The Flight of the Iguana

by David Quammen

  The third was named Nim Chimpsky—an irreverent allusion to the linguist Noam Chomsky. Nim was another male, born at the institute and then shipped off to Columbia University for use in an experiment that became rather famous, precisely because it was eventually declared a failure. At Columbia, Nim had sixty different teachers but apparently no close friends, no single supportive and personal relationship. After four years he was shipped back to Oklahoma, and the principal researcher at Columbia announced his conclusion that, though cleverly imitative, Nim was incapable of cognitive language use. In New York, for whatever reasons, Nim had not been a person.

  • • •

  What is a person? One message of the whole poignant pageant of language experimentation with chimpanzees, I think, is that this question is worth wondering about.

  Aristotle, Descartes, and the entire Western philosophic tradition of spiritual-material dualism would have us believe that a person is a human being, period. A human possesses a rational soul, and in that soul inheres the essence of personhood. By contrast an animal (as these thinkers generally put it, though what they meant was “a nonhuman animal”) has either a more primitive form of soul or none whatsoever, and therefore cannot be imagined as meriting personhood. John Ruskin and others have talked of the pathetic fallacy, a term which implies the assertion that, notwithstanding the liberties of metaphor, no storm cloud can truly be angry, no mountain can truly be haughty, and no chimpanzee can truly be heroic. All this seemed certain beyond question. For about eighteen centuries, in fact, the very idea of acknowledging personhood in a nonhuman creature was potently heretical. In some corners, it is still heretical.

  Darwin is supposed to have cured us of some of this categorical smugness, but the Darwinian idea of continuity and incremental transformation throughout the spectrum of earthly life is seldom applied to the intangible aspects of what we call human nature. Darwin himself had a strong disagreement with his codiscoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, over the question of whether the human mind was a product of organic evolution. A half-mad South African naturalist named Eugène Marais later offered a wild and interesting notion when he argued (in a book titled The Soul of the Ape) that what Freud called “the unconscious” in humans had evolved directly from the conscious mentality of prehuman primates, and had merely been pushed into the psychological background by the more recent development of human consciousness. E. O. Wilson, with his concepts of sociobiology, is also working in this area. But generally the modern view closely resembles the traditional view in seeing mankind as set apart—absolutely and qualitatively—from the biological and (such as it may be) spiritual continuity of all other living creatures.

  So Homo sapiens is supposedly unique, utterly distinct from the rest, through some miracle of cumulative neurological alchemy. Very well—then what is it exactly that manifests that uniqueness?

  Religions all offer their own irrefutable answers, but the biological and social sciences have a little more trouble with the question. For instance, biochemical genetics suggests, not only that humans and chimpanzees are very closely related, but that the relation between chimps and us may be even closer than the one between chimps and gorillas. (Though orang-utans also have a plausible claim as our closest living relatives, as described above in “The Lonesome Ape.”) Argument from behavior has turned out to be equally inconclusive. At times it has been claimed that mankind, uniquely, is the tool-using animal. Or that mankind is the weapon-using animal (as proposed so vividly in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey). But chimpanzees in the wild use both tools and weapons. It has also been claimed that mankind is the only tool-making animal. Wrong again: In the wild, chimps fashion tools especially for gathering one of their preferred foods, termites. And at last it was said, more conservatively, more confidently, that mankind is distinguished as the sole animal making cognitive use of language. That was until Washoe.

  What is a person? Well, “person” is just a word, after all, and maybe the project of defining it is of no philosophic or scientific consequence. But in my own view it is an eloquent word, a richly connotative word, and one well suited for use in exactly that foggy no-man’s-land between humanity and the rest of the biological community. I think it’s a word that is wasted if judged to be merely a synonym for Homo sapiens. To me it seems that a person is any creature with whom you—or I, or Roger Fouts—can have a heartfelt and mutual relationship.

  • • •

  The great value of Eugene Linden’s book, Silent Partners, is in telling us what became of those famous language-learning chimps in the years after the spotlight deserted them.

