The Dolphin in the Mirror (23 page)

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 after 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?

We thought it was a beautiful experiment and were quite proud of it. But then we realized it wasn't infallible as a demonstration of mirror self-recognition. It would be hard to explain away why the animal would go to the mirror after the suction cup was positioned on his head, but a skeptic could reasonably argue that the dolphin had learned: If I go to the mirror, I will see a suction cup, white or black, and then I will pull the appropriate lever. That line of reasoning did not necessarily imply self-recognition; it might mean that the individual was merely following a set of simple rules: see a white suction cup, pull the white lever; see a black one, pull the black lever. The dolphin in the mirror could easily be interpreted by the dolphin as a separate animal, and the lever-pulling would still be the same. So we had to give up on that. It would have been an easier experiment to run than the mark test, but, alas, it wouldn't do. So it was back to the mark test for us, with all its difficulties for no-handed subjects.

***

We embarked on the mirror self-recognition tests in January 1998, setting the bar for success high. First, we predicted that if the dolphin knew it was his face in the mirror, he would not react as if he were seeing another dolphin—he would not show social behaviors. We also predicted that when marked after a feeding session, the dolphin would move to the mirror more quickly to check himself out than when he was not marked after a feeding session. But that alone was insufficient. The dolphin would also have to show himself highly motivated to inspect that part of his body that had been marked, clearly orienting that part of the body to the mirror as soon as he arrived.

We planned to videotape all the sessions and then score fifteen-minute segments comparing the behaviors the dolphins exhibited in the pre-mark and post-mark conditions. Four independent scorers in two independent pairs would rate the behaviors, second by second, as we watched the videotape segments. We coded behaviors in several different ways.
Mark-directed
meant that the dolphin positioned himself directly in front of the reflective surface and then oriented the body so that the mark could be seen in the reflection.
Self-directed
meant the dolphin was inspecting parts of his own body or watching his own behavior in the mirror (for example, close-eye viewing, looking inside his wide-open mouth, repetitive head circling, viewing his own genitals).
Social
meant the kind of behavior these dolphins would display in the presence of another familiar or unfamiliar dolphin, such as aggressive jaw-clapping and charging, or affiliative responses and vocalizations (whistling and squawking). Finally there was
exploratory,
meaning that the animal seemed to be inspecting the mirror itself, looking behind it or over it, or pushing on it.

As raters, we were unaware of whether each dolphin had been marked in any particular video segment being observed. We were "blind" to the condition we were rating. And we insisted that a particular instance of a behavior be included in further analysis
if and only if
there was 100 percent agreement between the two rating teams as to the behavior's classification. The coding was actually somewhat more complex than I've outlined, and it included not only the specific behavior at hand but also the time of onset of the behavior, time of termination, orientation of the body, and several other measures.

We also included several controls in the study. First, before we actually put a mark on either animal, we did sham marking. This involved taking the nontoxic dye out of the marker, replacing it with water, and then touching the dolphin on a part of his body he couldn't normally see
as if
we had truly marked him. We also planned to do the sham-marking procedure after the animals had experienced true marking. We hadn't done these controls in the earlier study at Marine World, nor had we been anywhere near as meticulous in analyzing post-marking behaviors.

The excruciating experimental details I've presented here are normally the stuff found in the methods section in academic papers, not in books for general readers. But our hypercompulsive and demanding experimental criteria were necessary because of what we were up against. If we announced that dolphins had the same cognitive capacities in the realm of awareness that humans and great apes
and no other minds in nature
had, then we had to back that up with iron-clad evidence. If we claimed that the primate-centered view of the origins of self-awareness in humans was incorrect, we had to have incontrovertible results. Extraordinary claims such as this one required extraordinary evidence. Gordon Gallup often says of his original work with the chimps that he felt he had demonstrated mirror self-recognition in the self-directed behaviors he observed, but he needed some more objective measure. That was the mark test. Lori and I felt the same about our study, but we had to work extra carefully with our non-handed dolphins.

As part of our extreme caution we decided to use only Presley as our principal experimental subject for the paper we planned to write. One of Tab's eyes was slightly cloudy. Lori and I talked about it and agreed that it would be prudent not to include him in the full mark test. We reasoned that Tab might fail the mark test because his vision might be impaired and not necessarily because he didn't recognize himself in the mirror. It was safer to leave him out, we decided. It later proved to be an unfortunate choice.

We carried out the first phase of the study, which involved getting base-line data on the dolphins' normal behavior in the rectangular indoor pool, before the mirror was installed. Then we exposed the dolphins to a very small, three-and-a-half-by-one-and-a-half-foot mirror (much smaller than the mirror described earlier) affixed vertically on the exterior wall of the pool, facing them. When the mirror was present, which was about half the time, the dolphins were definitely interested in it and in what it revealed. After a few initial bouts of touching the mirror, they began to position their bodies vertically, tightly aligned within the mirror's boundaries, as if fitting themselves into the reflective frame. Then each dolphin, alone at the mirror, began to do some very different, non-dolphinlike behaviors that were strikingly reminiscent of the antics of Groucho and Harpo Marx in the famous mirror scene in
Duck Soup
—except those comedians were crafting pretend reflections, with the straight man trying to catch the "reflection" in a mistake.

Like the Marx Brothers, the dolphins displayed a rich repertoire of some pretty bizarre orientations and highly repetitive movements—but only when they faced the mirror. For example, in calm silence, one of them would hang vertically within the narrow sliver of the mirror and repeatedly rock his body from side to side. Or he would move his head in wide arcs and circular movements close to the mirror, repeatedly and exaggeratedly nodding from left to right or up and down. Each would hang upside down at the mirror and peer into his wide-open mouth. The dolphins would do sequences of repeated flips. Like Groucho, and like our close ape cousins, the dolphins appeared to be testing the contingencies of their own behavior at the mirror. What happens when the dolphin circles his head? What does the other dolphin do? In mirror self-recognition studies, this is called the contingency-testing phase, a critical hurdle to pass on the way to self-recognition. It does not guarantee the next step of self-recognition, but it seems to be a necessary step for individuals who make that leap.