The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2013

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

  Herzing’s strategy is to engage the dolphins by having two swimmers in the water play a game with one of the toys while using the CHAT boxes to whistle the sound for that toy. Dolphins, like children, are very good at learning by observing and then joining in. “If they really get it, I think they’ll go down to the bottom and grab something like a sea cucumber and bring it to us with a whistle,” Herzing says. “The intention is to convey that we want to interact and that we have the tools.”

  Herzing and Pack press the buttons on their keypads, and a series of distinctive trills cuts through the still air. Then they put on their masks and snorkels and stagger to the swim platform as the Stenella rolls. “The sea was angry that day, my friends, like an old man trying to send back soup in a deli,” Pack jokes, channeling Seinfeld. He and Herzing trundle off the swim platform at the back of the boat, splashing into the water. Within seconds, both pull their heads out and shake them. As soon as the boxes were immersed in the sea, they quit. “That’s why they put the ‘re’ in ‘research,’” Pack quips as he clambers back aboard.

  Butler and Kohlsdorf gather up the boxes and take them into the makeshift workshop they’ve set up in the Stenella’s main lounge, which is quickly being overrun with spare parts and tools. The battle of Georgia Tech versus the ocean, otherwise known as prototype development, commences. Herzing is patient. “It’s counterintuitive to put a computer in salt water,” she says.

  Three days later, after a night in West End to escape rough weather and conduct a troubleshooting conference call with Georgia Tech, we’re back on the bank. Suddenly, Captain Pete Roberts shouts “Dolphins!” from the bridge. He toggles an alarm and stomps on the floor to alert everyone on the boat. Dark shapes are moving through the water to take up station in the pressure wave pushed up by the bow. It’s a free ride, and the dolphins love hanging there, adjusting their position with almost invisible movements of flukes and fins. Jessica Cusick and Bethany Augliere, graduate students at Florida Atlantic, who have been working with Herzing on the Wild Dolphin Project for three years, immediately start calling out names and taking photos. (Herzing updates her ID catalog every year as the dolphins grow and their spot patterns change.) Once they have what they need, Herzing decides whether the conditions are right for a jump.

  Butler and Kohlsdorf are still battling the boxes, pulling all-nighters and working their way through a fifth of Eagle Rare bourbon. They are being utterly confounded by small leaks, the capacitive oddities of salt water, and the gremlins that pop up when you field-test software for the first time. They adjust the code, tweak the hardware, the ground wiring, and the waterproofing, reassemble the boxes, and then dunk them into a large plastic vat of fresh water on the back deck to rinse them. Sometimes the boxes work, but usually not for long.

  “What the fuck?” becomes the most common technical question on the Stenella. Kohlsdorf, who was adopted from Korea by German parents and recruited by Starner from the University of Bremen for his coding skills, is also smoking his way through most of a pack of Camels each day. He has long, shaggy black hair and a sense of fatalism that serves him well. “That’s how it goes,” he likes to say. But his T-shirt subtly contradicts his poise. It’s black, and across the chest is a phrase in German. The translation: “It’s also shitty somewhere else.”

  Herzing calls for a jump. She and Pack will take a scarf to practice the game that they’ll model for the dolphins once the CHAT boxes are operational. Herzing’s two-way strategy relies on the animals’ love of play. She has to get them thinking, Hey, I want to get in on that game, and they have to understand that the way to do it is to mimic the whistle for “scarf” or whatever the play object is. “As with kids, there is a lot of stuff that goes on before you achieve recognition,” Pack explains. “They have to see that the system is fun, that it is functional, and that they can use it to ask for things. So it’s a process.”

  We all slide into the water. A small group of spotteds is milling around nearby. Herzing swims out, a red scarf visible in her hand, with Pack trailing. I can see the dolphins take note of her. She drops the scarf and points at it. Bijyo, the garden-eel poacher, swims by and plucks the scarf out of the water column, with two others trailing her. She drops the scarf in front of Pack, who points at it, and Bijyo grabs it again. Bijyo seems to enjoy being the center of attention. The scarf drops from her mouth, and I think she’s lost it—but then it catches on her pectoral fin, fluttering there as she cruises around.

