The Dolphin in the Mirror (31 page)

Meanwhile, the powerboat
Gala
was searching for Salazar in a zigzag pattern. The crew noticed a pair of dolphins approach and then turn and swim away. This happened several times, and the
Gala
's captain had a hunch that the dolphins were trying to tell him something. He turned the
Gala
to follow the dolphins, even though they had already searched in that vicinity. After a short while the crew spotted Salazar and hauled him out of the waters, exhausted, numb, and cramped after this two-hour ordeal. It was Salazar's fiftieth birthday, and he really had something to celebrate.
⁵

A decade earlier, a story of dolphins rescuing not one but three sailors in trouble was reported. Peter Stock, Terry MacDonald, and Roger Hilligan had been sailing a mile from the mouth of the Great Kei River on South Africa's east coast in rough weather when their yacht capsized. The three men managed to stay close to the boat and struggled to right it, but they felt themselves being dragged out to sea, toward waters where they had seen sharks the previous day. Understandably, the shipwrecked sailors were apprehensive. But then dolphins appeared on the scene. "It was only then that I didn't mind falling into the water," Stock told the
Johannesburg Star
. "I felt safe." Stock said that the dolphins stayed with the boat as they clambered back aboard, and even steered it to safety, away from rocks and toward shore. "As soon as we were all safely ashore they disappeared," Stock said. "They gave us a feeling of security and spurred us into action."

In the book
Beautiful Minds,
coauthor Maddalena Bearzi tells an extraordinary story of the efforts of a group of dolphins to save the life of a young woman off the coast of Malibu, California. Bearzi was studying the foraging behavior of the group of nine dolphins as they encircled a large school of sardines just off the Malibu pier. Soon after the dolphins started feeding, one of them abruptly left the circle and swam away at high speed. Almost immediately the other eight dolphins abandoned their feeding and followed their companion. "This was an odd behavior for my metropolitan dolphins," Bearzi observed. "To abruptly stop feeding and take off in an unrelated direction was rather peculiar."
⁶

Curious, Bearzi set off in her powerboat in pursuit of the dolphins. About three miles offshore the dolphins came to a sudden stop and formed themselves into a circle, for no reason that was obvious to Bearzi. "That's when one of my assistants spotted an inert human body with long, blond hair floating in the center of the dolphin ring," wrote Bearzi.
⁷
She maneuvered the boat toward the unconscious woman, and the crew hauled her aboard. The dolphins swam away. The young woman was hypothermic and would have died had she been in the water much longer. This is an extraordinary tale. How did the first dolphin know that someone three miles distant was facing death? And why would the group be motivated to save her?

I have a collection of ancient myths and modern tales from newspapers about dolphins coming to the rescue of humans. I have a drawer full of them. There must be some truth to these stories. (Although if dolphins ever did the opposite, pushed a person away from safety to his death, how would we ever hear about it?)

Why does the impulse for caregiving exist among dolphins and whales, if indeed these stories really do imply the behavior of active thinking minds? Gordon Gallup was the first to point out that behaviors that can be described as caregiving occur only in animals that have large, complex brains and are able to pass the mirror-self-recognition test. Membership in that club is small: humans, great apes, dolphins, elephants, and, as recently discovered, magpies. "Organisms that are aware of themselves are in a unique position to use their experience as a means of modeling the experience of others,"
⁸
he said. This is not limited to having insight into another individual's practical reactions, but also into their mental states, their emotions.

The primatologist (and my colleague and collaborator) Frans de Waal, author of
The Age of Empathy,
said that in chimpanzee societies, instances of one individual actively consoling another, often after a fight, are quite common. "A victim of aggression, who not long ago had to run for her life, or scream to recruit support, now sits alone, pouting, licking an injury, or looking dejected," wrote de Waal. "She perks up when a bystander comes over to her to give her a hug, groom her, or carefully inspect her injury. Consolation can be quite emotional, with both chimps literally screaming in each other's arms."
⁹
Does the bystander go to the victim of the fight and give comfort because she knows that under those same circumstances she, too, would be emotionally hurting and would like to be comforted? Do Terry and Circe stand vigil over Gordo when he is having a medical procedure because they know that they would feel distressed under those circumstances and would want to be comforted?

