The Dolphin in the Mirror (9 page)

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It was not long after my return from Florida that I realized the path to take. Lacking the ring of wise old Solomon but agreeing with Lorenz that the powers of observing and listening to animals were critical, I wanted to use a combination of observational and experimental approaches: first, observing and recording the behavior and vocalizations of the dolphins within their own social interactions, and, second, finding a way for the dolphins to interact with a symbolic system that would allow them to have at least some rudimentary choice and control over their environment. I sought to develop an underwater keyboard for dolphins that would provide them with some ability to communicate with us via a shared code of symbols. My beginning premise was that dolphins were an intelligent and highly social species who were already communicating among themselves. About what, I had no idea. I have an abiding philosophical and pragmatic fear that we may be unable to recognize other forms of intelligence in a species that is so unlike us and that is coming from such an alien environment. But it had become increasingly clear to me that a shared keyboard might be a means to allow the dolphins to "show us their best stuff."

The Animal Acoustics Laboratory of France's National Center for Zoological Research is located in a chateau near the small town of Jouy-en-Josas, some two and a half miles southeast of Versailles and about twelve miles southwest of the center of Paris. This charming village is best known for its famous fabric design, called toile de Jouy, a repeating pattern of a pastoral scene in a single color, usually set against a white or off-white background. Much of the countryside surrounding Jouy-en-Josas is heavily wooded, but open parkland and rolling hills here and there are redolent of a grandeur appropriate to a region of such fabled history. The French chateau itself looked like something out of Grimms' fairy tales, with steep roofs and elegant long windows beyond intricate laceworks of black iron gates. The lab, by contrast, was like any science lab, with benches, bookcases, and electronic gadgetry.

René-Guy Busnel was the director of the lab at the time, and he was the reason I was there. He had done much work on dolphin acoustics, had worked with insect and bird communication too, and he'd edited the volume
Acoustic Behavior of Animals,
published in 1966, making him the world's authority in the realm of animal bioacoustics. But that wasn't all. His monograph
Whistled Languages,
published in 1976, is still the most important work about this little-known realm of human communication.

In 1976 I'd known that John Lilly was the person to speak to about my nascent interest in dolphins, and I now recognized that I had to contact Professor Busnel. I wrote a letter, and he later invited me to visit him at his lab.

I explained that my goal was to decode dolphin communication and learn more about the minds of dolphin and that I planned to follow two separate paths. The first, which had already had a little traffic, was to record dolphin whistles as a step in understanding the information they contained. I recognized that this was extremely challenging because we lacked a Rosetta stone to help us decode their calls. I therefore needed a parallel line of investigation that might inform the first. This second path, which at this point was almost virgin territory with dolphins, was to develop an artificial code, probably using a keyboard as Duane Rumbaugh and Sue Savage Rumbaugh were doing with chimpanzees. With an artificial code, I hoped to learn something about how they communicated that I could then employ as a window into their natural means of communication. I also thought it was important to give them more choice and control if they were in captivity. Busnel was interested in these ideas and suggested I do some of my graduate work at the lab. He helped shepherd through a grant from the French government and also enlisted my help with a NATO sonar systems conference on echolocation that he was organizing.

Beginning in September 1978 I took the bus to the lab each day, leaving my small studio apartment on rue Pernety in the Fourteenth Arrondissement of Paris. This neighborhood lies just south of the Tour Montparnasse, an area famous for its ateliers of artists, actors, and philosophers. Through a friend of Professor Busnel and his wife, Marie-Claire, also a renowned scientist in bioacoustics, I had found the inexpensive studio apartment located in a very old five-story house. My room was small but charming. The good news: it had a wood-burning fireplace, two french windows overlooking a small courtyard with a large fig tree, a raised built-in bed with bookshelves on the surrounding walls, a small sink with hot and cold water, and a shower. The bad news: it had no kitchen or bathroom. The sink was near one of the windows, and a three-by-three-foot shower basin was on the floor near the sink. As for a toilet, it was a shared one conveniently located outside on the stairway landing between my floor and the next floor up. It was essentially a hole in the floor, flushed by a brisk pull of a string dangling from the tank above. This type of toilet is commonly referred to as a Turkish toilet by the French and as a French toilet by Americans. (No country wants to claim it as its own.) I was thrilled to have the studio, and it was a bargain, about ninety dollars a month.

