The Dolphin in the Mirror Read online

  I continued to try to build Circe's fragile confidence over the next few days but still wasn't able to do any serious work. "I've found a quiet moment to sit and write, finally," I noted in my log three days later. "The electricity is still stopped. I'm beginning to worry if it will ever come on again." I was encouraged that Circe seemed to be getting the hang of coming to station to be fed, but she was very picky about what part of the fish she would eat. She seemed to prefer the heads.

  Five days into the project, Circe and I had our first intimate moment, tentative on her part. I had noticed that after she ate, she seemed to like to have some time to herself, five to ten minutes. Then she would come over to me, without my having to call her. On this morning, she came very close to me, looked at me, and seemed to want me to touch her. I put my hand in the water. "Finally she touched," I wrote in my log that evening, "first with her mouth closed, putting the very tip of her head against my hand. Then she began gently pushing my hand up to the surface. At one point she kept opening her mouth under water." When working with dolphins or any other animals, pets included, you have to "read" their behavior, their body language. Circe's body was relaxed and her mouth was open in a calm manner as well—I read her signals as friendly and solicitous, and I acted on this interpretation. "I put my hand on her mouth to show her I trusted her. I could run my fingers along her closed mouth gently, and over her rostrum—& back. Finally I put my hand in her open mouth and it was gentle, relaxed and open. I tickled her tongue, she moved closer and closed her eyes." This little incident marked a turning point in our relationship.

  The lack of electricity at the facility was increasingly frustrating, not least because I had to haul buckets of warm water from my apartment, the only place that did have electricity, to thaw the fish for the dolphins. On February 1, more than a week after the outage began, the electricity was restored, "thanks to prayers—sympathetic magic—chanting—electricity dances, etc." At last, I could begin.

  I started informally. I wanted to give Circe more choice and control over getting objects that she desired. I first taught her that she could obtain a toy by simply touching it when I presented it to her at the side of the pool. She learned this quickly, and apparently getting the toys themselves was reinforcing.

  Then I conducted my first formal experiment: testing if a dolphin could visually discriminate between the white symbols. This was not a trivial question at the time; the everyday world of dolphins was thought to be dominated by sound, not sight, and, as I mentioned before, dolphins' echolocation abilities are exquisite. I therefore couldn't assume that dolphins could see well enough and discriminate well enough to use the visual symbols of the keyboard. Back in 1979 when I started with Circe, we did not know if they could. More than a decade earlier, at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, Winthrop Kellogg and Charles Rice had done some very preliminary studies on this kind of ability in dolphins, but they had gone only so far. Essentially, I was starting at square one. The first part of my doctoral research, therefore, was to discover whether dolphins could visually discriminate among simple shapes.

  I built a simple wood-and-metal apparatus that displayed a set of white, wooden visual forms: a circle, a cross, and a triangle. The forms were buoyant and backed with metal studs so that they could float and adhere to the apparatus. The apparatus consisted of a horizontal bar with a vertical bar coming down off each end. This was the setup for a match-to-sample task: one symbol (the sample) was displayed in the center of the horizontal bar, an identical (matching) symbol was on one vertical arm, and a different (nonmatching) symbol was on the other. A symbol was introduced as the sample, and Circe had to look at the sample and pick the correct match. Dolphins are adept at touching things with the tip of their rostrums (the front of their mouths), and Circe was no exception. The symbols were presented in air so she had to use vision, not echolocation, for the task.

  Using this setup, I rewarded Circe with a piece of fish when she touched the bottom circle, the correct match to the sample, but not when she chose the triangle. I switched the positions of the circle and triangle at the bottom from time to time, in what we call a pseudo-random pattern, to make sure she wasn't using the symbol's position or any predictable pattern to solve the problem. Other animals are as clever like us and look for useful strategies to solve problems, like choosing what's on the right because that's what worked last time or trying an alternating pattern such as right, then left, then right. Circe was an eager student, and she learned the procedure fairly quickly. So now I knew that, indeed, Circe was able to identify shapes visually and could compare and distinguish between different forms.

  The next procedure built on Circe's previous understanding of the match-to-sample task. The conditional-discrimination task was a bit more of a cognitive challenge, one that David Premack had pioneered with his chimpanzee Sarah. The task involved learning to associate a non-iconic visual symbol—that is, a symbol not visually similar to what it will be linked with—with a particular object; for example, a triangle with a toy ball. In this case, using the same match-to-sample apparatus as the first experiment, I put a ball in the top position on the keyboard, the sample position. In the two lower positions I had a triangle and a cross. For this test I rewarded Circe when she touched the triangle key, but not when she touched the cross; I did the same type of thing with the other objects. Again, Circe got it quickly, showing that, indeed, she had learned the concept of conditional discrimination. In the most parsimonious explanation and the driest technical description, what Circe learned was this: If the ball was in the sample position, then she should touch the triangle; if the ring was in the sample position, then she should touch the cross; and if the necklace float was in the sample position, then she should touch the circle. A more user-friendly description of Circe's newly acquired ability was that the triangle was associated with a ball. It is too much of a stretch to infer that in Circe's mind, the triangle was a "word" for ball, at least not in the way we understand and use words. But this was what I hoped my work would ultimately lead to, the development of an artificial language that humans and dolphins could use to communicate.

