The Dolphin in the Mirror (29 page)

Bubble-ring behavior:
The aesthetics and easy inventiveness that take place around the bubble rings belie the cognitive abilities that bubble-ring production demands. There has to be the initial learning of how to make them, by chance (as in the case of Delphi) or by observation (in Pan's case); anticipatory planning and motivation; and an intuitive sense of the physics of what makes good rings and how they might be manipulated without destroying them. So here we have dolphins making arbitrary play objects appear out of thin air, planning and releasing the rings with exquisite timing.

Deception:
Having another individual believe, based on one's own calculated behavior, that something is true when it isn't certainly demands high cognitive abilities; one has to manipulate the environment so that another individual is somehow fooled by an otherwise innocent action. True deception implies an individual knows the rules of the game and is manipulating them. It demands an appreciation of how the self's honest or dishonest act might be interpreted by the other. As you have seen, dolphins are quite capable of deception.

Mirror self-recognition:
You saw in chapter 6 that Presley and Tab each definitively recognized the image in the mirror as self. And Delphi and Pan's behavior at the mirror was strongly suggestive of that ability as well. Recognition of self is, for obvious reasons, the strongest indicator that the glow of consciousness is more than a dim ember. But recall the urgency with which Presley tried to find the mark on his side, contorting himself in the cramped corner of the indoor pool after sham marking; remember his double take on first seeing his image as he casually swam by the mirror, as well as his horizontal swirl performance; think about the intensity with which he searched for a glimpse of self, looking into his own eye just inches from him in the mirror. Consider all these things, and it is not a stretch to put yourself in his mind and experience a consciousness that you recognize in yourself.

We
assume
consciousness in dolphins shines less brightly than it does in our minds. But this may be just an assumption. How would we know? How could we know? There is one thing we can be certain of, though, and that is that the
texture
of Presley's consciousness, the texture of all dolphins' consciousness, will be different from ours, just as Wittgenstein's lion inhabits a reality that is foreign to that of humans. One major reason: While humans are primarily visual creatures, dolphins experience their world primarily through sound, through their exquisite echolocation system. If you are a dog owner, or even simply a casual observer of a dog on a walk with its owner, then you are aware that a dog's experience of a walk is dramatically different from its owner's. The dog's world is constructed from a kaleidoscope of odors—a sensory realm that is mostly invisible to us—and visual images. In the same way, dolphins can perceive their immediate environment via their exquisitely detailed natural sonar. They receive acoustic pictures built from the returning echoes of the clicks that reflect off environmental features. The upper ranges of their sonar clicks are ultrasonic to us, beyond our perception. How they integrate and interpret the returning echoes of the clicks they've produced is still a mystery. No human-made sonar comes close to this natural technology.

Lou Herman has been a professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii for four decades, and in 1970 he founded the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory in Honolulu to study perception, cognition, and communication in bottlenose dolphins. A little more than two decades later, he and his colleague Adam Pack founded the Dolphin Institute, which added conservation and public education to other research interests. Lou directed what is likely the most longitudinal cognitive research program with dolphins; it began in 2004 and has resulted in many groundbreaking experiments on dolphin perception and intelligence.

Early on, Lou Herman bravely decided to investigate dolphins' language competence. I say
bravely
because the investigation of animal language has a long history of contentiousness, thanks in part to John Lilly. Whereas Lilly had dreamed of humans' one day having two-way conversations with dolphins in spoken English, Herman concentrated only on dolphins' ability to comprehend, not produce, language. And he didn't use spoken words, as Lilly had wanted to. Instead, he taught one dolphin, Akeakamai, an arbitrary system of hand gestures with a simple grammar, akin to American Sign Language, as some ape-language researchers had done. A second dolphin, Phoenix, learned another arbitrary system, dolphinlike whistles created by Herman and his colleagues.

