The Dolphin in the Mirror (10 page)

This style of interspecies communication had been developed with chimpanzees, but no one had attempted it with dolphins. As simple as this transaction sounds, it does in fact require considerable cognitive abilities.

The prospects for doing all this in Paris were not encouraging. With Busnel's help I looked farther afield. A small aquarium, the Zoo Marin at Port Barcares, soon popped up on our screen, and I visited the place in November 1978 and met the young female dolphin that had recently arrived, captured from the wild. (Given what we know today, I am strongly opposed to the capture of dolphins from the wild for any reason.)

There were three bottlenose dolphins in the too-small pool: a large male, called Hoss, a smaller female, Niki, and a young female that I guessed was about three years old. She was smaller than her companions, and although she had arrived six months before, she appeared reticent around them, especially Hoss. I watched as the three swam unhurriedly around the tank, the newcomer always staying quite close to Niki. "If she looked at me," I wrote in my notebook, referring to the newcomer, "I gently tapped [my open hand on the side of the tank] three times. It brought her closer. As she was close, I tapped three times again. Finally, in 20 minutes she had [tentatively] touched my hand. I felt it was a good indicator—and I decided to come and work with her."

Monsieur Stone readily agreed that I could spend six months there doing my graduate research, but there was one condition: I had to teach the young dolphin, who I now called Circe in my mind, to come to a particular spot by the side of the pool and be fed, part of preparing her to be in a dolphin show with her companions. Dolphins are predators, and their natural diet is live fish. At most aquariums, and in this case, frozen and then thawed fish are substituted for the real thing. Nevertheless, dolphins soon adapt, and the fish is nutritious. Despite my distaste for using dolphins for human entertainment, I accepted the arrangement as a compromise that allowed me to begin my work.

I rented a small apartment in a summer resort complex composed of several boxlike, stucco buildings on the beach with a spectacular view of the sea, directly across the road from the Marine Zoo. This being January, I was the sole resident apart from the manager and his family. Each building was painted a bright white, so they all stood in jarring contrast to the natural browns and grays of the Pyrenees and the azure of the Mediterranean. The day after I arrived in Port Barcares I went to see Circe and the other dolphins, and late that afternoon, as I walked back to my apartment across the seashell-strewn plain that separates the foothills of the Pyrenees from the sea, I felt myself drawn to an area to the right of my path. I didn't know why. Then I noticed a tuft of fur quivering slightly in the grass. I walked toward it, knelt, and saw a tiny baby rabbit, with a skein of fur all but ripped off its back, hanging loosely; its skin was shiny, but there was no blood in sight. I scooped up the poor thing and nestled it against my neck inside the thick green French army parka that I was wearing to ward off the January cold.

I got back to my apartment, warmed some milk, and fed the bunny as best I could. I checked it for bugs (I am practical as well as compassionate!), and then I retired to my narrow bed, the little creature tucked against my neck, for extra warmth.

I woke the next morning to the sight of the bunny hopping around on my bed, its fur positioned where it should be on its back and looking fine. It had survived! So began a new, but temporary, relationship. I built the baby rabbit a hutch inside the apartment, and when the weather warmed sufficiently, I created an outside space for it too. It became my companion for the next few months. I eventually found a permanent home for the little guy, with a local family who loved animals and thought of rabbits as pets and not as a next meal. Somehow it seemed a good sign for the work to come. We scientists can be a superstitious bunch.

Meanwhile, my formal work had not started well. "The electricity has been out since the day after my arrival," I wrote in my log on January 24, 1979. "So the experiments must wait until the emergency situation is over." So I began building a relationship with Circe, who was quite timid with me at first, and started to work on the feeding regimen. Circe had seemed a little intimidated by Hoss and to a lesser extent by Niki when I'd met her the previous November, and she still was. I spent time just observing Circe's behavior and that of the other dolphins to see if they would respond as Dal and Suwa had. "Niki was near Skip [a sea lion in an adjacent enclosure] the whole time," I noted in my log one night after work. "Circe and Hoss were by me the whole time—floating—rolling etc. At one point I stopped, Hoss began vocalizing on a note. I answered. He answered—changing as if going through his different combination of sounds. Then he stood on his head—keeping his tail out of the water... Circe just watches." She seemed nervous to me, and she barely ate anything at suppertime. "She fears H I think," I wrote in my log. "We need our own space."

