The Dolphin in the Mirror Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Photo

  Copyright

  Dedication

  List of Video Illustrations

  Prologue

  1. Minds in the Water

  2. First Insights

  3. In Search of the Dolphin Rosetta Stone

  4. Nonterrestrial Thinkers

  5. The Face in the Mirror

  6. Through the Looking Glass

  7. Cognitive Cousins

  8. Reflections on Dolphin Minds

  9. Into the Cove

  10. Ending the Long Loneliness

  Consortium of Marine Scientists and Zoo and Aquarium Professionals Call for an End to the Inhumane Dolphin Drives in Japan

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Footnotes

  Arion, the seventh century B.C.E. poet, is rescued from the sea by a dolphin

  in this illustration by Albrecht Dürer, ca. 1514.

  Copyright © 2011 by Diana Reiss

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,

  write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,

  215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Reiss, Diana.

  The dolphin in the mirror: exploring dolphin minds

  and saving dolphin lives / Diana Reiss.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-547-44572-4

  1. Dolphins—Psychology. 2. Dolphins—Conservation. I. Title.

  QL737.C432R457 2011

  599.53'15—dc23

  2011016064

  Book design by Melissa Lotfy

  Printed in the United States of America

  DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For the dolphins

  To my husband, Stuart, &

  my daughter, Morgan

  List of Video Illustrations

  The subjects below, from indicated chapters, can be viewed via streaming video at www.hmhbooks.com/dolphinmirror. Specific links to each one can be found in footnotes in the appropriate location of each chapter.

  Dolphins using keyboards (chapter 3)

  Dolphins using a learned whistle to represent an object (chapter 3)

  Dolphins blowing bubble rings and playing with them (chapter 4)

  Dolphins watching themselves in a mirror (chapter 5)

  Dolphin spinning and watching herself (chapter 6)

  Observing and recording wild dolphins in Bimini (chapter 7)

  Prologue

  SAVING HUMPHREY

  IN OCTOBER 1985, millions of people the world over followed the plight of Humphrey the humpback whale, a lost, stray, forty-ton leviathan who accidentally wandered into San Francisco Bay and swam far inland. Humpbacks were migrating south along the Pacific Coast, from Alaska to the warmer waters of Baja, Mexico, Hawaii, and beyond, but Humphrey was in danger of beaching and never making it back to the open ocean. At first, few paid attention. But as the days went by and Humphrey remained trapped, the headlines began to appear.

  One chilly afternoon, I was sitting on the edge of the dolphin pool at my research facility at Marine World Africa U.S.A. in Valejo, California, feeding two young bottlenose dolphins, Pan and Delphi, when my assistant got a call. The director of the California Marine Mammal Center (CMMC), the regional marine mammal rescue center, explained to my research assistant that it was urgent that she reach me. My assistant took over the feeding of the dolphins, and with my wet hands covered in fish scales I answered the phone. Peigin Barrett, the center director and a dear friend, was speaking quickly about the forty-five-foot-long humpback whale that had swum under the Golden Gate Bridge nearly two weeks before.

  Humpback whales are best known for their hauntingly beautiful songs that can travel great distances in the seas. Although the purpose of the songs remains unclear, researchers believe they have something to do with mating behavior, male-male competition, and perhaps social contact and individual identification. Imagine a population of whales spread out over hundreds of miles of ocean, their identity and relative location broadcast through song; effectively, they form an acoustic network. Humphrey had probably become separated from other humpback whales traveling south, and I wanted to help save him.

  I was a science adviser for the Marine Mammal Center. I also helped rescue marine mammals. Injured and stranded dolphins and small whales were brought to our facilities, and my research assistants and I worked with a veterinarian, trainers, and other volunteers in efforts to save them. Now we faced a new challenge: an on-site rescue. Whales had been observed in San Francisco Bay waters before, but they generally made brief, albeit well-publicized, tours and then exited uneventfully. Humphrey had turned unexpectedly and wandered inland, swimming through a series of connected bays and waterways, each one smaller than the last, until he was eighty miles from the open ocean! When Peigin called me, Humphrey was swimming back and forth in the Sacramento River and into ominously small, fingerlike sloughs near the small sleepy town of Rio Vista.

