The Cetaceans hold an important lesson for us. The lesson is not about whales and dolphins, but about ourselves. There is at least moderately convincing evidence that there is another class of intelligent beings on earth besides ourselves. They have behaved benignly and in many cases affectionately towards us…
What Do You Think?
Non-fiction by Teresa Troutman
The first thing I noted when I stepped off the plane in Honolulu was the smell of flowers. The air was thick with fragrance, the island humidity carrying the sweet air through the Delta Airlines terminal. There were women dressed in colorful mumus; the long, traditional dresses of the locals covered with prints of flowers and sunsets. Looped over their arms were leis of greeting, a perk for those travelling with tour groups who, in their own colorful vacation wear, readily bent their heads to receive their pink and yellow flower necklaces and to receive a kiss from a young, native wahine. These beautiful women, commissioned by the tour company, guaranteed all guests of this hotel or that, were met with the spirit of Aloha.
I wasn’t part of the tour group and, while I thought of buying a circle of tuberose and pikake flowers to wear, it didn’t seem right to buy one for myself. I wasn’t on vacation. I was here on Oahu for the next several months for an undergraduate internship at the University of Hawaii. I had come to the island to help teach dolphins language. After grabbing my luggage, a combination of summer clothes and scuba gear, I hailed a taxi and set off for the University.
I first heard Dr. Louis Herman lecture on his Dolphin Language Project at the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Lab as part of a lecture series for members of the New England Aquarium in Boston. Dr. Herman wasn’t a tall man, but his face was very tan against the white beard and mustache he kept neatly trimmed. It took him a moment to lower the stage microphone to the proper level, which was about ten inches lower than the speaker before him. The lecture was called, “Putting DesCartes Before The Horse,” in which Dr. Herman described his research project. The University on Oahu was one of the first to receive funding after the debacle in dolphin cognition experiments conducted by Dr. John Lilly. Dr. Lilly, after years of experimenting with dolphins’ brains and their vocalizations, was unsuccessful at quantifying intelligence and language ability in non-human animals. He lost credibility when he began giving LSD to his dolphins. Soon after, Lilly closed his lab and refused to use dolphins, which he decided were obviously sentient creatures, as test subjects. While there were two movies based on John Lilly’s research and colorful life – Day of the Dolphin and Altered States, -- research grants for dolphin cognition experiments elsewhere dried up and new age thought began to take hold of the cultural consciousness.
After Lilly, dolphins were often reified as super-intelligent shamans, with many writers claiming they were reincarnated dolphins or worse; some claimed they were psychic channellers for dolphin wisdom. At least, this was the case in the United States. Japan and Norway and the whole fleet of the tuna fisheries continued the endless slaughter of dolphins and whales. Lou Herman, a research psychologist and cetacean ethologist, had been trying to break the ‘dolphin mystique” with tightly controlled quantitative research. As he stood on the stage narrating slides of his research trials in teaching dolphins symbolic language, I first came to know the two bottlenose dolphins in residence at the language lab: Phoenix and Akeakamai.
A year later, in the spring of 1986, I was accepted for an internship in Hawaii and I took a sabbatical from my job at Marineland in Ranchos Palos Verdes on the coast of southern California. I came to know Dr. Herman, the graduate students and the doctoral candidates conducting dissertation research, and Phoe and Akea themselves, each participant in the language trials as an interesting and complicated personality.
The taxi dropped me off at the Hale Manoa dormitories. I had barely been on the island an hour and I was already beginning to build my repertoire of Hawaiian idioms. Hale: house. Lanai: patio. Humuhumunukunukuapua’a: a funny looking trigger fish whose name meant “pig-nosed.” After unpacking my stuff, I met Amy on the lanai of the Hale. Amy had thick, dark hair and skin so tan, she looked like Abe Lincoln on the face of a penny. Her dialect, though, was eclectic European with Hawaiian pidgin slipping in between the cracks.
“Your room okay?”
“I like it.” It was a private dorm room and I could see the stratified layers of the tip of the Diamond Head crater through my window, less than a mile away.
“Here. This is your bus pass and your meal ticket. You pick up your bag lunch from the kitchen. They usually give you an apple, an orange, two sandwiches. Usually bologna. Not too good.”
I took the two cards. The bus pass simply said “The Bus” across the front and the other read “Saga Food Service.” I put both into my pocket.
“Come. I’ll show you how to take The Bus to get to the lab. We start sorting fish at eight, first trial at nine.”
