The Dolphin in the Mirror (24 page)

Presley and Tab did reach that milestone. They went on to show clear signs of self-directed behavior. For example, they would look at the insides of their mouths, often holding their mouths open wide in prolonged gapes; they gazed at their eyes, holding their eyes right near the mirror surface; they blew varieties of bubbles at the mirror; they twisted and turned their bodies in bizarre postures (unlike their normal behavior in the absence of the mirror); and they brought their toys to the mirror and engaged in toy play there. The self-directed behavior at the mirror was a clear indicator that the dolphin understood that the external image in front of him, that dolphin in the mirror, was himself. In a young child, self-directed behavior is often reported as close inspection of eyes, mouth, genitals, or other body parts that go unseen without a mirror. Children might pick their noses, eat, or play in front of a mirror. If you mark each child in a group of nineteen-month-olds with a small spot of rouge on their foreheads or elsewhere on the face, about half of them will be able to look in the mirror and then point to the location of the spot on his or her body. Not all children of that age pass the mark test, although many show self-directed behavior, which is evidence in itself that they recognize the faces in the mirror are their own.

Both Presley and Tab were well used to being handled, tickled, and rubbed, and they often solicited it. They didn't seem to mind being marked when we did the initial sham marks. We didn't expect them to race to the mirror or any other reflective surface immediately afterward, and they didn't. We figured they would just think we were tickling or rubbing them. When the mirror was present, which was about half the time, they were definitely interested in it, observing themselves in various ways, but they made no attempt to examine the part of the body we had touched with the water-filled marker.

By October we felt we were ready to begin the true mark section of the study with Presley. The first time we marked him was quite revealing. As in the previous sessions, the dolphins were exposed to the mirror for thirty minutes, then called to their feeding areas to be fed and marked. We then gave them the release signal signifying the end of the feeding sessions, letting the dolphins know they could leave the area. This time, we carefully made a triangular mark on the side of Presley's head using a black, nontoxic marker. When we gave the release signal, he left station and swam around the pool playfully, as usual. When at last he swam by the mirror, however, he did a classic double take. He immediately turned around, went back to the mirror, and proceeded quite deliberately to orient himself in a way that would make the mark quite visible to him. We were elated.

We piled up statistically significant numbers of trials, and the results were outstanding, even more clear-cut than either Lori or I had dared hope. We were able to show that when marked, Presley swam right to the mirror and positioned his body immediately to expose the marked area to the mirror. We marked him on different parts of his body that he could not see without the mirror, and he always positioned himself accordingly. Orienting to the mark in his first moments at the mirror was strong evidence that he was using the mirror as a tool to view his mark. Presley spent substantially longer time in this behavior when he was marked than when he was not marked, more than twenty times longer. When he was sham-marked, he would swim over and inspect himself, but with nothing unusual to see, he would swim away much sooner. We had many qualitative observations too that made the same point: these animals knew who they were seeing in the mirror.

The dolphins' interest in the marks were never casual. They scrutinized their marks from many different angles, often for up to a minute. Presley demonstrated keen curiosity about the mark. We did most of these sessions in the two outdoor joined pools; the marking station was at the far end of the larger pool, and the mirror was around the corner from the entrance to the smaller pool. After being marked, Presley had to swim the length of the large pool, enter the smaller pool, and take a sharp left turn in order to use the mirror. He routinely did this very rapidly, sometimes in fewer than ten seconds, and never longer than a minute and a half.

In the summer, with the dolphins in their outdoor pools, we marked Presley under his chin on his neck area for the first time. We prepared to give the release signal, but before we could move an inch he darted away from his feeding station, made a fast beeline to the mirror in the adjoining pool, and assiduously examined the marked area. He arrived at the mirror so quickly that I could hardly keep him in my viewfinder as I videotaped his behavior. This time he oriented in a very different manner. He came close to the mirror and stretched his neck up repeatedly, lifting his head, exposing the marked area, and looking into the mirror. This self-examination went on for several minutes. Presley seemed very calm and very interested. Then he slowly backed away from the mirror and began to do the spin dance that I described earlier. If you want to see your entire body in a small mirror, you have to move away from it. He understood the rules. His behavior provided strong evidence that he was aware that what he saw before him was an external representation of himself.

We finally moved into what we called the late sham-marking phase, in which we again went through the motions of marking but with a water-filled marker. Presley had learned that after being touched by the marker, he was marked. As we expected, he raced to the mirror to inspect the spot. But he lost interest soon after seeing his usual, unmarked image. Presley spent about a fifth of the time in self-directed behavior inspecting himself when the mark was false and invisible.

On one occasion, though, Presley seemed determined to find a mark, even though there wasn't one. We sham-marked him on his right pectoral fin while he was in the rectangular pool and there was no mirror present. He immediately went to a corner of the pool that had the most reflectivity (due to a dark wall directly behind it) and spent more than half a minute in a sequence of a dozen dorsal-to-ventral flips in that corner area, each time bringing the sham-marked spot into close view. You could almost hear him thinking,
I'm sure they put a mark somewhere here.

***

I had seen several videos of chimpanzees undergoing the mirror self-recognition test and read many accounts of them, and it was obvious that Presley was at least as motivated as the chimps, if not more, to examine the marks in detail. The chimps usually touched the mark a few times, sometimes sniffing or tasting their fingers, but they fairly quickly lost interest. Not Presley, who was a mark self-examiner par excellence. Another difference between chimps and Presley was in the response to another individual's mark. While one chimp usually expressed interest in another individual's mark, neither Presley nor Tab paid any attention to the mark on his companion. Dolphins do not groom one another, as chimps do, so perhaps they have less interest in changes to another's appearance.