  Lucky, I think. But then I see the scarf slide off her pec, only to be picked up by her tail fluke. Luck has nothing to do with it, I realize. Bijyo, with impressively casual dexterity and awareness, has passed the scarf down her body. She finally drops it on the white sand. Then another spotted swoops in and with equal precision picks it up, using a tail fluke. Other dolphins show up, until there are more than a dozen swirling around. The scarf game stops only when one of them eventually swims off with it.

  It’s easy to see how the CHAT boxes will add an intriguing dimension to the proceedings. “Most social beings learn about each other through interaction,” Herzing says later, when we review the session on video. Pack adds, “You model the behavior for the player, but the others are watching. It’s like a classroom, but there is so much else going on, you can see how challenging it is. In the marine pool, you know they will be there at eight in the morning. Out here you have to hope you find them and, if you do, that the same players will turn up.”

  In the immensity and isolation of the Little Bahama Bank, you have to pause to figure out what day it is. Most of the time, the Stenella zigzags across the water, checking in on all of Herzing and Captain Pete’s favorite spots. Roberts has been working with Herzing for twelve years, and he knows this area like his own backyard. It’s never long before he finds dolphins and we’re in the water. When the sun goes down, margaritas and beers come out and the grill gets fired up. Any new dolphin data or interactions are logged in exquisite detail, and video is reviewed. When there is time to relax, the talk often turns to the science of dolphin cognition.

  The idea that dolphins are the humans of the sea (which is what the Maori called them), and that there is a special connection between humans and dolphins, has existed for centuries. Herzing herself once watched Jumper, a female, break off what she was doing to escort an exhausted swimmer back to the boat. Another time, the dolphins were behaving strangely and would not approach the Stenella. The crew on board soon discovered that one of the passengers had died quietly in his cabin, from a heart attack. As the Stenella motored toward West End, the dolphins swam for a way in escort, about 100 yards out on either side.

  In the 1960s, John C. Lilly, a freethinking neuroscientist and friend of Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg, took the idea of a unique and potentially transformative bond between humans and dolphins to an extreme. Lilly, captivated by the intelligence and gentle nature of dolphins, believed that one of them could learn to speak English. He bought a house on St. Thomas, in the Virgin Islands, partially flooded it with seawater, and got his assistant, Margaret Howe, to live in the house with a bottlenose called Peter. Peter was incapable of producing the consonants and other sounds needed for English, but he did display an ability to closely mimic the patterns of Howe’s speech. The experiment, unsurprisingly, deteriorated along with the hygienic conditions and Howe’s tolerance for living alone with a dolphin. Lilly’s extreme methods—he also tried giving dolphins LSD—have colored efforts to communicate with the animals ever since.

  “He was a visionary, ahead of his time,” Herzing says of Lilly as we cool off one afternoon in the air-conditioned lounge. “But he really lost the scientific process and decided to go off and explore his own mind with drugs. It has held two-way work with dolphins back for two decades, because people have been scared to death to be called another Lilly.”

  Nonetheless, the idea of a deep connection with dolphins has motivated Herzing’s work from the start. She grew up in landlocked Minnesota and developed an obse
ssion with the ocean by watching Jacques Cousteau and reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Even as a young girl, she knew she wanted to become a marine biologist and study dolphin communication. If she could do one thing for the world, she declared in an essay at age twelve, it would be to “develop a human-animal translator so we could understand other minds on the planet.”

  In the early 1980s, after earning a marine-biology degree from Oregon State University and traveling the world, Herzing realized she wanted to study dolphins in their natural environment instead of in captivity. She reasoned that if the best way to understand humans was in the context of human society, networks, and relationships, the same was likely true of dolphins. She wanted to study dolphin cognition and communication as an anthropologist might—in a natural setting. “I wasn’t as interested in doing experiments,” she recalls. “I was interested in observing, which is the most productive if you want to understand their culture.”

