The Dolphin in the Mirror Page 7

  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.

  ***

  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.

  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 fin
e. 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."