  In 1982 Ally and Nim were sold off, along with a few other sign-using chimps from the institute, to a medical research laboratory in the state of New York. The destiny facing them at this laboratory was to be used in the testing of hepatitis vaccines.

  It should be said that the laboratory maintained its chimps under relatively comfortable conditions, and that the testing program was generally nonfatal. But then CBS News ran a short piece on the matter, and that led to a brief but vociferous public outcry, which in turn led to a decision that Ally and Nim—only those two, and because of their famous names—would be spared from medical research. Nim was eventually sent to a ranch in Texas, a place run by the Fund for Animals as a refuge for abused horses, where he would receive benevolent care but where, according to Linden, he had no chimpanzee companionship. Ally was sent to a breeding farm for chimps, where his name was changed and his illustrious past was of no interest, and so he has in effect disappeared, one of several indistinguishable chimps put out to stud in that place. There is no news about whether anyone ever chats with Ally or Nim in sign language.

  Lucy was luckier. Like Washoe, she had acquired a devoted and stubbornly loyal friend. She was shipped to a certain refuge in West Africa where promising work had been done on reintroducing displaced chimpanzees to the wild. But because Lucy had lived for so many years like a human in human surroundings, and had never before even seen an equatorial jungle, the adjustment to her ancestral habitat has been difficult. Her human friend, a woman named Janis Carter, who originally met Lucy in Oklahoma, had at last report spent almost eight years over there herself, in the West African bush, trying to help Lucy learn the ways of a wild chimpanzee.

  And Washoe is still with Roger Fouts, now at a different research facility in a different state. Together they are still exploring (in a style of interaction that is less formalized than science generally prefers) the question of what humans and chimpanzees might be able to teach each other about thinking and talking and learning. Meanwhile they seem to have discovered something far more precious, and far more communicative, than language.

  ICEBREAKER

  A Brief Rapprochement Between Whales and Russians

  News dispatches arriving from the Soviet Far East in a recent year revealed surprising new evidence of intelligent life at sea. The evidence was musical. The surprise belonged to a group of whales. The intelligence belonged to a group of Soviet mariners.

  On February 6, 1985, the government newspaper Izvestia reported that a Soviet icebreaker, the Moskva, had been diverted from its usual duty, keeping shipping lanes open in the Bering Sea, and was presently on its way to attempt the rescue of a thousand desperate whales. These whales were penned into a small area of open water within Senyavina Strait, just southwest of the Bering Strait, where they had gotten trapped by shifting ice floes while feeding on a shoal of fish. They were part of a great herd of migrating beluga, Delphinapterus leucas, the only species among all cetaceans that is a pure snowy white. The largest of the males were twenty feet long and weighed a ton and a half; the females were slightly smaller. They couldn’t escape by going under the ice, they couldn’t get around it, and as the open area shrank further they were doomed to begin dying of starvation or suffocation. The water of Senyavina was “boiling,” according to Izvestia, with their frantic efforts to thrash a way out. The whales’ only hope seemed to be t
hat Soviet icebreaker.

  But it was an improbable hope, since the Soviets are notorious in certain quarters for their unregenerate slaughter of whales.

  The U.S.S.R. is a member of the International Whaling Commission, but Soviet whaling fleets often refuse to abide by the IWC’s rulings. Already that year they had flouted the kill quota for minke whales (a small species of baleen whale that became commercially attractive only when most of the larger baleens had been killed off) with their factory-ship operations near Antarctica, and had announced their intent to exceed the quota by a full thousand minkes before they stopped killing.

  But those thousand belugas, in contrast, were for some reason more precious alive. This was no impulsive act of sentiment by one whale-loving sea captain; clearly a decision had been made in Moscow. Before it was all over, the icebreaker’s time alone had cost $80,000, a sum that no Soviet bureaucrat would allot to seemingly quixotic purposes without confidence that those purposes had the blessing of Moscow. And whoever in Moscow made that decision, for whatever motives, that person had undeniably been visited with a moment of transcendent good sense. Maybe it was a public relations stunt. Maybe there had come a sudden new Soviet recognition of kinship with the cetaceans. But whether you take the most cynical view, or the least cynical, that $80,000 was money well spent.

