even just spotting dolphins in the wild was difficult, like looking for a needle in a haystack, as field researchers knew. Like astronomers searching the skies for undiscovered stellar bodies, one searches the glimmering waters in the hopes of spotting triangular dorsal fins at the surface. It is both thrilling and frustrating.
In what I can only recall as an unbelievably odd set of circumstances, I visited Marine World and somehow convinced the owner of the facility, Michael Demetrios, to convert what had been a petting pool into a research pool. In retrospect this was an amazing feat, because petting pools were a big attraction. (Hopefully, given our increased understanding of and respect for dolphins, petting pools soon will be—and should be—a thing of the past.)
My keyboard research—focused on Pan and Delphi—had quite ambitious goals. I had three main questions. The first and most basic: What would happen if we gave dolphins choice and control by way of a keyboard? The standard research approach at that time used techniques that were similar to those used when training dolphins to perform specific behaviors in shows. Researchers gradually shaped, or modified, dolphin behavior through reinforcement. Effectively, a trainer or experimenter decided what response or behavior he wanted from an animal and then selectively rewarded that response with food. The goal was to limit the dolphin's freedom so that when the animal was given a specific cue, such as a hand or acoustic signal, it would respond in one way. In these cases, it is the experimenter or trainer who is in control.
In contrast, my goal was to abdicate power and turn at least some choice and control over to the dolphins and see what their big brains would do with it. My assumption was that if you treated another as an intelligent being, he or she would show you a reflection of that intelligence.
My second question: How do dolphins learn their whistle repertoires? I had embarked on a project to decode whistle repertoires by observing and recording the behavior of the group. Vocal learning is surprisingly rare in the animal world, and besides humans, only avian species, dolphins, whales, and possibly elephants and bats show evidence of it. Numerous anecdotal accounts reported dolphin vocal imitation, yet no studies existed that investigated the process or extent of their learning, apart from Lilly's attempt to teach them to speak English using food rewards. I wondered how dolphins learned from one another without any human trainers. Was it at all similar to how humans and birds learned, through exposure and through imitation and practice?
Two decades after Lilly's philosophy had been most popular, expectations of the cognitive reach of dolphin minds were both lesser and greater than they had been.
During the first half of the twentieth century, the scientific study of animal psychology was dominated by a philosophical and theoretical approach known as behaviorism. Put simply, the main tenet of behaviorism is that scientific investigation should focus only on animals' (including humans') objective, observable behavior and their reactions to environmental stimuli. Behavior in animals was the outcome of stimulus/response processes, and nothing more. Mental processes might underlie some behavior, but because they could not be observed directly, they should not be the subject of scientific investigation.
In other words, animals were considered little more than biological automatons, creatures that lacked emotions or intent. Mental processes such as reflection and self-awareness, or consciousness, were nowhere in the picture, the behaviorists argued. This approach influenced the methods by which psychologists and biologists studied animal behavior. The brain was a black box, unknowable to human observers, and therefore not a valid topic for scientific inquiry.
It was not always like this. Charles Darwin would have been shocked at such a mechanistic perspective of the animal mind. In 1872, a decade before he died, Darwin published a book called The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, which presented the then commonly held belief that humans were not the only animals to experience thoughts, plans, and emotions. But behaviorism pushed this idea aside until well after World War II. Beginning in the 1950s, however, there was a growing interest in the nascent fields of artificial intelligence, computer science, and neuroscience. Two landmark scientific conferences in 1956, one at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one at Dartmouth College, marked a paradigm shift in thinking about minds, brains, and computers. These meetings resulted in what has been termed the cognitive revolution in how scientists approached the question of thinking and the minds of humans and other animals. The fundamental question changed from Can other animals think? to How do other animals think?
The modern study of animal minds was largely influenced by a small but courageous and pioneering book written by Donald Griffin in the late 1970s. Griffin had established his reputation three decades earlier; in 1944, at the age of twenty-nine, he and his fellow student Robert Galambos discovered that bats navigate using sonar, which they called echolocation. This was a revolutionary suggestion back then, and it was met in some quarters by complete disbelief. Echolocation was eventually accepted as a biological reality, of course, and it was followed several years later by the discovery that dolphins also employ echolocation for navigation and detection of prey, although in water rather than air.
In 1976, Griffin published The Question of Animal Awareness, which argued that nonhuman animals might also experience consciousness and be capable of thoughts and intent. He faced disbelief once again, and sometimes contemptuous opposition. Nevertheless, the seeds of what would become known as the field of cognitive ethology had been sown. Exploring animal minds became a more respectable scientific endeavor. The field is still criticized for citing anecdotes—which are subject to interpretation—as evidence. The late Stephen Jay Gould often said that "the plural of anecdotes is data." Yet as Marc Bekoff, a professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology, noted, anecdotes, like anthropomorphism, "can be used to make for better science, if we only let them."1
By nature, I have a lot of sympathy with Gould's and Bekoff's viewpoints, as long as the anecdotes are combined with scientific rigor. I try to trust my instincts, trust the insights that emerge, but I verify them with scientific tests as meti
culous as the circumstances allow. By the time Pan and Delphi were born, dolphins were recognized as intelligent, sentient creatures. But to what degree? That remained to be discovered. John Lilly's claim that dolphins could produce human words had proven to be unfounded. Yet they communicated with one another very effectively.
***
Animal research methods were still hotly debated at this time. In 1980, I attended a conference at the prestigious New York Academy of Sciences entitled "The Clever Hans Phenomenon: Communication with Horses, Whales, Apes, and People," ostensibly about current research on human-animal communication, specifically apes and dolphins. As a neophyte in the field, I was very eager to attend. I was aware that so-called ape-language research was under growing scrutiny, and I wanted to hear more about that. From the very first moment that the conference opened, I found myself witness to a vicious and vitriolic attack on the integrity of ape-language researchers in particular and the field of interspecies communication research as a whole. It made me wonder not whether humans could communicate with other animals but whether humans could communicate with other humans. I spent much of the time with Irene Pepperberg, who was at the beginning of what turned out to be a remarkable research program with an African Grey parrot named Alex. Irene and I felt like a couple of kids who had inadvertently stumbled into a roomful of adults slinging insults at one another.
Under attack were ape-language researchers including Allen and Beatrix Gardner, David Premack, Roger Fouts, Duane Rumbaugh and Sue Savage Rumbaugh, and Penny Patterson. They had used sign language, keyboards, and other kinds of symbols to explore whether apes could produce "words" in relation to objects or behaviors and whether they had a grasp of syntax. Only Sue Savage Rumbaugh and Duane Rumbaugh attended the conference.