The Kewalo dolphins quickly grasped not only the meaning of the symbols (for hoop, ball, fetch, and so on, which can be thought of as the semantics of the language) but also the meaning of the word order (the syntax). For instance, when one of the trainers gave Akeakamai the symbols for hoop-ball-fetch—in that order—she would push the ball to the hoop. But when she was given the instruction ball-hoop-fetch, she took the hoop to the ball. We all know that word order in sentences is critical to comprehension, and we respond to it without thinking. Herman put it this way: "Syntax is what tells us that a venetian blind is not a blind Venetian." Both Akeakamai and Phoenix were almost flawless in their response to the meaning of word order in the simple, and sometimes not so simple, sentences Herman gave them. For instance, they knew that "take the pipe to the basket on the right" meant that the pipe should finish up in the basket on the
right,
not the one of the
left.
Lou's dolphins proved themselves at least up to par with any chimp in their grasp of semantics and syntax.

Akeakamai and Phoenix also mastered other cognitive tests. For example, a trainer would sometimes ask one of the dolphins to fetch a novel object and do something with it, and the trainer would use a symbol for the object that the dolphin had not yet learned. The dolphin had no difficulty figuring out that the symbol must refer to the only object in the pool that it hadn't seen before. Akeakamai also understood the rather abstract concept of presence and absence, and used Yes and No pedals to respond to questions. For instance, when she was asked, in the form of the symbols that meant "ball" and "question," whether there was a ball in the pool, she would press a Yes pedal if there was a ball there and a No pedal if there wasn't. Sounds simple, doesn't it? But dealing with an abstract concept, as absence is, demands more brainpower than dealing with the concrete.

Akeakamai spontaneously and on her own took this little exercise further. Akeakamai knew that the construction Frisbee-hoop-in meant "put the hoop on the Frisbee." One day, she was told to do this but there was no Frisbee in the pool, so she got hold of the hoop, went over to the pedals, and put it on the No. Another time, when the object to be moved, the hoop, was absent, she simply went to the pedals and pressed No with her rostrum. She had found a way to respond correctly. She had worked out how to say "There's no Frisbee" and "There's no hoop." She'd devised these responses to impossible situations on her own, with no training. That's a reflection of dolphin mind: problem solving and communicating.

For me, one particular study that Herman and Pack conducted was remarkable and extremely revealing about dolphin sensitivities—and perhaps about their own form of communication. Akeakamai not only responded to the meaning of gestures with impressive accuracy but also showed herself to be superbly sensitive to the physical form of the gestures that carried their meaning. Ordinarily, a trainer made gestures standing at the side of the pool, moving an arm from a bent position to straight out in front, moving it across the body, and so on. In this particular experiment, the goal was to determine how dolphins interpreted signals that were visually degraded. Rather than generating gestures from the normal poolside positions, the trainer gave all signals from an underwater viewing window. The first stage of degrading the signal was to have each trainer dressed in black, with his arms in white. Akeakamai would therefore see just the arms as the trainer gestured. She was able to respond just as well as she normally did. The next stage was for the trainer to wear a black body suit, with only the hands in white. Akeakamai now saw only the hands, and she still had no problem. The last stage had the trainer totally in black and holding a short black stick in each hand, a white Ping-Pong ball at the end of each stick. Akeakamai still aced it, which astonished Herman and his colleagues because, given the minimal information, they themselves had tremendous difficulty identifying which gesture was which.

This experiment was done quite some time ago, but when I saw Lou Herman present the videos at a conference I flashed on something I had experienced when swimming with dolphins. On occasion I would swim with Circe, Terry, Pan, and Delphi. While behind them, I noticed small white areas on the leading or back edges of their pectoral fins or flukes. From the front I noticed the tips of their rostrums were lighter as well. I used these markers as directional cues so I could maintain cohesion and velocity with the group and sense which way they would move next. Birds use visual cues in similar ways in maintaining flock cohesion. Perhaps the dolphins themselves used these white-tipped cues? Recently I was swimming with dolphins during a research trip with Daisy Kaplan, a doctoral student in my lab, off Bimini, in the Caribbean, and I wondered if they were using the same visual cues that I used with them.
^*
Perhaps you have seen films of groups of dolphins swimming in unison, twisting and turning, diving and leaping, as if they were perfectly executing a piece of choreography. How do they do it? How do they avoid bumping into one another? Visual monitoring of neighbors must be a part of the system, though probably not all of it. So what are they actually monitoring? It was a wow! moment for me when I saw Lou Herman's video. Dolphins have exquisite sensitivity to minimal information, and they can accurately act on it.