  ***

  The previous week, a rescue attempt using underwater whale calls had failed. Some of my colleagues, local marine mammal scientists, had conducted a playback experiment; that is, they'd played recordings of the calls of killer whales, a natural predator of humpback whales, hypothesizing that upon hearing such sounds, Humphrey would quickly depart. But it was no surprise when this approach failed. Previous playback attempts over the years using predator calls had failed to deter dolphins and whales from dangerous areas laced with fishing nets. These animals are pretty smart; apparently, they check out their environment, realize there is no true threat, and ignore the acoustic "scarecrows."

  By now, Humphrey had been in both brackish and fresh river water for a week and a half, with little or nothing to eat. The water changed the appearance of his skin. Buoyancy is quite different in fresh water than in salt water, and Humphrey had been forced to expend more energy with less food consumption. The clock was ticking. We had to get him back out to sea.

  A military helicopter picked up Peigin and me at San Francisco International airport at five that evening and took us to the Operation Humphrey headquarters, a makeshift control center at a U.S. Coast Guard station near Rio Vista.

  We landed in the darkness on the bank of the Sacramento River, and Peigin and I were immediately ushered into the bright fluorescent lights of Operation Humphrey headquarters. A meeting room there was already filled with federal staff from the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the U.S. Coast Guard, as well as CMMC staff and some local officials and townspeople.

  A rather stiff-necked NMFS agent whom I will call Dave took charge at the front of the room and began the meeting. He reviewed the past week and a half and Humphrey's travels farther and farther from salt water and food. But Dave stunned us when he expressed his overarching concern: If the whale died in the Sacramento River, his rotting carcass could present a health issue. Saving the whale was, it seemed, a secondary issue.

  Dave then brought forth and uncovered what looked like a medieval torture device: a barbed round object on a stick. It was a radio tag that he wanted to use to track Humphrey's location. Radio tracking was an excellent idea, but unfortunately the only tag available had to be attached to the whale by embedding the barbs into its blubber and muscle. The CMMC veterinarians and our rescue staff strongly opposed this idea. The whale was already compromised and stressed, and the barbs would only add
to his problems. Dave dropped the idea—at least for the time being.

  By the end of the meeting we'd arrived at a plan. The next day, with a flotilla of Coast Guard boats, a few riverboats used in the Vietnam War, and a myriad of small private boats owned and manned by local residents of Rio Vista, we would try to find the whale and form a boat barrier to herd Humphrey back to sea.

  We arrived at the dock the next morning and Peigin and I were assigned to the lead boat, the Bootlegger, used by some of the CMMC staff. It was a small fishing boat owned and operated by a local fisherman, Captain Jack Finneran, who'd kindly donated his time and vessel to help in the rescue. On the boat with us was another researcher who worked with the CMMC, Debbie Glockner-Ferrari, and her husband, Mark, a wildlife photographer. Debbie had been studying humpbacks in Hawaii and could determine the sex of these enormous animals while swimming with them. We set off upriver in search of Humphrey. En route I used a hydrophone (an underwater microphone) to obtain some recordings of normal noise levels in the river. As we moved northward under the Rio Vista Bridge, I noticed that the noise level was much greater in the waters on the north side of the bridge than on the south side. This finding would play an important role later in the rescue, though I had no inkling of it at the time. Then the boat's radio crackled: Humphrey had been spotted in a small slough near Sacramento. We raced off in the direction of the whale.

  I was absolutely stunned to see this huge whale in such a small body of water, flanked on both sides by grassy fields with grazing cows.

