The Dolphin in the Mirror Read online

  The majestic Golden Gate Bridge was the site of the most amazing experience in the rescue. We approached in the late afternoon on November 4, just as the fog began rolling in from the sea, blanketing San Francisco. We entered San Francisco Bay, and I looked across it to the pyramid-shaped Transamerica building in the city, its apex sunlit and shining like a welcoming beacon. We were almost home. The Bootlegger moved closer to the Golden Gate Bridge, and Humphrey was no longer following us but swimming about twenty to sixty feet off the boat's starboard side. We were not in the lead any longer. Instead, we were accompanying each other. The large flotilla of boats moved in behind us, creating the familiar arc, gently encouraging Humphrey forward. We stopped broadcasting the sounds because Humphrey looked like he was well on his way back home now.

  It wasn't until we were close to the Golden Gate Bridge that I looked up and saw that all the traffic had come to a stop. Multitudes of people were standing on the bridge, waving and cheering Humphrey on. The only mechanical sound I heard was the buzzing from swarms of news helicopters overhead.

  I asked the boats in the flotilla to stay back and let us go under the bridge alone with Humphrey. Because the waters near the bridge were very choppy, we had to take a few minutes to pull up the underwater speaker. Humphrey stayed beside us, as if waiting.

  I looked over at Humphrey next to us as we started to pass under the bridge. The Bootlegger moved slowly and passed through, but Humphrey didn't. He was still on the bay side of the bridge—just floating there. So we circled back and positioned the boat next to him. Again we tried, and again we went under the bridge alone. But on the third try, at 4:36 P.M., Humphrey joined us and passed under the bridge as the crowd cheered.

  Our flotilla followed us closely, and once they were all on the other side of the bridge, the other boats quickly encircled the Bootlegger. From a bird's-eye view, our small boat must have looked like the bull's-eye in the center of a dartboard. Silently, all of us aboard the boats watched Humphrey swim away, farther and farther westward, finally home.

  But it wasn't over. He was swimming in the wrong direction! He was heading north, taking him ever farther away from his annual winter migration southward. I asked the boats to remain in the circle formation but to put their motors into neutral. We looked out in all directions for any sign of the whale, but he had once again vanished. We waited five minutes—nothing. Ten minutes—nothing. Then, suddenly, Humphrey reappeared alongside the Bootlegger! He had somehow passed unseen under all the other boats and found us. With apparent deliberation, he swam slowly toward our boat. We all waited and watched in silence. He stopped, pressed his belly against the side of our boat, looked up at us for several long seconds, and then swam off, southward this time.

  It's hard to describe the force of emotion that I felt as I looked down at Humphrey. Aside from when he was beached, I had seen only his back and his blowhole, a huge dark moving mass behind us. But now he had made contact, body contact and eye contact, that evoked a visceral reaction, a knowing, a real connection that linked us. Two very different species, separated by ninety-five million years of evolution, looking at each other in a way that made a connection. As I write these words I reexperience the raw emotion. How can I explain what it is like to be enchanted by a whale?

  ***

  Humphrey was spotted the following year in the Farallon Islands with other humpback whales. In 1990, he was back in San Francisco Bay. This time he beached himself on the bank near Candlestick Park and once again had to be escorted back out to sea. It was during this rescue that it was discovered that Humphrey was actually a female! After that, I waited and hoped for sightings, increasingly worried about this whale with whom I had formed such a strong bond. A few years later I received the very sad news that Humphrey had died. Numerous unanswered questions remained after our encounter with this elusive visitor who moved us in so many ways.

  ***

  In the more than two decades that have passed since Humphrey's misadventure, scientists' understanding and appreciation of the character and capabilities of minds other than our own species' has been dramatically transformed. Prior to the 1950s, it was commonly held that all creatures other than humans were mere unthinking automatons, devoid of intentionality and devoid of any spark of self-awareness. Researchers studying animals' ability to communicate with humans were expected to keep the animals at arm's length, literally and figuratively. Developing a relationship with one's subject of study was unacceptable because it was believed that subtle cues might influence both the animal's behavior and the scientist's interpretation of that behavior. The perils of anthropomorphizing were lurking everywhere, it was said, and were to be avoided. There were still strong echoes of this stance in the 1980s.

