by Theo Marais
He SMSs her, ‘missing you lets live for today’, and she replies, ‘make my day’, so 10 minutes later, he is on the way there.
They are at the mouth of the Matjes river again, but this time the sky has fallen into mist all around them. The huge rocks near Cathedral Rock swirl in and out of view.
Mariada says, “You think I may disappear, so let me disappear and you try to find me after counting slowly to 100. OK?”
Alex faces the rock and starts to count as she walks backwards towards the sea, where her steps disappear in the shallow water. She walks towards the far side of the rock and then runs around it to the side near where she started. She peeps over the top and sees him looking at her footprints going towards him, so he traces them back for a while. But then he stops, laughs and shakes his head and follows them to the sea. He looks left and right, correctly chooses left and then disappears behind the rock. She quickly goes around to the place where they started and sits down casually. Not long after, he comes jogging around the corner and nearly falls over her.
“What?!” he says.
“I had a swim and then I came straight back here. Didn’t you see me?” she says nonchalantly. They both burst out laughing like lunatics and she runs off screaming, closely followed by him, into the sea. They both disappear but you can still hear them splashing and laughing.
It is a few days later and the weather is wonderful again, with the sea deep blue and sparkling. They are walking around Robberg peninsula and visit the cave there, then move on to Nelson Bay shelter, another famous site. They start discussing their relationship.
Mariada says, “We live in the here and now present and at this moment I have deep feelings for you and would like to become even closer. But you must also know that if I were to be called to go back into space, I would go, with or without you. I would miss you terribly but I’ve left Earth before and I would do it again. Do you accept that, dear Alex?”
“Of course I do, Ada, and I would support you even if it means the end of us being together.
Actually, I have a confession to make, something I haven’t told you about because it only happened recently. I have applied for the Earth 2 mission which, as you know, proposes to send people there in a few years’ time, when that sort of travel becomes possible and safe, which is looking likely now. My research here seems to have reached a peak and, while I want to wind down a little, I also long for a new challenge. I made up my mind a few weeks ago after I had a life-changing experience, when I nearly drowned.
I was swimming at Keurbooms at second beach, beyond the restaurant, where we have swum so many times. But that day I shouldn’t have swum there as it was Spring high tide, with some big waves at times. But the water was crystal clear and just the right temperature between cool and warm, so I went in anyway. I would stay within my depth of standing comfortably and just dunk myself a few times. Well, it was great and I enjoyed diving under each wave that came in, then standing again before diving under the next one, until I felt OK, enough, time to get out now.
Just then, a bigger than usual wave came in, a dumper that had a washing machine effect on the currents behind it. Before I could try to go towards the shore, I found myself powerless to avoid being sucked into deeper water by the retreating backwash of the wave.
I was coughing up some water when the next wave hit me and, not having taken a breath first, I soon found I was choking for air. Not sure whether I was upside-down or not, I must have inhaled more water. I started to panic as I wasn’t even sure if I should try to swim for the shore or rather to swim further out, beyond the waves, hoping a current would take me around and back to shore somewhere.
I chose the latter but I was getting exhausted and could sense that I wouldn’t be able to keep going much longer. I looked towards the shore but it seemed far away and totally deserted, so it would have been a waste of energy to shout for help. After that, I remember giving up trying to swim and just floating, letting go of all care and anxiety about what may happen to me, going peacefully into the unknown around and inside me. I was surrounded by pure love with no intruding thoughts in my head. I felt so at one with the water that I could leave my body and see myself floating there.
I was being drawn towards a very bright light, not blinding, but warm and comforting.
I saw my deceased grandparents, relatives and close friends who could communicate with me without words, like telepathy I suppose. Some were welcoming but others seemed to be telling me to go back, it was not my time. Strangely enough, one was a dolphin, saying it would see me later, in space.
I found that I was experiencing, at lightning-fast speed, all the main events of my life, feelings, thoughts and relationships. I could even see and feel the effects and repercussions of my actions on others, and so I was able to judge myself as to how ethically or not I had lived my life.
I had a sense that this was the ‘hell’ we imagine if we feel extreme guilt and shame.
Just then, a power, something like my parents and loving spirits combined, confronted me and told me to ‘go back now !’
I felt a huge jolt, like an electric shock, and when I opened my eyes I found I was in one of those little gullies near the restaurant, and I was able to dog-paddle and crawl to the shallows and beach. I lay there coughing and retching the last of the water from my lungs, too weak to cry properly, as I felt my whole being flooding with tears of thankfulness, not only that I was alive, but also for the revelation I had had and still feel deeply now. And for you being a part of my life, Ada.
I have started feeling confident that somehow we can both have our careers and have each other.
I have had a verse from a song by The Incredible String Band, called Painting Box, in my head for a week now. Would you like to hear it? OK then.
‘The purple sail above me catches all the strength of Summer,
Fishes stop and ask me where I’m bound.
I smile and shake my head and say my little ship is sinking,
But I kind of like the sea that I’m on and I don’t mind to drown.”
Alex and Mariada are at The Heads in Knysna.
He finally tells her, “I heard from Earth 2 today. It’s hard to believe that I am telling you that I’m going into deep space without you. When they asked me about that, about you, I mean, I told them that you would make the same choice, to go. So that’s that. But I will always love you, Ada.”
A few weeks later, Mariada and Alex are at Storms River Mouth, standing on the foot-bridge across the river.
She finally tells him with a huge grin, “I also heard from Earth 2, today. And you won’t believe what they asked me to do!”