The daily bus journey to the lab was a good opportunity to improve my rather limited French. When I arrived at the center, I walked through the gates past the chateau and onto a smaller road that wound up a hill to the green rectangular building that was the acoustics laboratory. My office was a small square room on the second floor with a U-shaped counter-cum-desk that faced a window onto rolling lawns. It was a haven for me. In France, doctoral students were treated with great respect and, unlike their counterparts in the United States, given time to just read and think. The graduate training grant I had been awarded by the French government provided for American students to go to Paris and study in a specialty area. My area was about as specialized as you could get: dolphin communication and human whistled languages.

One vivid memory I have from my walks to the lab was of some very interesting behavior of the crows that lived in the surrounding woods. Busnel had told me to watch out for it. The crows had been seen repeatedly dropping or placing intact chestnuts in the roadway and then waiting in the treetops above until a truck or car ran over the nuts and cracked them open. They would then swoop down and feast on the exposed kernels. I saw the crows engaged in this activity on many occasions. This was at a time when reports were on the rise of birds and other animals using tools, joining us humans in the tool-use domain.

Busnel was the first person to study human whistle languages, beginning in the 1950s. I read some of his papers on the topic before I met him. Spoken language is one of the most plastic and rapidly evolving aspects of fundamental human behaviors. More than five thousand distinct languages exist around the globe today, probably a rather small representation of what used to exist in the not so distant past. Their variants are enormous and involve components that to the average Germanic- or Romance-language speakers are quite exotic, such as clicks, gutturals, and nasal sounds. But all these elements of language are for the most part products of a natural, unconscious evolution. Not so with whistle languages. Whistle languages, of which there are scores around the world, are deliberate adaptations to particular contexts in which normal spoken language, including shouting, does not work. The most common ecological context is in mountainous regions, where accomplished whistlers can communicate detailed instructions or pass on complex information across a valley or from the top of the mountain to the bottom of the valley, the sounds often traversing as much as three miles.

Busnel's initial interest in whistle languages was as a bioacoustician studying variants of human vocal communication, but his excursions into the acoustics of calls in other animals, especially dolphins, put the whistle languages in a new intellectual context. When I first arrived at the lab in Jouy-en-Josas I was thrilled to find that there were some whistlers from Eastern Europe visiting for a short while. Busnel had filmed these people in their own country and now wanted to record them for spectrographic analysis in the lab. I was rapt. I heard men produce quite lengthy but not obviously complicated whistles that in fact were whole sentences containing a lot of information. (Women from Eastern Europe apparently don't whistle. Why, I'm not sure.) Here were people who, under the constraints of a certain environment, had developed a means of encoding a lot of information in what seemed to be simple whistles. And I was thinking,
This is astonishing. Dolphins were once terrestrial animals, and then they evolved to inhabit a very different medium, the sea, which resulted in all kinds of adaptations, the most obvious
being body form. But they, too, communicate with whistles—sounds that travel farther in water than other sounds.

Now, dolphin communication as compared with that of mountain-dwelling humans is quite distinct, and the vocal adaptation of dolphins was not intentional, of course. How the vocal repertoires of dolphins have developed and how they are related to the communication signals of their ancient terrestrial ancestors remains a mystery. We simply do not have an acoustic record, analogous to a fossil record, of early cetacean signals.

But what I heard in the lab that day was enlightening: simple whistles are effective at long-distance communication and can encode large quantities of information. And here's another difference between human whistlers and dolphins: after a human whistler has dazzled us with an especially complicated riff, we can ask him to translate the message, and he will. The challenge that stretched before me back in the lab in Jouy-en-Josas in 1978 was to discover what dolphins mean when they whistle.

