The Dolphin in the Mirror (7 page)

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 about 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.

***

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 dolphin 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.

It had been John Lilly who had guided my path to Little Torch Key that summer. Months before, I had tracked down Lilly's phone number in California and called him. "Dr. Lilly," I said. "You don't know me. I am Diana Reiss and I am going to do research on dolphin communication. I need to talk to you." Lilly was very patient and encouraging in what was quite a long conversation. I was thrilled and more determined than ever to follow my impulse.

We had several phone conversations after that first call, and he was charming and more helpful than I deserved. I met him in person shortly after this dialogue began, at a public lecture in Manhattan, and I told him I was looking for guidance as to how to get started with working with dolphins. "You should contact Betty Brothers in Florida," he suggested. "She has two dolphins in a lagoon next to her house. She's had them for years. I'm sure she'd be delighted to have you go and do your work there. I'll arrange it." Naturally, I was thrilled. He added, "Betty is a remarkable woman. You'll love her!"

John was right. She was, and I did. Betty had lived in the Keys since 1952 and loved the proximity of wild dolphins to her oceanfront house. She loved to watch them as they swam past her property each day. In the early 1960s, the dolphins stopped visiting, and Betty and her husband decided to acquire two of their own, which they purchased from a dolphin training school.
^*
The first, which they obtained in 1962, was a female they named Dal. Dal was joined three years later by Suwa, a young male. The two bottlenose dolphins spent their days and nights in the large lagoon by Betty's house, essentially captive. Then, in 1966, Betty removed the barrier between the lagoon and the ocean, allowing Dal and Suwa to go where they wanted to. Aside from a period early on, when they disappeared in the ocean for six days, Dal and Suwa were in the ocean during the day and in the lagoon at night. Eventually, the two dolphins spent more and more time only in the lagoon, apparently content to trade the complete freedom of the ocean for the certainty of two fish meals each day.

I was excited to be at the lagoon. When I arrived, Betty, who personified the phrase
feisty woman,
welcomed me as a daughter. Like me, she was an animal lover. She had two dogs running around the place, so I was in heaven. It was so hot in the Keys that Betty routinely put ice cubes in the dogs' water bowls. Betty was in the real estate business, and her home and office compound included a few small rental cabins on the edges of the lagoon. She asked if I would mind helping her out by feeding the dolphins during the day, thus freeing her for her real estate activities. Would I
mind?
I was delighted to have the chance to become intimate with Dal and Suwa. Betty's father, Carl, also lived at the house, and he took me under his wing and taught me how to cut the fish the way the dolphins liked it, which included removing the spiny dorsal fins from the large Spanish mackerel they were fed.