  It wasn’t long before she became aware of a group of friendly spotted dolphins in the Bahamas, first noted by treasure divers in the 1970s. The water was warm and shallow, and the dolphins appeared to be easily accessible, even curious about humans. “I couldn’t believe no one was studying them already,” Herzing says. She began her fieldwork in 1985, which grew into the Wild Dolphin Project. Its motto captures Herzing’s research ethos perfectly: “In their world. On their terms.”

  Still, her plan to develop two-way communication with the spotted dolphins presents an important ethical dilemma. Diana Reiss, for one, wonders whether there’s a danger of somehow changing or harming a wild culture by bridging into it. “You have the potential to learn something you would never be able to learn, because they have the potential to show you something in their world that they wouldn’t in an aquarium,” she says. “But the question is, should we introduce new vocal elements into a wild population? And if we do, are we somehow contaminating their vocal repertoire? It’s a basic philosophical question.”

  Herzing worries about that quite a bit. “The potential is that they will start showing you their world in detail, and you can have some interface that will help you understand the wild mind,” she tells me one morning after sunrise as we sit on the Stenella’s bridge. “The danger is that you could get too much into their system. That you could have young animals who spend too much time with humans and don’t do the things they are supposed to do, putting pressure on the mothers. Or you could get dolphins who get to trust humans and a bad human comes along.”

  In a way, it’s like the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, except here on Earth. The spotted dolphins are like aliens that inhabit a completely different world. Scientists at the SETI Institute, in Mountain View, California, are, in fact, paying close attention to Herzing’s work. “What we’re trying to do with SETI is communicate with a different form of intelligence,” says Doug Vakoch, the institute’s director of interstellar message composition. “Denise’s work has highlighted some of the things we need to take into account, like the importance of interactivity and a long-duration relationship.”

  Inevitably, these attempts are open to ridicule. Rush Limbaugh, who somehow got wind of Herzing’s project, joked to listeners in May: “The dolphins can tell us how they keep health care costs down without Obamacare and how they avoid trillion-dollar deficits.” Herzing’s scientific colleagues respect her dedication and rigor, and when I ask Herzing if people think she’s a kook, she’s not offended. “No,” she answers. Then she adds, “At least not yet,” and cuts loose with one of her signature cackles.

  Dusk is falling on Monday evening, our sixth day out. Butler and Kohlsdorf emerge onto the back deck carrying two complete CHAT boxes. They have made progress, but the boxes have to be totally reliable before Herzing will introduce them to the dolphins. “Having them quit in the middle of a session would be very confusing,” she says. There is a faint air of hope, but after repeated false starts everyone has learned to live by Kohlsdorf’s favorite response to all questions about whether the latest fix will work: “We will see.”

  Herzing and Pack gear up, and the water is dark enough that Captain Pete drops a light off the stern. Herzing and Pack slip into the water for what seems like the fiftieth test, ten feet apart in the green glow of the droplight. Herzing’s box seems to work fine. After a few seconds, Pack lifts his head out of the water and says, “My unit is not playing anything.”

  Back on deck, Herzing is philosophical. “Shit happens,” she says. “It’s a tough environment out here.” The next morning, the carcass of Pack’s CHAT box lies open in the lounge. Water found a way in and drowned the components. Throughout the day, Herzing, Hoffmann-Kuhnt, and Kohlsdorf discuss the modifications they’ll make to improve waterproofing, software stability, and electrical grounding. Kohlsdorf is wearing a different black T-shirt. It depicts a toddler in a Jason-style hockey mask, dragging a bloody chain saw.