  The Moskva arrived, threw itself at the ice blockage, couldn’t break through. The ice was twelve feet thick in some places, and the blockage was twelve miles across. The ship was forced to withdraw for refueling. By the time it could return, the whales had been trapped for almost a month, though there was no sign yet that they had begun dying off. The icebreaker tried again. Meanwhile, workers from the mainland were keeping that penned area clear of new ice and dropping loads of fish to the whales, in the hope of bolstering their strength—possibly also their morale. Nevertheless, about forty belugas did die, with more destined to follow soon. Then the Moskva broke through. It had cut a channel twelve miles long and seventy yards wide, from the open sea to the whales. Now all the whales had to do was follow the Moskva back out.

  But they wouldn’t. They wouldn’t go. No doubt they were still distressed and addled from the entrapment, but they also had good grounds for a more deep-seated confusion. Experience had not prepared these animals to expect kindness from humans, in ships of Soviet registry or any other. As a species they had been butchered by virtually every tribe of mankind that sails and hunts Arctic waters—Eskimos, Greenlanders, Norwegians, Russians, and every sort of Siberian. They had been driven up onto beaches, stabbed and shot to death, strangled and drowned in gillnets and sweep nets and seines. These thousand survivors had no reason not to be terrified. All whales are smart, of course, but belugas are among the smartest and most wary, so they may well have wondered: Is this another murderous trap? They wouldn’t follow the ship. Not until someone on board thought of music.

  “Several melodies were tried out,” said a Soviet press account, “and it turned out that classical music was to the taste of these Arctic belugas.” So with classical music pouring from loudspeakers on board the Moskva, a thousand white whales swam behind the ship, trailing it trustingly down that channel to freedom.

  Who says there’s no cheerful news in the papers? Even Greenpeace sent a telegram of congratulations. And I began poking into it, in a modest way, with my own small list of unanswered questions.

  • • •

  Of course the most obvious was: Which classical music? The Moscow press sources gave no specifics, didn’t name a particular piece or even a composer, and to me that seemed a tantalizing oversight. Who did those belugas like? What composition was it that so moved them? What was it that sang to them so clearly, so reassuringly, in tones of benevolent fellowhood? Was it some wild romantic sonata by Rachmaninoff? Was it “The Great Gate of Kiev”? Was it Tchaikovsky? Stravinsky? Prokofiev? Or maybe, despite understandable chauvinist pride, was it something by a non-Russian? Possibly Pachelbel’s weatherproof “Canon in D,” for a parade of one thousand happy whales? Or Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries”? Not likely that, no; not for such amiable creatures. Or maybe the choral movement from Beethoven’s Ninth? The last of these was my own preferred candidate: I loved the image of that symphonic ode to joy booming out over the Bering Sea while a thousand belugas each came through the channel, spouted once to the ship in thanks, and then arched and dived, disappearing.

  So I dialed the Soviet Embassy in Washington to ask. But the Russians weren’t answering their phone. Again and again, all afternoon: no answer. It was strange. Nobody seemed to be home.

  The second thing I wondered about was the character of the belugas themselves. What sort of a species were they? How did it happen that a thousand of them should become trapped in a single small inlet? And what did science have to say about their auditory sophistication? I knew that humpback whales are famous for those wonderful mating songs that stretch on for as long as a half hour, complex and melodious, and then are repeated with boggling exactitude as though the humpbacks were sight-reading off a printed score. But I had never heard any claims made for the special phonic capabilities of the beluga.