Herman also taught the dolphins the symbol meaning "mimic," which told them to copy the body movements a trainer performed at the edge of the pool. The act of mimicry sounds simple, but it means that one individual must model its behavior based on that of another. And when the other is a different species with completely different anatomy, an extra cognitive step is involved: matching analogous parts of the observer's anatomy to the demonstrator's. Herman's dolphins had no problem copying a whole-body pirouette, relating whole body to whole body. No surprise there. They were also adept at copying a trainer bending backward from the waist with her hands by the sides of her head. Still not too challenging. When the trainer shook a leg, that should have presented a problem. But the dolphins shook their tails! We've already seen how accomplished dolphins are at vocal mimicry (more so than any animal other than certain birds and humans). This, combined with behavioral mimicry, makes dolphins the only species, aside from humans, that are capable of both forms of mimicry.

Dolphins appear to be performing a dance as they swim synchronously in groups in the ocean. Who is devising the dance? And how is it communicated among the group? Lou Herman decided to dabble a little bit in this performance arena. He taught Akeakamai and Phoenix a symbol meaning "create," which told them they should go off and do something novel. (Karen Pryor had done a study earlier showing that dolphins could learn the concept of "do something novel and creative"!) He has a film segment that showed a trainer giving Akeakamai and Phoenix this command at the side of the pool. The two dolphins swam to the center of the pool and circled underwater for a few seconds. Then they dramatically broke through the surface of the water, spinning clockwise and erect, heads up, and squirted water from their mouths, all in such perfect unison it would have made Olympic synchronized swimmers proud. "None of this was trained," Lou Herman said, "and it looks to us absolutely mysterious. We don't know how they do it." These active, intelligent minds understand
novel
and
create,
and they can do it in teams.

Lou Herman and his colleagues have produced many findings over the years that further indicate that dolphins are the cognitively complex creatures we intuitively feel they are. I've given only a glimpse of his work here, and I wish I had space for more. But I do want to add just one last finding of Lou Herman's. It's an experiment I wish I'd done.

Dolphins' sonar systems are, quite properly, regarded with something approaching awe by technical and nontechnical people alike. They are the subject of both impressive data and questionable claims. In the first category, impressive data, the U.S. Navy has determined that a dolphin can accurately locate a three-inch sphere from a distance of four hundred yards. The second category, questionable claims, arises from the fact that the sound waves that dolphins produce are able to penetrate biological tissue. In principle, therefore, dolphins should be able to examine one another's internal organs at a glance. What they "see" and what use they make of such information is a mystery, but there are stories that imply dolphins sometimes know more than we think possible. I have heard numerous accounts of people who claim that when they swam in the wild with dolphins, injured parts of their bodies were scanned by the dolphins and manipulated. This may be the case, but it is certainly possible that one moves an injured limb differently, which could capture the attention of a dolphin and lead it to investigate. I've also heard numerous accounts of pregnant women who claim that dolphins used sonar on their abdomens. It's not surprising to think that dolphin sonar could reveal a pregnancy. After all, our less sophisticated ultrasound technology performs this task. I now conduct observations and cognitive studies with a social group of dolphins at the National Aquarium in Baltimore. The social group is composed of several generations of females and a few male offspring. We have observed an older female scan the abdominal area of her pregnant offspring. It would certainly confer an advantage to the individual and the social group to know who is expecting. Whether they are really detecting a pregnancy and understanding the ramifications, however, is far from clear.