  If and when the CHAT system is finally debugged, it’s likely the dolphins will be ready to show Herzing something new. The next morning, we drop in on a curious scene featuring three bottlenose dolphins and a group of seven spotteds. About a hundred bottlenoses share the Little Bahama Bank with the spotteds, but they are more skittish, and Herzing hasn’t spent as much time with them. After days of looking at friendly little spotteds in the water, the bottlenoses appear enormous and a bit menacing, like outlaw bikers. With penises visibly erect, they have been mauling a young spotted male named Lhasa, while Lhasa’s three buddies—Linus, Malibu, and Kai—hover nearby. When I get into the water, two bottlenoses swim up toward me, their pale erections still waving in the water. Don’t get confused, boys, I think nervously.

  Instead, they turn away and direct their attention to Malibu. They swarm around him, trying to jam themselves into him. Malibu twists and turns, but he doesn’t try to flee. The other spotteds follow the action but don’t intervene. Eventually, the bottlenose dolphins break away and swim off. At that point, four of the male spotteds abruptly turn and, in tight formation, swim right up to me, so we are all eye to eye. They are like four authoritative bouncers. With my puny human hearing I can’t know if they have anything to say to me. But their posture and eyes alone convey a simple and direct message: Enough already, human voyeur. It’s time for you to leave. With that, they spin away and disappear. I head for the swim ladder.

  “That’s some crazy shit,” I say on deck, abandoning any pretense of scientific inquiry. “What’s up with that?” Herzing agrees that it is pretty remarkable behavior, but she and Pack don’t really have an explanation. Over the years, Herzing has seen lots of bottlenoses hanging around with spotteds, and vice versa, and she has also seen evidence of limited interbreeding. Despite the controlled aggression, what struck me was the ritualized nature of the interaction. The spotteds never tried to fight or flee; most just hung around as if observing a frat-house hazing. It is clearly an interesting relationship. There is confrontation, but it has limits, and Herzing doesn’t know for sure, but she has never seen aggression between spotted and bottlenose dolphins escalate to killing. Pack is also intrigued by the sympatric relationship that the spotteds and bottlenoses have, sharing the same territory yet coexisting and maintaining their distinct cultural and genetic identities without extreme violence. It’s a thought-provoking, perhaps even instructive, model.

  Before we head back to Florida, we make one last drop with a large group of spotteds. I count twenty-four, traveling slowly across the sand flats, a community on the move. The ever-excitable calves sometimes dart away, only to be chased down by their mothers or babysitters and firmly set back in the pack. Groups of males are swimming in close formation, keeping an eye on us. Deni and Bijyo are still hassling one another. Small groups break off to chase fish out of the sand. The entire community forms and re-forms in a hundred subtle ways, and I can see lots of pec touching, the dolphin equivalent of a reassuring hand. I know I can’t comprehend 99 percent of the social dynamics and communication in play, but it’s also impossible not
to feel that they’re there and worth trying to fully understand.

  Herzing will spend another seventy days on the Little Bahama Bank this year, and more in the years to come, refining the CHAT system. Stan Kuczaj and Diana Reiss, among many others, will be watching, to see how far she can take it. “There is a difference between communicating and engaging in a meaningful conversation,” Kuczaj says. “Conversations require shared interests, and finding common ground may be more difficult than we imagine.”

  If any human can find that common ground, it’s probably Herzing. She is arguably more connected with a wild dolphin culture than anyone else on the planet. One evening I ask Pack if he’s confident that a few decades from now we’ll have cracked the code of dolphin communication. He thinks and then answers: “As long as we’re on a positive trajectory and have technology, we’ll understand more of what the code is. It may not be what we thought it would be, but we’ll have a general understanding.”

  The boat settles in for the night. Overhead there is a thick carpet of stars, and a warm wind whispers over the undulating water. I know the spotted dolphins are somewhere nearby, perhaps headed into deep water to feed on squid. Their world seems both separate and connected to ours, and it’s suddenly easy to believe that something extraordinary will happen if Herzing builds a meaningful two-way connection between humanity and the wild and alien culture that thrives on the Little Bahama Bank.

  DAVID DEUTSCH AND ARTUR EKERT