  Only because I was very ignorant. It turns out that those capabilities are legendary. The beluga is not just the noisiest of all whales; it also produces the largest variety of noises, some of which are more musical (to a human ear) than others. One scientific source reports that the various sounds in the beluga repertoire resemble bird calls, dull groans, the bellow of a bull, the grunt of a pig, the scream of a woman, teeth being gritted, a boat motor at low idle, and “the sound of a flute, modulating warble and whistling.” This source also mentions chirping, clicking, and gurgling. Another expert describes “a well-modulated bell tone which is unique amongst cetaceans.” Still another speaks of “barks, squawks, jaw claps, whistles, squawls, buzzes, whinnys, and chirps.” Two scientists who tracked belugas off the coast of Quebec heard “high-pitched resonant whistles and squeals, varied with ticking and clucking sounds, slightly reminiscent of a string orchestra tuning up.” No wonder, then, that early whalers gave this species the nickname “sea canary.”

  But what is the biological explanation for all this vocal versatility? Or is there an explanation that is merely biological?

  Though marine mammal researchers have scarcely begun to decode the beluga’s vocabulary, they are confident about one thing: At least some of those sounds serve a navigational function. Hearing is the dominant sense among whales, far more important than sight or smell, for the very good reason that sound travels much better through water than do either light or chemical signals. And the toothed (as opposed to the baleen) whales, including the beluga, seem to rely heavily on echolocation. They use the echoes of their own clicks and chirps, just as a bat does, to spot food and guide themselves as they move. For the beluga species, in particular, those more elaborate bellows and grunts and whistles may be forms of communication, useful in mating, herd forming, and other types of social behavior. The simpler high-frequency sounds probably function as sonar, allowing the animal (even in dark or murky seas) to maneuver among obstacles. And again for the beluga, because of its Arctic habitat, the most familiar and most threatening obstacle is ice.

  Belugas live much of their lives near the sea ice of the extreme north, and in the gaps and natural channels that stay open in that ice during the transitional seasons. They even go under the ice when there is reason, hunting or hiding—though after fifteen or twenty minutes a beluga, just like a seal, needs to surface through open water for a gasp of air. Occasionally individuals are caught beneath solid ice sheets and drown. But a beluga has one advantage that a seal does not: Carrying a ton or more of heft, with a hard area on the back of its head covered with tough skin but no cushion of fat, the beluga can bash its way up through a four-inch thickness of ice. Its complete lack of a dorsal fin, a contrast with most other cetaceans, also helps make this ice-breaking trick possible. Elsewhere on its body the beluga is padded with blubber, enough to keep i
t comfortable in the coldest waters, where it feeds well on crustaceans, salmon, Arctic cod, and other small fish. With these adaptations, Delphinapterus leucas is well suited to life in the northern ocean.

  Its chief enemies are killer whales and humans, not necessarily in that order. For the beluga, hunting and hiding amid the kaleidoscope of shifting ice evidently has been—notwithstanding the incident at Senyavina—the lesser of alternative dangers.

  • • •

  The third on my list of unanswered questions was: Why had the Soviets performed this act of mercy?

  Why send a ship to rescue belugas while leaving other Soviet ships to proceed with the slaughter of minkes? Why not be consistent, one way or the other? If the Soviets had just wanted to buff up their international image, they could have announced a decision to abide by the IWC quota—or, better still, a decision to join the complete worldwide moratorium on commercial whaling, scheduled to begin the following year, which the Soviets (as well as the Japanese and the Norwegians) had so far vowed to ignore. Either of those steps would have cost their economy more than $80,000, true enough, but not really so very much more. On the other hand, if the Soviets felt such exigence about “harvesting” whales in Antarctica, why didn’t they just “harvest” those thousand trapped belugas? Nothing could have been easier than going into Senyavina with guns and tail grapples and flensing knives instead of with food and music. It wasn’t simply the difference in species, because there existed a hearty tradition among Soviet coastal peoples (at least until the mid-1960s) of hunting the beluga. Its meat was processed into sausage and animal fodder and fertilizer; its skin was prized for boot leather; its oil went into soap, unguents, margarine. With that sort of market standing ready, a dead beluga could be a valuable commodity.