The Dolphin in the Mirror (30 page)

What isn't in doubt, however, is the insight into the dolphin mind that Lou Herman's beautiful experiment gives us about what dolphins "see" when they echolocate. Just as it is hard for vision-oriented creatures to imagine what a dog "sees" when it is creating an olfactory picture of its world, so it challenges our imagination to picture a dolphin's mind when it creates an acoustic picture of the world. But Herman and his colleagues provide compelling evidence that dolphins' sound-based perceptual systems produce something akin to visual images.

Lou collaborated with Adam Pack and Matthias Hoffman-Kuhnt on this classic experiment with a seven-year-old female named Elele. Elele was an eager student in whatever she did, and she loved to be right, which she was most of the time. When a trainer gave her the "hooray" signal, both arms stretched up vertically, Elele would leap into the air, squeaking and clicking with delight. In this experiment, Elele had a lot to squeak about, because most of the time she was near perfect in her performance.

The experiment was simple in concept but demanded careful execution. The question was this: Would Elele be able to visually identify an object after she had sonared it? In other words, does the sonar echo translate into a visual image in a dolphin's mind?

Lou Herman and his colleagues had Elele examine the contents of a box that was transparent to sonar but visually opaque. Inside the box was a complexly shaped object constructed from PVC piping, measuring about ten inches in size. Elele's task was to visually identify the object she'd "seen" by way of sonar. It involved her discriminating between two very similarly shaped objects and picking the right one. Elele had never seen the objects before, so there was no element of recognizing something familiar. She had to form a clear image of a complex novel object based only on sonar and prove that she'd seen the object by choosing it over something very similar. She got it right almost 100 percent of the time. And she did it almost instantly. We still don't know exactly how the sonar-produced image is manifested in the dolphin's brain, but we can now say that it is not merely recorded in sound. Perhaps it is some kind of holograph? Only dolphins know.

Elele showed herself to be equally skilled in the reverse direction, going from visual image to sound image: she had no difficulty identifying an object with sonar that she had seen visually just once. This was a very important study. It would be fascinating to repeat it while rotating the objects slightly in the visual-identification phase to see if dolphins can mentally rotate something. I bet they can.

***

Spock and Shiloh were inseparable, always swimming together, always playing together, always resting together. They were a major item in the show pool at Marine World in Redwood City. Everybody loved this devoted pair. Spock was the male dolphin who had apparently tricked Jim Mullen into giving him multiple rewards for cleaning up the pool by bringing him multiple scraps of paper torn from one large piece. And Shiloh was the first dolphin I saw producing bubble rings, soon after I arrived at the facility in 1981. Then, quite suddenly, Spock became ill, and died. I'd known him for only a few years and hadn't worked closely with him in the way I worked with Terry and Circe and their boys, but I was stricken, as were Jim Mullen and the other trainers. And we were not alone.

Shiloh was right by Spock's side as we lifted his inert body out of the pool. She looked bewildered and bereft. She wouldn't eat. She no longer swam around the pool with joie de vivre. She spent a lot of time simply lying on the bottom, deeply lethargic, stirring only when she had to surface to breathe. The other dolphins became very solicitous of her, swimming up to her side, apparently trying to encourage her to swim with them. But the grieving Shiloh would not be consoled. She continued like this for some time, and we became quite concerned for her health. Thankfully, after several days, like a human emerging slowly from mourning, Shiloh began to eat and socialize with the other dolphins. Oddly familiar. A pattern that connects.

There are a number of words in the preceding paragraph that, strictly speaking, should be in quotation marks.
Bewildered
and
bereft,
for instance; and
solicitous
and
grieving.
These words are inferences of the states of mind of animals, not states that we know for certain. With known human behavior as our model, we thought Shiloh looked
as if
she were bewildered and bereft; her buddies behaved
as if
they were being solicitous of Shiloh, concerned about her well-being. If someone you knew behaved after the death of her mate as Shiloh behaved when Spock died, you would know she was grieving, and you would have a very good idea of how she felt, especially if you yourself had experienced such a loss. Shiloh looked
as if
she were grieving. Does that mean that she was experiencing something like the raw, searing, heart-rending emotions we associate with grieving? How can we know?

