The Dolphin in the Mirror

by Diana Reiss

  On more than one occasion, Pan spent minutes in front of the mirror bending his head toward it, which gave him a view of his blowhole, and then he produced bubbles and bubble streams along with a variety of sounds. We had seen dolphins blow bubbles before, of course, but Pan was obviously looking at himself in the mirror. Delphi and Pan had pretty clearly gone down the cognitive path pioneered by Gallup's chimps two decades earlier. It was time for the crucial mark (with no hands) test.*

  Our plan was that during a feeding session, we would put a mark on each dolphin's body in a place he could not ordinarily see. We would then give the dolphin a release signal to let him know he could swim away and do as he pleased. We marked one animal at a time. If the dolphin was curious about what had happened during the marking session, we expected he might go to the mirror and visually inspect the mark. Or, if he wasn't curious, we thought he might notice the mark in the mirror while swimming freely and then use the mirror to take a closer look.

  The first session did not go well. Delphi was the first to be marked. Lori and I and my research assistants were filming and collecting data from an elevated observation deck twelve feet in the air, adjacent to the pool, and I asked one of the dolphin trainers to mark Delphi. The trainer inadvertently put far too much of the mark (white zinc oxide, the main ingredient in many sunscreens) on Delphi's side. It was a huge, thick smear, and it appeared to really freak Delphi out. He broke station without waiting for the releasesignal and started speed swimming around the pool. I was upset that he seemed so upset, so after a few minutes I shouted to the trainer, "We've got to call him back to station, now! Forget the experiment. We have to get this stuff off him." My own heart was pounding as the trainer placed the bucket of fish at the pool's edge and put her hand in the water, part of the signal to come. Delphi came right over. The trainer gave him the hand signal to lay out, which the dolphins had learned to do for physical exams.

  The trainer quickly wiped away the big white mark, and Delphi immediately relaxed. Again without a signal, he broke station and made a beeline for the mirror, orienting that part of his body where the mark had been toward the mirror. He appeared to inspect it closely. He then came back to station. We were thrilled. In that little episode, Delphi gave every indication that he knew the dolphin in the mirror was in fact him, and he had used the mirror to check out something on his body. We seemed to be on the way to that final crucial step in the test.

  Unfortunately, the use of the mirror to inspect a part of the body after the mark was removed was pretty much the only such compelling behavior during the mark (with no hands) test. We conducted a few other mark tests, putting a less freaky amount of zinc oxide on both Delphi and Pan, but neither of them made a beeline for the mirror to check it out as we had expected them to. Only after we removed the marks did they unequivocally race to the mirror and quite deliberately orient their bodies to inspect the area. "Whereas the dolphins did seem interested in using the mirror to examine their bodies after the mark had been removed," we wrote later, "we did not find any other instances of posturing that was unambiguous." We were therefore forced to conclude that the work had been suggestive but not conclusive of self-recognition. We felt we had been so close. (I had conversations about this work with Ken Marten, a friend and colleague at Sea Life Park Hawaii, shortly after we finished this experiment. He decided to embark on a similar project and produced similarly inconclusive results.9) It was very frustrating. In retrospect, I think we probably stopped the work prematurely, partly through force of circumstances: I was pregnant and was planning to spend a year back east at Yale with my husband before returning to Vallejo.

  ***

  In his original chimp mirror self-recognition paper, Gallup had essentially said that the self-directed behavior he'd observed in the chimps he had tested was enough to convince a reasonable person that these animals were self-aware but he felt he needed a "scientifically objective" measure: the mark test. We were now in the same position with the dolphins: we all felt in our guts that dolphins, too, were self-aware, given what we'd seen, but they had just failed Gallup's litmus test. Why?