The bus stop was a short walk from the dorm. The university was inland from the massive hotel blocks of Waikiki. The bus was exactly that: “The Bus” and it was a quick and easy ride down the hill to the Honolulu marina by way of the Ala Moana Mall. There was always music and singing coming from the halls of the shopping center and I immediately fell in love with Hawaiian slack key and ukele:
He ho ‘oheno, ke ike aku, ke kai moana nui la,
Nui ke aloha e hi’ipoi nei,
I had no idea what dream the words of the song described and despite the diesel bus fumes, I drank in the ceaseless bouquet of tropical flowers and hula song. As we approached the beach, the smell of saltwater and fresh cut grass deliciously joined the mix of the full air. No smog, no refinery residue, just luscious, humid air.
The Kewalo Basin was on a small peninsula that jutted out from a marina full of small fishing boats on one side and the Ala Moana park on the other. A giant Banyan tree filled the park across the boulevard with about an acre of shade and each morning, The Bus dropped our group off in front of the spot where some twenty islanders gathered each morning to practice slow motion tai chi. Amy led our small band of interns to the lab; a neat rectangular structure surrounded by 10 foot high plywood and cement walls. In the distance, popular sealife artist Wyland had painted a humpback whale mural on the side of a tall hotel. The whale wall stood out among the many high rise hotels of Waikiki Beach.
The dolphin language studies had focused on teaching two bottlenose dolphins, Tursiops truncatas, a gestural vocabulary (sign language) and a vocabulary of computer-generated whistles. These bottlenose dolphins, in their code of things and action 'words', would go through their separate but similar trials to see if they made sense out of grammatical syntax (sentences) created by moving noun/verb sequences around in novel combinations. These 'sentences' were short (usually subject-action-object) or simple yes/no answerable questions.
The usual routine at the lab was, after sorting twenty pounds of smelt, for one trainer to work with one fish bucket with one dolphin. As interns, one of my jobs was to work with one dolphin on her repertoire of behaviors while a post-grad trainer worked with the other on various language trials. The idea was to keep the 'free' dolphin from meddling with the ‘trial’ dolphin and muddying up the data. They really seemed to enjoy muddying up the data. During the one-on-one time, the dolphin I was 'playing' with would squeak, whistle, blow, chirp, echolocate... all seemingly directed toward me and what I was doing to amuse her. My typical human egocentrism, I soon found out.
I learned quickly that no one at the lab thought much of people who bought into the romantic claims of dolphin shamans or whale telepathy. Phoenix (the lazier of the two dolphins) and Akeakamai (her name was Hawaiian for “lover of wisdom”) were quick to help dismiss any idealistic visions based on their generally altruistic behavior and those amiable built-in dolphin smiles. After a few days, I knew that smile as the permanent mark of a trickster’s soul.
While healthy skepticism is necessary in trying to understand what non-human animals might be thinking, I can honestly say Iwitnessed something incredible during my internship. It was about a week after my arrival when Dr. Peter Tyack, a renowned cetologist from Wood’s Hole Oceanographic Lab in Massachusetts, came to visit with his new invention: the vocalites. He had been working on the problem of trying to understand dolphin vocalizations when there were more than one dolphin in the water. It was nearly impossible to tell which dolphin was “talking” at any particular moment. The vocalites were small, suction cup devices embedded with either a green or red L.E.D light. There were sensors attached to the L.E.D.s, which picked up sonar vibrations. When one of the lites was attached to a dolphin's melon, forward of their blowhole, it would light up whenever its wearer began to “speak.” We all thought this was a pretty neat invention.
So, the first trick was to get Phoenix and Akeakamai to tolerate wearing these little plastic 'hats' on their heads which, at first, turned out to be no big deal. However, the longer the suction cupped stayed on their heads, the more irritating the suck became and the two dolphins would thrash about until the sensitive devices were dislodged. Worse, both dolphins developed a knack for sending the sensitive devices into the nearest solid object.
During daylight hours, the bright Hawaiian sun made it near impossible to see the L.E.D., so the first real test had to wait until around sunset. I remember four of us sitting on the roof of one of the conference rooms, waiting for the sun to dip low over the inland hills; Adam, a graduate student at the University; Paul, a Ph.D. candidate working on his dissertation; and Joe, another intern from Colorado. We were all wearing our official lab uniform (bathing suits and flip flops) and taking notes while the dolphins swam around one of the two circular tanks. The clouds were turning pink and gold when Phoenix and Akea put on their vocalites. Their red and green lights flashing through the dusky water reminded me of Christmas.