  Yet at the same time, since the 1960s there has been a growing awareness and concern for the plight of whales. After the discovery in the early 1970s of the hauntingly beautiful songs of the humpback whale, our appreciation of them soared and probably contributed to achieving a successful yet all too brief moratorium on whaling by the International Whaling Commission.

  People rally to save individuals. They seem to want to help individuals more than they want to help entire populations. This was the case with Humphrey. And yet, whole populations of humpbacks, made up of individual whales just like Humphrey, are still hunted in many parts of the world. The problem is that the idea of a population is abstract, whereas one or two individuals that we can see and even name become real to us. Real individuals can experience pain, fear, and suffering, and we want to help. I have dedicated my career to understanding dolphins—one species of small whale, that is—and to rescuing them. This book summarizes my life's work, along with the research of others and dolphin lore through the ages, in order to make a bold claim: Dolphins are among the smartest creatures on the planet—fully conscious, creative, and highly communicative, with an intelligence rare in nature. And yet, despite this and the fact that many people and entire cultures have loved and revered dolphins for centuries, mankind is slaughtering dolphins at astonishing rates.

  We would never slaughter chimps, and there are laws against slaughtering elephants throughout Africa and Asia. Yet their sentient, empathetic cousins in the ocean are subject to mass killings. My hope is that everyone who reads this book will be motivated to support increased protection of dolphins and whales globally.

  1. Minds in the Water

  The hunting of dolphins is immoral, and that man can no more draw nigh to the gods ... or touch their altars with clean hands, but pollutes those who share the same roof with him, who willingly devises destruction for the dolphins. For equally with human slaughter the gods abhor the deathly doom of the monarchs of the deep.

  —OPPIAN, Greek poet, in Halieutica, approx. 200 C.E.

  TEN YEARS BEFORE my close encounter with Humphrey, the idea of studying dolphins (much less whales) was absolutely not in my life plan. As a young child, I had felt very connected to animals, had an innate compassion for them, it's true. I had a dog, Rusty, and a younger brother, Bob, and although I loved my brother dearly I now sheepishly have to admit that in some ways I always felt closer to my dog. I really believed I could hear him thinking and that we shared a very direct form of communication that I didn't have with my brother. I can only imagine now that I was very attuned to Rusty's body language, and my childhood fantasies filled in the rest. One of my earliest childhood memories is of a neighbor tidying up her yard and accidentally disturbing a nest of wild rabbits near our house. I felt it was my job to find all the baby rabbits and the mother, and take care of them. I was a born animal rescuer. Injured birds. Injured frogs. Injured animals of any kind. Little Diana of Assisi was always there to make things right.

  Later, I toyed with the idea of becoming a vet, as many kids who love animals do. I also had a talent for art, however, and so after high school I attended Moore College of Art in Philadelphia. Eventually, I pursued a career in theatrical set design and I began an MFA program in theater and communication
at Temple University. It was then that I met, worked with, and married Stuart Firestein, the director of an experimental theater company in Philadelphia where I was a set designer for several years.

  But even as I was building theaterscapes, I had a strong pull toward science. One day, I had an epiphany under the most bizarre of circumstances. Stuart and I were participating in an actors' workshop in Poland run by the famed Polish counterculture director Jerzy Grotowski; I'd been quite honored to be invited to take part in it, especially given my limited acting experience. I found myself in a darkened warehouse in Wroclaw, Poland, in the company of about two dozen actors, most of whom spoke no English. As part of an experimental exercise, we were making animal sounds in the dim building. I was thinking to myself, This is really interesting. I can't speak to these people because I don't know their language and they don't know mine, but we are communicating with one another by making animal calls across the darkness. I cannot explain it now, nor could I at the time, but I experienced a powerful intuition at that instant, as if a voice were saying to me, This is not right; you have got to get back to science. When I told Stuart, "I'm out of here, I want to work with animals," he thought I was completely crazy.*