It is a difficult topic for humans to discuss dispassionately because, being the super-empathetic creatures that we are, it is impossible for any one of us to see or even imagine another distressed and not feel an emotional tug in the stomach and an urge to give comfort. But it remains true that the existence of a theory of mind in a species does not
automatically
lead to the experience or expression of empathy and caregiving in one individual for another. Mind reading could, in principle, be an experience entirely free of emotional identification. Psychopaths can "read" other people—they just don't care a whit about them. Some further cognitive step needs to be taken to go from emotionless mind reading to identification with another's psychological state to the urge to ameliorate suffering or distress.

I suspect dolphins and whales, with large, complex brains living in complex societies, may use their smarts to read the psychological states of other individuals as a tool. Some biologists balk at this idea, most notably Daniel Povinelli. "Gallup speculates that the capacity for self-recognition may indicate that chimpanzees are aware of their own internal, psychological states and understand that other individuals possess such states as well," he wrote. "I have come to doubt this high-level interpretation of chimpanzees' reactions to seeing themselves in mirrors."
¹⁰
Povinelli argued that the brains of great apes are exquisitely wired to monitor the position of every part of their bodies, at all times. He describes this as chimpanzees' "kinesthetic self-concept," an ability that allows great apes to navigate deftly and safely in a hazardous environment. To Povinelli, humans can only be certain about their own mental states and can infer things about the mental states of others. "Other species, including chimpanzees, may simply be incapable of reasoning about mental states—no matter how much we insist they do."
¹¹

Danny Povinelli could be right, of course, but I believe his is an extreme position. As I have said on more than one occasion, when one spends time in the presence of dolphins and becomes highly attuned to them, as I have, or with chimpanzees, as Sue Savage Rumbaugh has, or with African Grey parrots, as Irene Pepperberg has, one forms the strong impression that there is "somebody" there, the presence of an intelligence that goes beyond a neural machine monitoring the physical actions of the body. While I am aware of the snares of anthropomorphism, I am also aware of the patterns that connect us, and when I am with a dolphin, I feel in my gut that I am in the presence of mind, not just body.

There seemed to be mind at work in a remarkable episode that involved the rescue of another humpback whale, this time near the Farallon Islands, about eighteen miles off the coast of San Francisco. In mid-December 2005, the animal, which measured some fifty feet long and weighed around fifty tons, became desperately entangled in hundreds of feet of crab-pot ropes and multiple weights. One line was in the whale's mouth. Crab fishermen spotted the whale early on a Sunday morning, and by that afternoon a rescue team was at the spot to attempt what would be an extremely hazardous venture. Divers had to swim around and under the whale in order to cut the ropes free or it would sink and drown. Yet with one flip of its massive tail, a humpback can kill a man. "I was the first diver in the water, and my heart sank when I saw all the lines wrapped around it," said James Moskito, who worked for a cage-diving outfit and led the rescue team. "I really didn't think we were going to be able to save it."

Moskito and three other divers spent about an hour cutting the ropes with a special knife. Some lines were so tight that the divers had to dig deep into the whale's flesh. During the entire ordeal the whale remained calm, as if it knew that the men were there to help it. "When I was cutting the line going through the mouth, its eye was there winking at me, watching me," said Moskito. "It was an epic moment in my life." When it was finally free, instead of immediately swimming away, the whale made small circles around the men, and then nudged each of them in turn. "It felt to me like it was thanking us, knowing that it was free and that we had helped it," said Moskito. "It stopped about a foot away from me, pushed me around a little bit and had some fun." Mick Menigoz, another of the divers, said, "I don't know for sure what it was thinking, but it's something I will always remember."
¹²

I fully empathize with the emotional impact that this close encounter had on those men, especially experiencing the lingering eye contact. It brings to mind that moment two decades earlier when Humphrey, having mistakenly started to swim north from San Francisco Bay, returned to our flotilla, came to my boat, bellied up to the side, and gazed at us for several long seconds as we looked down at him. Like the divers, I didn't know what Humphrey was thinking, but it was hard for me to believe that his eye was a window into a blank mind.