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In Greek mythology, Circe was an enchantress and sorceress who lived with her nymph attendants on the island of Aeaea. Her powers of seduction were legendary, and if it so pleased her she would turn men who offended her into animals. Such was the fate of some crew members of Homer's hero Odysseus (Ulysses) as they journeyed home after the war in Troy. The men, hungry for more than the food and wine that the beautiful Circe was offering after their long journey at sea, got more than they bargained for: they found themselves transformed into swine. Odysseus rescued his men and, in one version of the story, went on to sire many children with Circe. With flaming red hair and magical powers, not to mention the ability to brew intoxicating potions, Circe was the very definition of
enchantress.

In my world, Circe was a young female dolphin, the first with whom I spent serious research time, the first to give me a glimpse of a dolphin mind beyond anything I had imagined. She was the dolphin that set the intellectual stage for all my later work. She enchanted me right from the beginning, and because I'd been fascinated by Greek gods and goddesses since the sixth grade, I named her Circe. The metaphor goes further for me, because, as I said, the goddess Circe had been able to transform humans into animals, and what I was attempting to do with the dolphin Circe was create a means of communication to connect us and demonstrate there was continuity between us as thinking, cognizant creatures. (Beyond that, in an academic pun, CIRCE was an acronym for Cetacean Intelligence Research and Communication Experiment.)

Port Barcares is a picturesque town on the coast near Perpignan in southwestern France. It was, appropriately, a magical location, with the rugged Pyrenees to the west and the blue waters of the Mediterranean just a stone's throw to the south. When I first arrived, in January 1979, I literally gasped at the beauty I witnessed around me, even though the area was wearing its stark winter coat and was very cold. The small marine zoo there was a mom-and-pop affair, run by Willy Stone, a large, bighearted, white-haired man with a walleye, and his petite, demure Dutch wife, who seemed quite out of place in this remote setting. Monsieur Stone and his wife lived in an incongruously small caravan, the most modest structure on the site. Their teenage daughter, who looked like a young Brigitte Bardot, lived in another caravan. They all cared passionately about the animals, which mitigated my somewhat negative response to the, shall we say, limited facilities that housed four dolphins. Peacocks, black swans, and white swans roamed freely, which gave the place the atmosphere of a French farm, but one had to be vigilant because the black swans were quite aggressive and seemed to enjoy attacking people's feet.

During the previous six months at the animal acoustics lab I had been immersed in communication theory, information coding, and dolphin sound-production mechanisms and vocalizations, and I had started to master the practicalities of recording and analyzing cetacean vocalizations. But I needed to begin working with dolphins, not just reading about them. The research I was to conduct would form the basis of my doctoral thesis. I had several research goals, and all of them were related to my longtime vision of developing the underwater keyboard system.

I had imagined using three-dimensional white geometric forms on a black background as symbols on the underwater keyboard. Although I was sure the dolphins could use echolocation to discriminate among the different forms underwater, I wanted to make sure that they could also visually discriminate among them. So my first experiment was to investigate whether dolphins could visually discriminate one three-dimensional white geometric form on a black background from another when the forms were presented to them above the water's surface. A second experiment tested whether dolphins could learn conditional discrimination, which, simply put, meant seeing if they could learn to associate a specific visual symbol with a specific toy (say, a ball or ring). The third experiment was more complicated. Initially, I'd determine the dolphin's toy preferences—in a given set of toys, which objects did the dolphin play with most frequently? After this, I would provide the dolphin with a free-choice situation, a rudimentary keyboard of sorts, that would display the three visual symbols that had been associated with the different toys in the previous experiment. The visual symbols would be arranged horizontally in varying positions on the keyboard. If the dolphin touched a symbol, it would be given the corresponding object—a ball, a ring, or a float necklace. The question: Would the dolphin learn to use the keyboard to get the preferred toy? I hypothesized the answer would be yes.