  Crazy or not, I applied to the Speech and Communications Department at Temple University and was accepted into a PhD program in bioacoustics, a cross-disciplinary field that combines biology and acoustics. I had to scramble to take some basic science courses before I could embark on a graduate program, which I was fortunate to be able to fashion for myself around the science of analyzing animal calls, language development, symbolic behavior, animal behavior, cognitive psychology, and communication theory. I wanted to be equipped with skills to understand the communication and behavior of other minds, animal minds. But even then, dolphins were not in the picture for me. That would require one of those chance events many of us experience once in a great while, events of no great inherent significance but that have the effect of changing our lives.

  It was a rainy Sunday afternoon in the Germantown section of Philadelphia in the late winter of 1976, perfect for settling down for a couple of hours of serious reading of the New York Times. I was now a doctoral student in my first year of graduate school. Stuart and I were living in an old pseudo-Tudor apartment building in a lovely wooded neighborhood. Freezing winter rain was running down the mullioned windows, distorting the images of the trees outside so that they looked like part of an impressionist painting. The apartment was sparsely furnished with props from retired stage sets I had designed. I was sitting at my dark mahogany carved desk, a prop from the show Mark Twain Tonight! Prominently displayed in the International News section of the Times was an article on the killing of whales and dolphins, accompanied by a big photograph. It was as if I were somehow primed for that moment, because I read every word avidly, turned to Stuart, and said, "It's terrible that these animals are being killed off, and we know so little about them." I wrote much the same sentiment in a diary I kept for only the most important moments in my life.

  Public awareness of the precarious plight of many species of whale was growing at the time, and the efforts of the International Whaling Commission were much in the news. Roger Payne and Scott McVay had published a landmark paper in Science magazine in 1971 reporting that humpback whales sang songs with very complex structures, similar to classical music pieces, with units, phrases, and themes. They released an album of the humpbacks' eerily moving songs to tremendous interest and acclaim. The beauty of their songs touched me, but I was far from the science of it all. Philadelphia had an aquarium called Aquarama, which had several dolphins on display. I had never visited it growing up and had had no desire to go there. I had no interest in watching dolphins jump through hoops.

  I had never been a fan of the Flipper television series, which had had a tremendous following in the mid- to late 1960s. The Flipper character was a bottlenose dolphin (played by five female dolphins, and the occasional male for a particular trick) who, the story line went, lived with Porter Ricks, a warden in the fictional Coral Key Park and Marine Preserve in the Florida Keys. Week after week, Flipper helped Ricks protect the park and its wildlife and aided in tracking down and capturing various miscreants who were up to no good there. I disliked the program, thought it was stupid. I preferred Lassie.

  And yet, when I read the Times article that rainy Sunday afternoon, my attention was immediately arrested. As I said, it was as if I had been primed for that moment, but in a way that was not at all obvious to me then and still isn't now. I instantly became ravenous for anything and everything that had been written about dolphins. I scoured the scientific literature and found many papers on dolphin brain anatomy and communication, and I consumed John Lilly's popular-press books on his observations and speculations, The Mind of the Dolphin, Man and Dolphin, and others.

  Lilly was an American neuroscientist, philosopher, inventor, and writer, a man who delighted in being seen as both a pioneering scientist and a maverick. In the 1960s and early 1970s, he was a member of the California counterculture of scientists, mystics, and thinkers, an occasional acquaintance of the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary, and aware of the psychopharmaceuticals that implied. He was a larger-than-life character, and his research on dolphin minds was driven by a desire to understand consciousness, an ambitious quest that has occupied scientists and philosophers for millennia. His unorthodox approach, and his conviction that the dolphin mind was in some ways quasi-human—that we were destined to communicate and understand each other—elevated dolphins to almost mythical status in the eyes of his followers. There were many of them.