  As I mentioned earlier, human children generally develop self-awareness between the ages of eighteen months and two years. This cognitive capacity resides in the prefrontal cortex and elsewhere and is associated with the ability to show concern for others. "Poor Mommy," a two-year-old might say if Mommy gets a boo-boo. But psychologists know very well that not all of them can do this by age two, not even neurologically normal kids, despite the fact that from a very young age all children are cued almost daily, as in "Hey, Morgan, that's you in the mirror. Don't you look cute!" When Morgan sees herself in the mirror when she's a little older, she already knows it's her. So when we insist that in order to demonstrate that a nonhuman animal is self-aware it must pass the mirror test, including the mark test, with no prior cuing, we are actually setting the bar far higher than we do for human children.

  Recognizing oneself in the mirror seems like a simple act. You roll out of bed in the morning, you go to the mirror, you're either happy or not so happy with what you see, but you know without any effort what you are seeing, and you make use of the mirror to remove that eyelash resting on your cheek or to iron out that wrinkle inflicted by the pillow. Sounds simple, but in fact, cognitively, it is quite complex. In the mirror test, an animal must first pay selective attention to the information in the mirror. Many animals don't do this. Second, if the animal does pay attention, it has to interpret what it sees. Most animals that do pay attention to the mirror interpret the image as another member of their own species and try to engage it in some form of social interaction. If the rare observing animal recognizes the image as "self," it must then be motivated to use the mirror as a tool to observe and inspect itself before we can be sure what it knows. So, self-directed behavior requires both the cognitive capacity that underlies the concept of self and the motivation to use the mirror as a tool. Passing the mark test is yet more specific: it requires motivation or interest in touching the mark. I see that as a distinct barrier.

  Chimps spend a good deal of their time grooming themselves and even more time grooming one another; dolphins, for obvious reasons, do not. Dolphins engage in high degrees of tactile and physical contact with others, both dolphins and humans, and their skin is highly innervated so they are sensitive to touch. But for the most part, paying attention to marks on their body is not high on their daily agendas. Chimps need to pick out lice and other bugs. Dolphins do not. Perhaps that's why Delphi and Pan failed the mark (with no hands) test—perhaps neither one was sufficiently engaged by a foreign mark on his body. In which case, one could argue that the mark test was just unrealistically demanding. Or perhaps our experimental design was in some way inadequate.

  In any case, I knew that before long I would have to try again.

  6. Through the Looking Glass

  THE DANCER IN ME was quite captivated as I watched Presley perform a bizarre sequence of horizontal swirls. He was lying below the water's surface on his left side, his body curled in a fetal position as he spun and looked, spun and looked, spun and looked. From modern dance lessons I had taken as a child, I knew that when a dancer executes a spin, he has to visually fix on a particular point after each rotation. It helps keep the dancer oriented and stable, and during practice sessions in front of a mirror it allows him to check out the aesthetics of the move. Presley appeared to be doing something very similar as he visually fixed on a particular point after each rotation. Spin and look, spin and look, spin and look. Round and round and round he went, this thirteen-year-old male bottlenose dolphin. In the five years I had known him, I'd never seen him (or any other dolphin, for that matter) do this, and he'd not been trained to do it either. It wasn't part of the natural behavioral repertoire of dolphins. Yet Presley was suddenly motivated to carry out the swirl. He was regarding himself in a three-by-five-foot horizontal mirror that I had placed in his pool. This dolphin spin-dancer glanced toward the mirror at the
same instant in each rotation, looking at himself.*

  This was early in 1998 at the Wildlife Conservation Society's New York Aquarium in Brooklyn, and I had embarked on mirror-self-recognition investigations again, with two male dolphins, thirteen-year-old Presley and seventeen-year-old Tab, both of them captive-born. I had spent a lot of time thinking about the mirror we should use, trying to put myself in the mind of a dolphin. What would be the best possible demonstration that they really wanted to see themselves in the mirror? Then it came to me one day: Make it smaller. This way, if the dolphins truly wanted to see themselves, their actions would have to be quite deliberate. I thought we might see much more specific behavior as an indicator of their intentions. This approach would allow them to show me what they were capable of without my shepherding them toward a particular behavior.