I
FELT A POLITE
tap on my shoulder as I was peering at the poster display, my own, for the hundredth time, wondering whether people would be able to see the real story behind it. I turned and saw a tall, deeply tanned, silver-haired man next to me, his steel blue eyes holding me in a determined gaze. "Excuse me, but are you Diana Reiss?" I nodded. He was a total stranger to me, and he had a strong presence about him. There are a lot of big, bronzed, outdoorsy guys in my line of work, so this inquisitive stranger was nothing out of the ordinary. It was late in the afternoon, my session was coming to an end, I was tired, and I was looking forward to meeting up with some colleagues for a quiet dinner. I was unprepared for what the stranger said next: "I am interested in doing a film about the environment that will really make a difference and I have access to someone who has the monetary equivalent of a shah to do it. Someone told me I should talk to you."

It was the middle of December in 2005, and I was attending the sixteenth biennial conference of the Society for Marine Mammalogy (SMM).These events are the go-to venues for scientists engaged in research on marine mammals, such as dolphins, whales, seals, sea lions, walruses, sea otters, and so on. That year it was being held at the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego, and there were more than two thousand participants, including five hundred students, thirty-eight companies and organizations displaying their wares in various ballrooms, more than three hundred oral presentations, and almost a thousand poster slots. It was, as this genre of scientific gatherings usually is, a zoo.

Five years prior to the San Diego meeting I had by chance become interested in what can best be described as distress calls, the kind made when dolphins are under duress, such as in pain or severe stress. On a spectrograph, the distress call looks like a short rising whistle followed by a longer falling whistle. It sounds to me like a falling bomb. John Lilly was the first to recognize distress calls, in the mid-1950s, and René-Guy Busnel, my professor in France early in my career, had suggested that bottlenose and other dolphins and whales produce distress calls when injured or in pain; for example, when harpooned. But the topic wasn't prominent in anyone's mind when I came across it through happenstance in the year 2000.

In the late fall of that year, a young female dolphin, which we named Mara, had become stranded along with an older female presumed to be her mother in the Shrewsbury River in New Jersey. Officials at the National Marine Fisheries Service had been monitoring the dolphins for weeks and decided they had to be rescued before winter came and the river iced over. The older female had internal injuries, probably from a collision with a boat, and other severe medical problems, and unfortunately, she died during the rescue attempt. Mara, however, was carefully transported to the National Aquarium in Baltimore by the aquarium's marine mammal rescue program. I was a visiting research scientist there at the time. Some rescue-team members told me that prior to the death of the older female, the two dolphins were exchanging a distinctive odd whistle that sounded like a falling bomb. I raced to the aquarium the next day to record Mara's vocalizations. She was medically isolated in the aquarium's rescue pools and ministered to day and night by the veterinarians and marine mammal rescue staff. She looked like a healthy, albeit lonely, little dolphin, but people were always there with her and provided her with a variety of objects to play with while the rescue team waited for the medication they'd given her to work. Sadly, after a short period, Mara died too, but not before I had had the opportunity to record whistles of the sort that Lilly and Busnel had identified. I was puzzled about why Mara had been producing distress calls so persistently, but the mystery was solved with the autopsy: she had fibrous adhesions throughout her internal organs, the same medical condition from which her mother had suffered; and stomach acid had leaked into her body cavity. The poor dolphin must have experienced major pain. Dolphins, like many other animals, often mask their pain. This is highly adaptive for many species because predators seek out weak, ill, or injured individuals. Only her whistles signified her suffering, though we didn't realize it.