It's fair to say that anyone who observed Presley and Tab during this study would have been very quickly convinced that these animals were self-aware. I know that when I give public talks and show the videos of the dolphins after they've been marked, the audience sees what we saw. The tapes are compelling evidence that dolphins know there is a "me" there. But we needed quantitative evidence in support of that blindingly obvious qualitative conclusion. We probably could have published our results more than a year before we actually did. We knew we had it, but we also knew we had to convince everybody. So our two teams of raters spent more than a year grinding through the procedures I just described: detailed analysis of second-by-second behaviors, coding them by parallel independent teams. Not to put too fine a point on it, it was grueling, but there was no escaping it.

During the spring of 2000, Lori and I went through several drafts of the paper describing our results, and we sent copies to prominent colleagues in the field. We received very helpful comments and a lot of encouragement. We finally submitted what we felt was a finely honed manuscript to the journal
Nature
early in May. The British journal
Nature
is one of the most prestigious of scientific journals, and it prides itself on publishing breakthrough research across the spectrum of scientific disciplines. That was our rationale for sending it there: we felt that our work was a
really big breakthrough.
"This is a pivotal study that clearly demonstrates that the emergence of [self-awareness] is not a byproduct of factors specific to primates," we wrote in our cover letter, addressing the assumption that had been supported by a prodigious literature during the previous three decades. "These findings further advance our understanding of factors that may contribute to the emergence of advanced cognitive abilities in diverse species as well as providing us with a greater appreciation of the cognitive capacities of the [big-brained] dolphin."

We had high hopes for both a quick turnaround of the manuscript and its acceptance. We were right only about the speed. Within a couple of weeks I received a big brown envelope with
Nature
's logo on it containing a firm letter of rejection and copies of reviews from four anonymous referees. We were completely deflated.

There's a joke among academic scientists about "the third reviewer," one that recently made the rounds on YouTube. Essentially, the idea is that you get two terrific reviews of your baby—the submitted manuscript—but then a third reviewer trashes your paper, and you have to rework it or do additional experiments. Most journals do indeed send manuscripts out to three reviewers. In our case,
Nature
sent it to four, and it was the fourth reviewer who killed us.

The first three reviewers were very positive, also offering helpful comments for improving the accessibility of the paper. One of the reviewers had scrutinized our statistics. This person judged them
unexceptional,
which is statistics-speak for "well within the norm." That referee also said that the effects we were testing with the statistics were so clear as to almost obviate the need for statistical analysis. Two of the referees commented on our small sample size of one—we had included only one individual, Presley. But researchers familiar with the field of animal cognition know that there is a long tradition of single-subject studies, such as those by Irene Pepperberg (with Alex, an African Grey parrot), Herbert Terrace, Allen and Beatrix Gardner, Duane Rumbaugh and Sue Savage Rumbaugh (all with chimpanzees), and many others. In scientific epistemology, the demonstration of a particular capacity in an individual of a species not previously known to possess that capacity is known as existence proof. It is the first step down the path of a particular discovery, and in our case we were confident that other bottlenose dolphins would eventually pass the mark test, just as we believed Presley had.

And then there was the fourth referee. This individual's tone was completely different, and the message was unequivocal: our paper should not appear in any scientific journal. The referee's criticism of our statistics was simply incorrect, but he or she had objections to other aspects of our study that struck us as emotional and knee-jerk reactions, clearly outside the norm of a professional scientific review. Lori and I were so convinced of the force of our scientific case that we took the unusual step of calling the editor at
Nature
to find out what we might do to get the decision reversed. He was very polite, very nice (he was British, after all), but equally firm. No, he could not publish the manuscript as it was. Perhaps if we had data from a second dolphin, he offered, he might be prevailed upon to reconsider.

We really didn't believe data from another dolphin was necessary, and we wrote a long letter explaining why. We also outlined the modifications we were willing to make in response to the first three referees' helpful comments and pointed out what we saw as the unambiguous factual errors of the fourth referee. To no avail. Our only way forward, it was made very clear, was to collect data on Tab and combine them with those from Presley. Why hadn't we done that in the first place? By this time, we were extremely stressed, having ridden the wave of exhilaration with our results, the devastation of initial rejection, optimism that our reasoned pleas would prevail, then rejection again.

In the midst of all this Gordon Gallup called me and said, "Congratulations on getting your paper into
Nature,
Diana." He had been one of the first three reviewers and he'd assumed that, armed with his very positive assessment, the paper would sail through. He was astonished when I said, "Well, actually, Gordon, it was rejected." He was very supportive and urged us to persevere. This was the scientist who'd developed the test we'd successfully put Presley through, and yet here Lori and I were, still knocking on
Nature
's door.

We were able to collect the data we needed with Tab extremely quickly, for two reasons. First, we already had baseline data on him, in the form of a video record of his behaviors in the presence and absence of a mirror. And we had early sham-marking data on him too. Second, our experience with the mark test with Presley and our subsequent analysis allowed us to streamline our protocol. We knew what we were doing, and we were able to do it expeditiously. Less than a dozen actual mark tests and a handful of sham-mark tests gave us what we required. Tab's behavior was pretty much a carbon copy of Presley's, and we kicked ourselves more than a little for having thought that his possibly defective sight might interfere with his visual discrimination ability. Tab showed the same urgent motivation to get to the second, smaller, pool after being marked, and once there, he was just as diligent in examining the marked areas. There was no question, in our estimation, that Tab had the operational definition of mirror self-recognition.

We redrafted the paper and sent it back to
Nature
in the late summer with every expectation and hope that this time it would be accepted. After all, we had done what had been asked of us. Yet the paper was rejected
again.
The editor had sent it to the same four referees, and the fourth referee was even more strident in condemning the manuscript, essentially saying, I don't ever want to see this manuscript again. We were deflated once more.