  ***

  In addition to doing pioneering scientific work, Lilly single-handedly created a new mythology of dolphins that went far beyond science. In 1975 Lilly put together a compilation of his earlier books and papers in a volume entitled Lilly on Dolphins—Humans of the Sea. The concept of humans of the sea may seem a stretch and perhaps anthropomorphic in the extreme, but it was certainly not the first time this idea was put forth. The phrase humans of the sea had been bestowed on dolphins by the Maori in New Zealand; John Lilly was merely the latest in a long line of dolphin mythologizers.

  Humans and dolphins could hardly be more different in our physical forms and in the worlds we inhabit. And as mammals, our two species could hardly be more distant from each other, being separated by a gulf of ninety-five million years of evolutionary time. We humans are bipedal primates equipped with dexterous hands and guided through a terrestrial environment principally by an adequate, though not superior, visual ability. Dolphins have the hydrodynamic form of fish (no arms, no legs), and they navigate through their aquatic world guided by supersensitive sonar. And yet, from the earliest records of civilization, humans have felt a deep affinity with dolphins.

  We see a reverence for these monarchs of the deep in origin myths from Australasia to North America, from Europe to South America, and across Asia. In some of these ancient stories, humans are said to have arisen from dolphins, while in others dolphins are the mythical progeny of humans. Indeed, stories of dolphins being transformed into humans, in origin myths and in other circumstances, are a recurrent theme in cetacean mythology. Arguably, no animal plays a greater role in human mythology and lore than dolphins.

  Human esteem for dolphins reached its zenith in ancient Greece, where dolphins were viewed as being closer to the gods than any other creature, half divine themselves, and messengers between the human and divine realms. "Diviner than the Dolphin is nothing yet created," wrote Oppian in 200 C.E., "for indeed they were aforetime men and lived in cities along with mortals." Killing a dolphin in these times was therefore a sacrilege against the gods and was punishable by death. (By contrast, slaves could be killed with impunity.) Images of dolphins—on coins, seals, bronze statues, floor and wall mosaics, and vases—were as much a part of the iconography of Greek culture as marble temples and philosophers in white togas. A common image is of a boy, sometimes resembling Apollo, astride a dolp
hin and playing a lyre, symbolic of bringing wisdom and the arts of civilization from the sea to the land.

  Apollo, one of the more powerful deities in the Greek pantheon, is famous for establishing the oracle of Delphi on Mount Parnassus. The story of how this came about has many versions, as is common in Greek (and Roman) mythology. As the sun god, Apollo was also the epitome of music, poetry, beauty, youthfulness, and grace. Because he loved humanity, he decided he would bestow upon the Earth his wisdom and insights, which would be imparted through his oracle at Delphi.

  To this end, one evening Apollo made himself visible to a group of Cretan businessmen sailing in the Gulf of Corinth. He assumed the form of a dolphin, leaped high above their ship, landed on its deck, and changed into the form of a golden youth. He announced to the astonished and fearful group, "Behold, I am Apollo Delphinus!" He told them of his grand plan, and soon the ship's sails filled with wind, the rudder set a new course of its own accord, and the ship surged forth with steadfast purpose. It was clear to the men that there was something greater than mere mortals at work. Apollo resumed the form of a dolphin for the rest of the journey and lay regally shimmering on the deck.

  Soon the ship arrived at a port on the southwestern spur of Mount Parnassus. The men disembarked, and Apollo, once again a golden youth, led them to the temple of the oracle of Python, where they were met by Pythia, the chief priestess of a sisterhood that had maintained the oracle for many years. Pythia was displeased at the aggressive intrusion, and she challenged Apollo to a duel. Apollo prevailed, but rather than killing her, as was his right, he honored her for her bravery and for the years she and her sisters had tended the temple. He declared that henceforth, Pythia and her sisters would take on a new role: the voices of the new oracle of Delphi. Inscribed on the walls of the Temple of Apollo at sacred Delphi were words of righteousness and wisdom, the most famous of which was Know Thyself.