I continued to try to build Circe's fragile confidence over the next few days but still wasn't able to do any serious work. "I've found a quiet moment to sit and write, finally," I noted in my log three days later. "The electricity is still stopped. I'm beginning to worry if it will ever come on again." I was encouraged that Circe seemed to be getting the hang of coming to station to be fed, but she was very picky about what part of the fish she would eat. She seemed to prefer the heads.

Five days into the project, Circe and I had our first intimate moment, tentative on her part. I had noticed that after she ate, she seemed to like to have some time to herself, five to ten minutes. Then she would come over to me, without my having to call her. On this morning, she came very close to me, looked at me, and seemed to want me to touch her. I put my hand in the water. "Finally she touched," I wrote in my log that evening, "first with her mouth closed, putting the very tip of her head against my hand. Then she began gently pushing my hand up to the surface. At one point she kept opening her mouth under water." When working with dolphins or any other animals, pets included, you have to "read" their behavior, their body language. Circe's body was relaxed and her mouth was open in a calm manner as well—I read her signals as friendly and solicitous, and I acted on this interpretation. "I put my hand on her mouth to show her I trusted her. I could run my fingers along her closed mouth gently, and over her rostrum—& back. Finally I put my hand in her open mouth and it was gentle, relaxed and open. I tickled her tongue, she moved closer and closed her eyes." This little incident marked a turning point in our relationship.

The lack of electricity at the facility was increasingly frustrating, not least because I had to haul buckets of warm water from my apartment, the only place that did have electricity, to thaw the fish for the dolphins. On February 1, more than a week after the outage began, the electricity was restored, "thanks to prayers—sympathetic magic—chanting—electricity dances, etc." At last, I could begin.

I started informally. I wanted to give Circe more choice and control over getting objects that she desired. I first taught her that she could obtain a toy by simply touching it when I presented it to her at the side of the pool. She learned this quickly, and apparently getting the toys themselves was reinforcing.

Then I conducted my first formal experiment: testing if a dolphin could visually discriminate between the white symbols. This was not a trivial question at the time; the everyday world of dolphins was thought to be dominated by sound, not sight, and, as I mentioned before, dolphins' echolocation abilities are exquisite. I therefore couldn't
assume
that dolphins could see well enough and discriminate well enough to use the visual symbols of the keyboard. Back in 1979 when I started with Circe, we did not know if they could. More than a decade earlier, at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, Winthrop Kellogg and Charles Rice had done some very preliminary studies on this kind of ability in dolphins, but they had gone only so far. Essentially, I was starting at square one. The first part of my doctoral research, therefore, was to discover whether dolphins could visually discriminate among simple shapes.

I built a simple wood-and-metal apparatus that displayed a set of white, wooden visual forms: a circle, a cross, and a triangle. The forms were buoyant and backed with metal studs so that they could float and adhere to the apparatus. The apparatus consisted of a horizontal bar with a vertical bar coming down off each end. This was the setup for a match-to-sample task: one symbol (the sample) was displayed in the center of the horizontal bar, an identical (matching) symbol was on one vertical arm, and a different (nonmatching) symbol was on the other. A symbol was introduced as the sample, and Circe had to look at the sample and pick the correct match. Dolphins are adept at touching things with the tip of their rostrums (the front of their mouths), and Circe was no exception. The symbols were presented in air so she had to use vision, not echolocation, for the task.