  Humphrey was an amazingly large yet graceful whale, a lost alien in this bizarre landscape. I could barely see him below the water line until he raised his blowhole out of the water for an explosive breath. We observed him slowly moving through the sloughs; to our surprise and continual frustration, Humphrey demonstrated an uncanny ability to disappear into these very small bodies of water. We tracked him by following his "footprints," smooth, round circles on the water's surface created by his tail movements. Yet at frequent intervals, the footprints would suddenly cease. It was weird; for hours, even aerial surveys couldn't spot him. Our small boats seemed ineffective at guiding him in any direction, no matter how coordinated we tried to be.

  At midday I called my colleague Dr. Kenneth Norris; considered by many to be the father of modern marine mammal research, he was the scientist who discovered echolocation in dolphins. A professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Ken was not too far away. He joined us for our next meeting at the Operation Humphrey headquarters. Ken urged us to employ a method called oikomi, in which a flotilla of small boats is positioned in an arc behind the whale, and then a person on each boat bangs with a hammer on a metal pipe that's partially submerged in the water. This creates a cacophony of syncopated sounds that the whale avoids. The sonic wall moves toward the whale, and the whale is herded forward. Ken provided clear instructions, and we called for small boats, pipes, hammers, and volunteers. Ironically, the oikomi technique is used by small groups of fishermen in Japan to herd dolphins to their deaths. For us, it was essential in saving one whale.

  ***

  Soon the dock in the little town of Rio Vista was brimming with local townspeople, CMMC volunteers, and government officials, all of them holding hammers and pipes provided by a local construction company. Local boat owners and fishermen generously volunteered their boats and skills, so we had our flotilla. Ken joined us on the water that day and directed us on how to stay in formation and hammer on our pipes.

  We found Humphrey circling slowly even farther north than before. He had passed under a very small overpass, named the Liberty Bridge, made for single vehicles and pedestrians. We stealthily moved north of Humphrey and carefully formed a tight arc behind him. We put our pipes in the water and began to hammer. The sound was like loud underwater wind chimes, a chaotic clamoring that at times created a syncopated rhythm of its own. The small arc of boats moved up behind the whale, and we herded him southward, closer and closer to the Liberty Bridge. The technique worked well, although Humphrey occasionally managed to turn around, slip through a "hole" in our sonic net, and briefly head north again.

  As we drew close to the bridge, the whale slowed down. He abruptly stopped within six feet of the bridge's wooden pilings. The pilings were about two feet in diameter and were spaced twelve to fifteen feet apart. Would Humphrey pass through them? He wasn't budging. We moved the Bootlegger into a lead position, ahead of the other boats, banged our pipes, and practically rode up onto the whale's tail in an effort to urge him under the bridge. He could easily have brought his enormous eighteen-foot-wide tail down on us hard if he'd wanted to. Humphrey didn't, but he held his ground. He rolled onto his side, raised his huge, fifteen-foot-long pectoral fin, and repeatedly slapped it on the water surface. The Latin name for the humpback whale is Megaptera novaeangliae; megaptera translates to "giant-winged." Humpbacks have the longest pectoral fins of all cetaceans. They often lift their fins and slap them on the water surface. The specific purpose of this signal is unknown, but we understood Humphrey that day: he had no intention of moving under the bridge. I watched him slap his fins in obvious agitation and protest and wondered, What is spooking him?

  We decided that the Coast Guard and NMFS would continue to monitor his movements while the rescue team met to figure out the next steps. As we stood on the riverbank and discussed the situation, I looked back at Humphrey. He was still swimming in the vicinity of the bridge. It was no surprise to me that the whale refused to move through the wooden pilings and under the bridge: marine mammals generally don't like to pass through narrow openings. I had seen this with the dolphins at my lab. We had to acclimate them slowly before they would move through gates or from one pool to another. Man-made passages are unnatural to dolphins and whales. They live in an unobstructed sea.