Consider this. Back in the 1960s there were several reports of dolphins in aquariums displaying caregiving, or epimeletic, behavior with other dolphins. Occasionally, an individual dolphin in a pool becomes sick, loses strength, and is in danger of drowning because it is unable to swim to the surface to breathe. Often when this happens, other dolphins come to its aid; they stay at the sides of the ailing individual, holding it up so that it doesn't sink and drown. It looks as if the rescuers recognize that the individual is in trouble and care enough about it to keep it from drowning, often forgoing feeding for a long time while on the rescue mission. Is this a hard-wired response to a flailing individual, or do the dolphins really understand the situation and know what they are doing? Is their caregiving behavior evidence that they understand the plight of another?

Another situation. From time to time we do routine health checks on the dolphins. We teach each individual certain behaviors that help us carry out various procedures, such as lying belly-up at the water's surface so we can inspect its underside or do an ultrasound on an expectant mom; keeping its mouth open so we can examine teeth, gums, and throat; keeping its blowhole open so we can take a swab for a culture. When we did this with Gordo, Terry and Circe would abandon their carefree swimming around the pool and stand vigil until we released Gordo back to them.

When Gordo was actually sick and needed more invasive medical attention, we lowered the water level in the pool, put a foam mat under him, and supported him in a sling. Under these circumstances, Terry and Circe became seriously attentive and seemingly stressed, so much so that we had to take vigorous actions to keep them at bay. They acted
as if
they were truly concerned about the welfare of their buddy; they appeared to be agitated, and there was a lot of whistling back and forth. They acted
as if
they cared. There is nothing unique about Terry and Circe in this respect. Scientists and trainers who have worked with dolphins routinely see such behaviors in individuals,
as if
the dolphins feel the distress of a buddy in a difficult situation and experience a need to help. It may be the dolphin equivalent of Bill Clinton's saying, "I feel your pain."

The behaviors I am describing here are what we would call empathy or, more simply, caregiving, and dolphin lore is replete with such tales. One of the earliest examples to find its way into the scientific literature was reported in 1966 by M. C. Caldwell and D. K. Caldwell.
¹
This observation was of a very unfortunate incident that occurred off the coast of Florida in late October 1954. In the 1950s there was little concern or protection for dolphins, and we were living in the dark ages in our understanding of animal minds. In what can only be described as an act of pure ignorance, at an exhibition for a public aquarium someone set off a stick of dynamite near a group of bottlenose dolphins. The apparently lifeless body of a victim of the explosion rose to the surface, listing awkwardly. Two dolphins immediately came to its aid, one on each side of the stunned individual, supporting it so that its blowhole was above the water. Being underwater themselves, the supporting animals were unable to breathe, and after a few minutes they had to leave their post, only to be immediately replaced by two other individuals. This relay continued until the stunned animal regained consciousness, whereupon it quickly swam away. The rest of the dolphin group had remained nearby, rather than fleeing, and now accompanied the recovered individual. The scientists who reported the incident said, "There is no doubt in our minds that the cooperative assistance displayed for their own species was real and deliberate."
²

Real and deliberate
is the key phrase here. It implies the behavior is the product of active intelligent minds, not a blind, hard-wired pattern that merely appears to be a conscious act. Critics argue that caregiving of this sort is just an extension of a hard-wired protective behavior of dolphin mothers with their newborns, who often flail helplessly and sometimes need to be pushed to the surface to prevent them from drowning. But even this protection of newborns is anything but hard-wired. I have seen several newborn dolphins on the verge of drowning, their inexperienced mothers not having a clue what to do, as happened when Circe gave birth to Delphi, and Terry had to intervene.