  In some ways it makes little difference what size a mirror is if all you are going to do is put an eye close to it, as I'd seen Presley and Tab do separately several times. But if Presley wanted to see himself fully in the three-by-five mirror while he swirled, he'd have to position himself some distance away from it, which is precisely what he did. He quite deliberately backed away from the mirror until he could see his entire body, and then he went into the horizontal swirl: spin and look, spin and look, spin and look. Presley apparently first tested out the physics of seeing the whole of his body in the small mirror, and then went into this entirely novel behavior, a move he invented.

  ***

  Embarking on an ambitious research program with dolphins at the New York Aquarium hadn't been part of my plans when I left Marine World in Vallejo in 1990 for what I envisaged as a year's leave of absence for the birth of my daughter. My husband had a research position at Yale Medical School and we decided it would be best for me to join him there; we planned to stay there for a year and then return to the West Coast, where he would look for a professorship in the Bay Area while I would reunite with the dolphins and resume my position as director of the marine mammal lab. But it turned out to be a tumultuous year for the facility, and a fateful one for me. The administration changed. Amusement rides and other abominations were to be installed. Circe, to my piercing sorrow, was sold to an aquarium in Portugal, and Delphi and Pan were sold to an aquarium in Florida. The new director had decided he wanted to use the research pools as a breeding facility. Apparently, the new regime thought that Delphi and Pan didn't look enough like the prototypical Flipper and so were not suitable for dolphin shows. It's true that the boys were bigger than purebred Atlantic bottlenose dolphins, since they were a cross between the Atlantic and Pacific species. (Delphi's mother, Circe, and Pan's mother, Terry, were Atlantic dolphins, but the boys' father was the lovable, larger Pacific bottlenose Gordo.) But I thought they were adorable, and smart as hell.

  I had left Brenda McCowan, who had been a graduate student in the lab and now boasted a PhD of her own from Harvard, in charge as acting director during my "temporary" absence, so she had some inkling of the seismic shifts that were taking place. I adore Brenda as a colleague and friend and hold her in high regard as a scientist. Our research team included Brenda, my lab manager Laura Edenborough, and many students from neighboring Bay Area universities and colleges, and collectively we created a family-like atmosphere at the lab. We cared deeply for one another, and for the dolphins and the research. I was very lucky. So it was understandable that Brenda and the other students tried to shield me from the unfolding bad news. When I eventually did find out what was under way, I was crushed. Losing the dolphins was like losing part of my family. In what was perhaps a pure fantasy, I tried, and failed, to raise funds to buy the dolphins myself. I intended to create a dolphin sanctuary of sorts. I know that "objective scientists" are supposed to be above such motives and emotions, but when you work closely with sentient, intelligent animals for years, strong emotional bonds are inevitable. When there is a connection of deep trust between an experimenter and animals they study and interact with on a daily basis, there is a greater likelihood of accessing the subtleties of the animal's mind. If that sounds unscientific to some ears, so be it. In my view, successful communication between human and nonhuman species is possible only through a genuine relationship.

  You can imagine my state of mind: my Marine World family was broken up; my beloved dolphins were shipped off. It's as if a human mother had suffered a divorce and was permanently separated from her children. My husband, daughter, and I remained on the East Coast, and for the next half a dozen years I did what many young PhDs have to do: I became an academic vagabond, holding down short-term positions at various universities and colleges, often more than one at once. I endured crazy commutes while searching for the right opportunity to resume my research with dolphins. The institutions where I taught during these years were academically strong, including Yale, Columbia, and Rutgers. But I was driven to create my own dolphin research lab again. When an opportunity came to do that at the New York Aquarium, I took it, even though the facility was, shall we say, not ideal for the proper housing of the dolphins it already had. It was too small, and rather old. It was at Coney Island, right by the ocean, yet there was absolutely no sense of those surroundings inside. More than a little ironic for an institution housing large marine mammals. But with the encouragement of the second in command (and soon to be director), Paul Boyle, I put these reservations behind me. We shared the vision to transform the place into a much better facility for the animals, for research, and for public education about dolphins and their conservation and protection.