“It’s called Kalikimaka.” Paul looked up from some avant guard doodling on his notepad. “Really, Teresa, get wid da program, sistah!” Paul was about as Hawaiian as a Bronx cheer. Still, the immersion in the native pidgin couldn’t help but rub off. I wondered if the dolphins, immersed in human interaction, had any humanese rubbed off on them. We settled back to watch the trial, with Amy gesturing to Akeakamai (red light) on the Diamond Head side of the tank and Dr. Herman working with Phoenix (green light) on the Makai – the ocean side – of the tank.
At first, it was just amusing to see Phoe and Akea circling around the blue-walled tank with green and red flashes separating out which one was Phoenix and which was Akea. I could hear the mutual sonar zzzzzzsssssszzzzzes and individual “signature” whistles of each dolphin, but now it was quite obvious which dolphin was making which buzz. This was interesting, but not very spectacular.
The trial went on for about 5 minutes or so with all of us taking notes and thinking that okay, this was a pretty interesting invention and yes, it could be a valuable research tool. The lights were going off here and there, red and then green, sometimes both at the same time, most time each dolphin lazily taking turns. The dolphins returned to their 'stations' in front of Lou and Amy and stood upright on their tails, looking up at their respective food-givers for their next set of directions. Tail walk? Double back flip? Belly rub? A Hug? Anything you asked of them in return for a fish.
Again, there was a good bit of vocalization going on (whistle-whistle-zzzzssszzzzz-whistle-sssszzzssss) but for the first time, it was evident that the chatter wasn't directed between dolphin and trainer. Instead, the lights flickered on and off in rapid succession, suddenly appearing to be a lightning-fast conversation going on between the two dolphins across the diameter of the tank. Even as Akea was looking at Dr. Herman while Phoenix was looking at Amy across the water on the Diamond Head side, the flashes of the green and red L.E.D.'s kept going off in a wickedly fast, conversational rhythm between the two cetaceans.
Red-green-red-green-red-green in the pattern of taking turns, just like in human discussion, only about ten times faster. I was absolutely floored at what seemed so obviously like intelligent communication, but I was yet a novice in ethology and linguistics, so it wasn't until I heard Paul, the Ph.D. wannabe, catch his breath and point to the tank.
"Woah! Did you see THAT?"
“Oh, yeah. Wow.” Adam stood up, writing quickly on his notepad. I knew I wasn't alone in seeing something amazing. He called down to the trainers.
“Lou! Did you catch that exchange?”
Dr. Herman looked up from his fish station. “What exchange?”
From his lower, tankside stand, he was unaware of the talk between the dolphins that, before this moment, just seemed like idle, swimming-around-the-tank, waiting-for-a-fish dolphin chatter. I looked over to Dr. Tyack, standing on the lanai of another observation post on the far side of the tank. Only his silhouette was visible, his facial expression indiscernible in the evening’s approach. He was listening to a hydrophone while taking notes but I saw him nodding his head. What was he thinking?
The dolphins grew weary of the 'hats' shortly after that and it became difficult to convince either one of them to keep the suction cup devices on their heads. Some behaviors just can’t be bought, not even with tempting but smelly silver smelt. We finished for the night and the four of us caught “The Bus” back to the university. We stopped a few blocks short, at “Moose McGillicuddy’s,” to down a couple of Mai Tais and Hawaiian Sunsets, eat some Mahi Mahi burgers and shuck down a stack of raw oysters. We talked. We hypothesized, and then we talked some more. I wish I could remember that conversation because I’m sure it was full of philosophical musings and debate about how little we knew about dolphins’ reality.
The next morning, I woke up in my dorm with a wicked headache. Dr. Tyack had already caught a taxi to the airport and was on his way back to Wood's Hole to tinker some more with his invention. We went back to gathering more data for the language cognition project; statistically valid data where anecdotes of what we thought we saw that night remained just that: stories. As Hawaiians say; “talk story,” and just too unscientific to note without further hypothesis testing and data collection. From then on, though, I felt for sure that Phoe and Akea had some language capability that we humans simply weren't able to interpret. So, we humans are left in our curious but clumsy ways are still trying to get these obviously intelligent and magnificent (and, let me tell you, very often sneaky) creatures to make meaning out of our linear, highly symbolic and non-sonar based communication system.
What do you think?