Moreover, if this kind of supporting behavior were hard-wired, we would see it on
every
occasion when an individual is in trouble. Ken Norris tells of an incident in which a pilot whale had been harpooned and its two companions did the opposite of the usual caregiving behavior. Initially they stayed very close to their mortally wounded companion, one on either side, supporting it in the usual way, as it was being reeled in. Yet as the dead animal got close to the ship, the two Samaritans abruptly changed their behavior, leaping onto the lifeless body and pushing it down and away from the ship.
³
This is not an isolated incident; similar stories have been reported elsewhere. Rather than being hard-wired, therefore, the response of dolphins and whales to an injured or killed companion shows flexibility encompassing behaviors that are appropriate to particular situations. This flexibility implies a conscious awareness of the nature of the prevailing circumstances, and a conscious decision as to what action should be taken.

Dolphins and whales are well known for sticking by a hurt or mortally wounded companion, a behavior we might regard as admirable in human terms, displaying as it does a sense of loyalty and care. But it also makes them easier to hunt, a trait that whalers have exploited through the ages. A mid-nineteenth-century report is one of the earliest published observations of such behavior. Whalers spotted a pod of Pacific pilot whales off the coast of Panama and managed to harpoon one. "The school hovered around their injured schoolmate and refused to depart for some time," explained a later review of the behavior, "even after the dead animal had been hauled aboard ship."
⁴
Hanging around the scene of loss leaves the pod vulnerable to further killing, which was exactly what whalers often did.

Dolphins displayed the same all-for-one, one-for-all behavior in the infamous hunt drives at Taiji, Japan. The dolphins are driven toward shore and trapped behind nets in the bay; the dolphins have the physical ability to leap over the nets and escape, but their desire to stick together is apparently too strong, ironically leading to the wholesale slaughter of entire social groups, including mothers and young.

Earlier I mentioned stories from ancient times of dolphins showing caregiving not only to their own kind but also to other species, most notably humans. Some of these tales may be just that, stories based on a sliver of truth that became embellished in the telling through the ages. But contemporary accounts are plentiful enough to allow us to suspend some disbelief. On one high-profile occasion, Elian Gonzalez, a Cuban six-year-old who was fleeing with his mother to the United States in 2000, survived for two days in the Caribbean lying on an inner tube after his boat sank, his mother having gone down with it. The two fishermen who plucked Elian from the sea said there were dolphins circling the boy on his tube. And Elian himself told reporters that dolphins surrounded him and would push him back up onto the mini raft when he was losing strength and slipping off. I have an acquaintance who assisted young Elian in the days following his rescue, and the boy claimed that the only time he felt safe was when the dolphins appeared. Similar sentiments have been expressed by many others who have been on the receiving end of dolphin rescues.

I have a tale of a dolphin rescue myself, albeit a vicarious one. I was a guest on a radio show shortly after the Asian tsunami of December 2004, and I was asked to speak about whether animals have special sensory systems that warn of impending disasters. A man called in with the following story. He and his family were vacationing in Indonesia and were in a small boat far offshore, fishing. All of a sudden they noticed fins circling their small craft. They thought they were about to be attacked by sharks. But it turned out that the fins belonged to dolphins, which proceeded to push the boat to shore. Then the tsunami hit. "These animals saved me and my family," the man told me. "I am convinced of it." Not long afterward, I got a phone call from a woman in Greece who said that dolphins had saved her life too. "I go swimming in the sea all the time," she told me, "and I often see dolphins, but they never come near me. But on this one occasion I got into trouble and thought I was going to drown. Then I felt a nudge, and I was moving rapidly toward the shore; this dolphin was pushing me. The dolphin saved my life."

Here is a story of an incident off the coast of Venezuela near Isla de Margarita, a place where it is said that people have a special relationship with sea creatures. Tony Salazar was on a sailboat with his brother, taking part in the first race of the South Caribbean Ocean Regatta, in June 1997. With brisk winds and a choppy sea tossing the boat around, Salazar fell overboard while trying to execute a maneuver with the spinnaker. Because the boat was moving so fast, by the time the crew turned it around Salazar was nowhere to be seen. Salazar screamed and waved as he watched the boat disappear into the distance. He thought he was doomed. After about half an hour, he realized he was surrounded by dolphins, which was a great relief to him, as he knew that dolphins are natural enemies of sharks, which were common in those waters.