  I took Circe a step farther down this cognitive path with the third experiment, preference testing and free choice. First, I put the three toys—a ball, the necklace, and a ring—in the pool with her. I then sat by the pool for several days, notepad in hand, carefully recording how often she played with each of the toys. I wanted to know which one she preferred most. Ball was her favorite, followed by necklace, followed by ring. Most dolphins love to play with toys, but Circe was especially playful. She would push or carry the toys around the pool or toss them into the air, and often she tossed one of them to me. I tossed it right back, so this piece of work was essentially a game, one that strengthened the bond that was developing between us.

  The real challenge came in the next part of the study. Circe had learned a conditional association of a specific object with a specific symbol: the triangle with the ball, the circle with the necklace float, and the cross with the ring. So now we were all set to do the test and see if Circe would use the symbols to obtain toys and if the symbols she used would match her toy preferences. I put the three symbols on the keyboard, positioned them so she would have equal, easy access to all three positions, and then watched what she did. Would she touch the triangle more than the circle, and the circle more than the cross? This was new cognitive ground for dolphins, and Circe was a star. Given her free choice and control over the keyboard, she asked for her most preferred object most often, the next preferred object a bit less often, and the least preferred object least often. In scientific terms it was a beautiful linear correlation suggesting that Circe could ask for an object she wanted.

  Recently I was looking at one of my old notebooks from the lab in Paris, and I came across the proposal I had written for my future research plans. It was: "To create a third language or communication system to exchange information between dolphins, Tursiops truncatus, and h
umans, Homo sapiens." I couldn't help laughing as I read these lines. It is all very lofty and PhD-student-like, very earnest. You have to remember that I was deeply immersed in communication theory and cybernetics, a systems approach to communication. Very mechanistic in a way, looking at the different parts that interact in the system: a human, a dolphin, and a keyboard, which is the interface. "The human experimenter"—that would be me!—"will begin by establishing a relationship with the dolphins," the proposal continued, "establishing trust, and mapping out environment..." And so on.

  At the time, John Lilly expected he'd be able to teach dolphins to communicate with humans in English, which I considered to be unrealistic and less interesting than understanding their own forms of communication. While not as extreme as Lilly's notions, my proposal was definitely out there, even naive in its wide-eyed expectations. Nevertheless, in those months working with Circe during the late winter and through the summer of 1979, in the shadow of the majestic Pyrenees, I took the first steps down that ambitious road. I had my first real glimpse into the dolphin mind.

  But there was more than that. I had really bonded with Circe, and I think she had with me. I was always eager to see her, and she always greeted me with excitement when I approached the pool, rapidly swimming around, occasionally porpoising a few times, then coming to where I stood, eyes big and eager looking. I rubbed her head, and her belly when she offered it. I didn't go into the water with her, partly because it was very cold in the first months, and then because Hoss's presence made it potentially hazardous. But despite the distance between us, me on land and Circe in the water, a bond had been created and I was entangled with her. I worried about her future and I anticipated that my departure from her would be difficult.

  A few months later, I had to leave Port Barcares for good, to return to Paris and then the United States, and for the first time I experienced the emotional rawness of the loss of a very special relationship; a grieving, really. My time with Dal and Suwa in Florida two years earlier had been short, and in any case, their emotional allegiance had been to Betty, not me. Leaving them was relatively easy. So I wasn't prepared for the pain of saying goodbye to Circe, who had certainly enchanted me. I wasn't prepared for the agony of not being able to explain to her why I was leaving. I wasn't prepared for the searing feeling of guilt about abandoning her. I left, expecting I'd see her again one day. I never did.*

  ***

  Sometimes in science the most jaw-dropping insights come when you are not even asking a profound question. So it was with Circe and what I call the time-out story. The circumstances could hardly have been more mundane.

  You will remember that part of my deal in working at Monsieur Stone's marine zoo was that I would teach Circe to come to a particular spot at the side of the pool and stay at a particular location when being fed. Even smart animals need to be trained for such husbandry practices. But just a few weeks into this little training program, Circe gave me a glimpse into her mind that revealed just how very smart she was.

  I was feeding Circe Spanish mackerel; since they were too big for her to swallow whole, I cut the fish into three smaller sections: heads, middles, and tails. After only a few days, Circe had learned to come to the side of the pool and station (stay in position in front of me) while I fed her. I used basic operant-training techniques to teach her to eat the various sections of fish and to stay at station; that is, I rewarded her with fish and vocal praise for doing the right thing, approaching the side of the pool when given a specific hand signal and then staying in front of me. She had to learn not to leave station until I gave her a signal that meant the session was over. If she left prematurely, I had to communicate to her that it was the wrong thing to do, so I'd give her a time-out, just as parents use time-outs with their children to let them know they've done something wrong and to allow them time to think about it. I'd simply break social contact and move away, leaving her alone for a short while. Time-outs can be extremely brief; just stepping back or turning away for a moment can let an animal know that it has done something wrong, and the animal then has to wait a short time before it can obtain another reward. (Nowadays, time-outs are used less frequently with dolphins because they can lead to frustration on the part of the animals.)