  I first worked at the aquarium as a senior research scientist, testing the waters, so to speak, before becoming director of marine mammal research. There were few vacant offices, so I tried to be flexible. I installed myself in a small windowless area at the end of a hall with only enough space for a chair and a shelf as a desk. (A year later, when I became director, my research assistants and I moved into much larger offices and lab quarters on the second floor of the Osborn Laboratories of Marine Sciences at the aquarium.)

  This was actually my second attempt to work at that aquarium. Two decades earlier, when I'd first made the decision to leave the theater and devote myself to dolphin research, I thought it might be wise to gain some experience with the animals before going to graduate school. I saw a help-wanted ad for a trainer to work with beluga whales at the New York Aquarium, and I applied for the job. As a marine mammal trainer I would have a lot of contact with the animals and would be able to learn a great deal about them. On top of that, the position required the trainer to be charismatic in front of an audience. Given my background in theater, I was completely comfortable with that. I was offered the job, and I accepted. Stuart and I made arrangements to move to Brooklyn from Philadelphia. We were poised to put down a rental deposit on an apartment, but the night before I was to begin the job, I got a call from the woman whom I was to replace. "I can't leave the job," she said tearfully. "It was a horrible mistake. I love the whales too much!" I surprised myself by being rather calm and accepting about what was really an awkward situation, and I said something like "Well, people do make mistakes, but it's okay." I took it as a sign that I should go to graduate school right then. I forgot all about that near job until the day I arrived in my office and the memories flooded back.

  ***

  There were two dolphin pools at the aquarium. One was a rectangular indoor pool, some sixty-two feet by forty-three feet and about ten feet deep; the other was an outdoor pool that the dolphins used during the summer months and that was in fact two connected pools, an oval one about forty-three by sixty-nine feet, again ten feet deep, and a smaller, round pool, twenty-seven feet in diameter. Three of the four walls in the indoor pool were glass, which allowed for public underwater viewing.

  Under certain lighting conditions, from inside the pool these glass walls were somewhat reflective, like a hazy mirror; one corner in particular was quite reflective. The dolphins, Presley and Tab, had apparently noticed the windows' reflections, because soon aft
er I started my research (another project on dolphin communication) I became aware that they were displaying several peculiar behaviors reminiscent of what I had seen Delphi and Pan do when they had a mirror in their pool at Marine World. These included close-eye viewing and adopting unusual orientations directed toward the walls, such as showing their bellies and displaying their penises. I frequently observed them doing this in the one tight corner where reflectivity was highest. I remember saying to Paul Boyle, who had become director of the aquarium, "It seems to me that these animals are recognizing themselves in the reflections." He asked how I could be sure. "Because," I said, "the things they are doing, putting their eyes close to the mirror, ventral presenting, these would be risky behaviors if Presley and Tab really thought the image was of another dolphin. They just wouldn't do that in social interaction with an unknown individual."

  I thought to myself, This is the right group to test for mirror self-recognition, because they are already experienced with mirrors. I called Lori Marino and invited her to help me try another mirror self-recognition study. I explained what had prompted me, and she enthusiastically signed on.

  Because of our frustrating experience with the mark (with no hands) test in Vallejo, Lori and I spent a good deal of time trying to figure out a different way to achieve the same end. We came up with another approach: We would train each dolphin to wear a small, gelatin suction cup, either black or white, on a part of the body where he could see it. (Edible gelatin ensured that if the dolphin swallowed it, it would just dissolve.) We would train each one to press a white lever when the suction cup he was wearing was white, and a black lever when the suction cup was black. When the dolphin became proficient at this, we'd put the suction cup on his forehead, where it would be invisible to him—unless he used a mirror. Would the dolphin use the mirror to check out the suction cup? And on seeing the by-then-familiar black or white cup, would he press the appropriate lever?