Using this setup, I rewarded Circe with a piece of fish when she touched the bottom circle, the correct match to the sample, but not when she chose the triangle. I switched the positions of the circle and triangle at the bottom from time to time, in what we call a pseudo-random pattern, to make sure she wasn't using the symbol's position or any predictable pattern to solve the problem. Other animals are as clever like us and look for useful strategies to solve problems, like choosing what's on the right because that's what worked last time or trying an alternating pattern such as right, then left, then right. Circe was an eager student, and she learned the procedure fairly quickly. So now I knew that, indeed, Circe was able to identify shapes visually and could compare and distinguish between different forms.

The next procedure built on Circe's previous understanding of the match-to-sample task. The conditional-discrimination task was a bit more of a cognitive challenge, one that David Premack had pioneered with his chimpanzee Sarah. The task involved learning to associate a non-iconic visual symbol—that is, a symbol not visually similar to what it will be linked with—with a particular object; for example, a triangle with a toy ball. In this case, using the same match-to-sample apparatus as the first experiment, I put a ball in the top position on the keyboard, the sample position. In the two lower positions I had a triangle and a cross. For this test I rewarded Circe when she touched the triangle key, but not when she touched the cross; I did the same type of thing with the other objects. Again, Circe got it quickly, showing that, indeed, she had learned the concept of conditional discrimination. In the most parsimonious explanation and the driest technical description, what Circe learned was this: If the ball was in the sample position, then she should touch the triangle; if the ring was in the sample position, then she should touch the cross; and if the necklace float was in the sample position, then she should touch the circle. A more user-friendly description of Circe's newly acquired ability was that the triangle was associated with a ball. It is too much of a stretch to infer that in Circe's mind, the triangle was a "word" for ball, at least not in the way we understand and use words. But this was what I hoped my work would ultimately lead to, the development of an artificial language that humans and dolphins could use to communicate.

I took Circe a step farther down this cognitive path with the third experiment, preference testing and free choice. First, I put the three toys—a ball, the necklace, and a ring—in the pool with her. I then sat by the pool for several days, notepad in hand, carefully recording how often she played with each of the toys. I wanted to know which one she preferred most. Ball was her favorite, followed by necklace, followed by ring. Most dolphins love to play with toys, but Circe was especially playful. She would push or carry the toys around the pool or toss them into the air, and often she tossed one of them to me. I tossed it right back, so this piece of work was essentially a game, one that strengthened the bond that was developing between us.

The real challenge came in the next part of the study. Circe had learned a conditional association of a specific object with a specific symbol: the triangle with the ball, the circle with the necklace float, and the cross with the ring. So now we were all set to do the test and see if Circe would use the symbols to obtain toys and if the symbols she used would match her toy preferences. I put the three symbols on the keyboard, positioned them so she would have equal, easy access to all three positions, and then watched what she did. Would she touch the triangle more than the circle, and the circle more than the cross? This was new cognitive ground for dolphins, and Circe was a star. Given her free choice and control over the keyboard, she asked for her most preferred object most often, the next preferred object a bit less often, and the least preferred object least often. In scientific terms it was a beautiful linear correlation suggesting that Circe could ask for an object she wanted.

Recently I was looking at one of my old notebooks from the lab in Paris, and I came across the proposal I had written for my future research plans. It was: "To create a third language or communication system to exchange information between dolphins,
Tursiops truncatus,
and humans,
Homo sapiens.
" I couldn't help laughing as I read these lines. It is all very lofty and PhD-student-like, very earnest. You have to remember that I was deeply immersed in communication theory and cybernetics, a systems approach to communication. Very mechanistic in a way, looking at the different parts that interact in the system: a human, a dolphin, and a keyboard, which is the interface. "The human experimenter"—that would be me!—"will begin by establishing a relationship with the dolphins," the proposal continued, "establishing trust, and mapping out environment..." And so on.

At the time, John Lilly expected he'd be able to teach dolphins to communicate with humans in English, which I considered to be unrealistic and less interesting than understanding their own forms of communication. While not as extreme as Lilly's notions, my proposal was definitely out there, even naive in its wide-eyed expectations. Nevertheless, in those months working with Circe during the late winter and through the summer of 1979, in the shadow of the majestic Pyrenees, I took the first steps down that ambitious road. I had my first real glimpse into the dolphin mind.