  Yet days before, Humphrey had swum through the pilings heading north. His refusal to do so now couldn't have been due to a lower water level, because we had purposely waited for high tide that day before attempting to herd him through.

  I tried to imagine the situation from the whale's point of view. Suddenly, I had a flash of intuition. To this day, I cannot explain it. I just suddenly knew that there was debris—perhaps some old rebar left over from when the bridge was constructed—reaching up like twisted metal fingers from the river bottom. What if the whale had injured himself during his previous passage and didn't wish to repeat the experience? I don't know why I thought this and I know it sounds far-fetched, but as I stood on the riverbank looking at this poor lost whale, I was convinced.

  Oftentimes, working with an individual animal, one gains an intuition about the species' general behavior. As suggested by the well-known ethologist Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, in human and animal interactions, subtle information can be conveyed and interpreted by both sides because "familiarity breeds interpretation." My familiarity with the behavior of dolphins specifically, and whales in general, may have led me to my intuitive glimpse. In any event, it seemed worth exploring. Peigin's eyes lit up at the idea, and she pulled me toward Dave.

  With great trepidation we presented the hypothesis and suggested that we check out the river bottom under the bridge with a ship's sonar. Dave said the idea was ridiculous and immediately rejected it. But luckily, at that point California state senator John Garamendi, a tall, elegant, and handsome figure, joined us in the discussion to see if he could help in any way. The senator listened thoughtfully to the idea and agreed that it was worth investigating. A very displeased Dave just shook his head and walked away. The results of a sonar scan proved my hunch correct: old rebar was indeed sticking up from the bottom of the slough under the bridge. That night, a construction crew dredged and removed it.

  At eight o'clock the next morning, the small flotilla reassembled and arced the boats to guide Humphrey. We waited for high tide and then tried once again to get the whale to pass under the bridge. This time, Peigin and I were observing the action from the bridge, and I tried to record any vocaliz
ations the whale produced. I didn't want Humphrey to see us on the bridge—it might spook him—so we stayed on its extreme left side, lying on our stomachs on the cool asphalt road. I had my hydrophone dangling below me in the water, and I monitored my recording equipment for sound levels and listened through my headset for vocal signals from Humphrey. Before the din of the oikomi banging commenced, I heard a few plaintive-sounding calls from Humphrey. I had no idea what the low-frequency, resonant hurumphs meant.

  Then I observed Humphrey moving his head from left to right and back again in a scanning motion. I heard what sounded like individual clicks. This was extremely interesting to me because it suggested that humpback whales might use echolocation—biological sonar—to orient themselves, navigate, and detect objects in their environment. (At the time, there had been only one report, by my colleague Hal Whitehead, that suggested the possible use of echolocation by a humpback whale; that case had involved a whale that was trapped in ice.) A subsequent analysis of the clicks at Ken Norris's lab could not confirm that all of the clicks were produced by Humphrey; some of them might have been made by the boats' changing gears. However, some researchers have since suggested that certain whales use low-frequency, repeated sounds as a rudimentary form of echo-ranging. The question still lingers.

  It was high tide, and the oikomi band began. At first, Humphrey didn't budge, but then he slowly edged forward and stuck his head between the pilings. The boats slowly moved forward behind him. Humphrey proceeded halfway through the pilings and then just stopped. He began to rock his torso from left to right. It appeared that he was stuck, his gigantic pectoral fins wedged close to his sides between the vertical bars. Suddenly, with my stomach pressed to the roadway, I had a sickening feeling. The road below me shook from side to side as Humphrey tried to free himself from the pilings that bound him. Peigin shot me a look as we both imagined the entire bridge collapsing. But we stayed and watched, terrified for Humphrey and for ourselves. Miraculously, with one more shake, Humphrey wiggled free and was through. Humphrey exhaled an explosive blow of rainbowed misty air and then quickly inhaled. I mirrored his behavior in reverse, inhaling deeply and then quickly releasing an explosive breath in relief.