  So, I used a time-out with Circe in the first days of teaching her to station in feeding sessions. I would back away from the side of the pool and just stand there looking at her for a few seconds to a few minutes. Then I would return and continue the session. Circe would always come right back to the side of the pool and wait for me to return. The time-out procedure worked well, and Circe soon learned to stay at station. Circe was a good eater, and she usually ate all the food offered; if she didn't want to eat all the fish, that was okay, and I interacted with her at station. But she had to stay with me until the end of the feeding period while the other dolphins were being fed.

  During feeding sessions in the first week, Circe readily ate the fish heads and sometimes the middles, but I noticed that she was spitting out the tails each time. I thought that maybe she didn't like the tails because of the spiny fins. So, trying to please her, I began cutting off the tail fins. It worked. She immediately ate all the trimmed tails! I remember laughing and thinking to myself, Circe is training me to cut her fish the way she likes it!

  It was two weeks after I first started using the time-out procedure, and everything was going quite well. I was learning about Circe's patterns of behavior. I noticed she was also frequently watching me as well. One day during a feeding I accidentally gave her an untrimmed tail. She immediately looked up at me, waved her head from side to side with wide-open eyes, and spat out the fish. Then she quickly left station, swam to the other side of the pool, and positioned herself vertically in the water. She stayed there against the opposite wall and just looked at me from across the pool. This vertical position was an unusual posture for her to maintain.

  I could hardly believe it. I felt that Circe was giving me a time-out! She stayed there for a short time, vertical, looking at me, and then returned to where I had been waiting at poolside. I continued the feeding, and she ate all the properly cut fish and never broke station again during the session.

  Did Circe really give me a time-out? Did she really intend to correct my behavior or let me know that I'd done something wrong, just as I had done with her? It felt like that to me. But, as a scientist, I knew that I needed more information to be sure. Impressive though it was, this one case was not enough. It was just an anecdote, and maybe I was reading too much into it.

  Circe's unusual behavior prompted me to do an experiment. I waited for a few days, during which time I continued to cut her fish as she liked it, and she ate all the fish and never left station. Then one day I deliberately offered her another untrimmed tail. But this time I planned it as an official experiment to test my idea. I had an idea, or hypothesis, and I set out to test it. This is the basic scientific method. And guess what: Circe gave me another time-out. Over the next weeks I repeated this procedure, six times in all, and got the time-out response on four of them.

  This is a powerful example of how communication develops between people, and between people and other animals. We all have cultural or species-specific signals that are used to transmit, receive, and share information with others. In social interactions, we observe and learn about others' patterns of behavior and signals. Communication is a social phenomenon, and all animals communicate. There are two basic tenets of communication theory: First, meaningful communication develops through social interactions. Communication is a dynamic transactional process of sending, receiving, exchanging, and interpreting signals; we interpret signals and messages based on our expectations, which are shaped by our past experiences. Second, there is no absolute meaning in messages—meaning resides in the individual's interpretation of messages. There's no way to know exactly what a word or signal means to another individual at any given time, but if the communication signals work pragmatically (practically) to serve a particu
lar function, participants will use signals to obtain certain results. So we communicate—it is a matter of developing a synchrony of behavior between two or more participants. Circe's use of the time-out was a superb example of how the behavior of two organisms (a human and a dolphin) becomes synchronized and meaningful to each through social interactions.

  It seemed to me that Circe understood that when I gave her a time-out, it meant that she had done something wrong. So when I did something that she considered wrong, giving her unwanted untrimmed fish, she used the same signal, a time-out, to communicate that to me. This was my first real insight into the depth of the intelligence of this remarkable and highly social species. You will hear a good deal about what is called theory of mind in the following pages. It means, very simply, that an individual is able to imagine the mind of another and understand how that other will behave. In the vernacular, one might say that the first individual is reading the mind of the second. Theory of mind is a highly sophisticated cognitive ability, one that is very rare in the animal world (humans and great apes have the ability). This time-out event with Circe demonstrated that she and—by extension—other dolphins are members of that elite club.

  I eventually included the time-out experiment as part of my doctoral thesis on dolphin communication.3 It was, to me, a pattern that communicated, a pattern that connects.

  3. In Search of the Dolphin Rosetta Stone

  IT ISN'T ALWAYS easy to know when a pregnant bottlenose dolphin is about to give birth. But I was going to find out, or so I hoped. It was late July 1983, a little less than a year since I'd set up a new research program at Marine World Africa U.S.A. in Redwood City, about forty minutes south of San Francisco. The three dolphins I observed were a somewhat unusual social group: two female Atlantic bottlenose dolphins, eighteen-year-old Terry and eight-year-old Spray (I soon renamed her Circe in honor of my first dolphin mentor, whom I still held dear), and a huge, older male Pacific bottlenose dolphin, Gordo.