CHAPTER 3
It is 2044 and Alexander Zhivago, the 60 year old Marine Bio-Linguist at Plettenberg Bay, is giving a talk to the International Marine Institute at a conference in Cape Town, on ‘The history of decoding cetacean communication.’ Behind him, a giant screen shows visuals relating to what he describes.
“I have given many talks at schools recently, and it’s very pleasing to see that children often ask questions that are radical — they get to the root of the issue. And so today I will start each section of information with a radical question or two that children have asked.
Are cetaceans as old as dinosaurs, and are they as intelligent as humans? No, they are not quite as old, but they came relatively soon after dinosaurs, and before humans. About 70 million years ago, the terrestrial ancestors of whales and dolphins re-entered the ocean where life originally began. About 30 million years ago, cetaceans evolved brains the present size of the human brain, which we have had for only about 100 000 years.
The main conditions for human intelligence — a large brain, a convoluted cerebral cortex, a complex system of social interaction and communication — may be greatly exceeded by cetaceans.
How long do whales and dolphins live, do they have families and how do they talk to each other?
Whales form stable, matrilineal groups, some offspring staying wi
th their mothers for life, and live for 50 to 80 years, like humans do. Groupings of extended families form clans or bands, with common calls, something like our dialects.
Sounds, made in water and air, consist of a blow, moan, growl, burp, wheeze, groan, bellow, grunt, yelp and snort, amongst others. The male has ‘songs’, used for communication, for fun, sometimes for mating, and probably also in following migratory routes.
Dolphins use mainly whistles and clicks, the whistles using a narrow FM band of signals for communication, and the clicks on a broad band of pulses for echo-location. They have unique ‘signature’ whistles, seemingly to identify and call each other, a slight variation of the mother’s call and is developed early.
Whales express bursts of air from as low as 20 Hz up to 9000 Hz in frequency, and at 100 to 180 dB in volume, in their songs.
The notes are in phrases which are repeated, before the next phrase follows, a phrase sequence forming a theme, and there being five to eight themes per song.
They can repeat a song exactly, much later, even when the song was more than half an hour long, and they can change the song in methodical ways, at varying times. The songs can be sent over huge distances, especially at the level of the deep sound channel, about one kilometre deep.
Dolphins can redirect the attention of another dolphin by using an acoustic ‘flashlight’, which is like pointing to indicate something. They can learn human sign language, including a long sentence of four or five instructions, and can understand chronological order. They can categorise objects through visual and acoustic discrimination and matching.
In an experiment, they took the same time as humans to learn what was required, which was to produce novel behaviour, and clearly showed self-awareness.
How do you learn whale and dolphin languages, and when will we be able to talk to them?
Cracking the codes of cetacean languages and communications has been an arduous process. As dolphins have lived in captivity in dolphinaria for many decades, and as we have formulated increasingly sophisticated theories about the content of their communications, we have had a much better idea of the meanings of dolphin sounds than of whale sounds.
For example, if a single captive dolphin in a group is instructed to do something, whether verbally or in sign language, it tends to repeat or pass on that instruction to the other dolphins in ‘delphinese’, enabling us to make an educated guess about the meanings of the sounds used. We could then look for these sounds in other communications and see if they mean the same things, thus gradually building up a vocabulary.
While dolphins can roughly copy some human sounds and understand the meanings of the words they form, and therefore they can converse with us to a limited extent, the converse is usually not true — our attempts to copy dolphin sounds do not get us too far, as the dolphins usually greet these attempts with contempt, judging by the snorting and spitting sounds that follow.
This difference in ability to copy sounds and words led some in the past to believe that, instead of us battling to learn delphinese and whale language, we should rather concentrate on captive dolphins and teach them to communicate with us in English. Maybe then they could teach us dolphin language and thinking, and maybe also how to understand whales.
However, Robert Stenuit, in ‘The Dolphin, Cousin to Man’ (1968), expressed it succinctly:
“All researchers today agree that the future of cetacean sonar research does not lie in the tanks of institutions.
To make a serious study of marine mammals it is necessary to study them in their natural environment, in the sea. In captivity animals do not use their total normal vocabulary nor the full reach of their sonar; moreover, the echoes sent back by the walls of the tanks confuse the recordings.”
It must be noted that dolphins, while having a larynx, have no vocal cords, flexible tongue or lips as we have for speech, so they cannot correctly reproduce human sounds. However, they have a range of sound frequencies so wide that we need sophisticated electronic equipment to record and analyse them for us.
So, research became more focused on collecting high-quality data with cameras and hydrophone and air sound recorders to capture the images and sounds of passing dolphins. Boats were and still are used as they can get close enough for you to get clear recordings, but the engine noise and the fact that you are intruding in the dolphins’ space could easily change their natural behaviour. To counter this, hydrophones, which are under-water microphones, have been placed in areas where cetaceans often visit or pass by. If you can have simultaneous sightings with clear images to accurately identify individuals, you can then link the sounds recorded to specific subjects.
Some studies have used trained dolphins who co-operate with researchers in the open sea and may interact with other dolphins.
The U.S. Navy has been doing this off the Bahamas in a specially-equipped boat called Sea Hunter. Some subjects have been tagged, in order for us to follow their movements and know exactly where they are, and some have even had microphones and cameras implanted, giving continuous recordings for the researchers.
What did we do with all this information?
Endless records of whale and dolphin sounds were collected in oceans all over the world and at different times of the year, and then analysed, classified and stored. Some studies were longitudinal, seeing how sounds and behaviour of individuals and groups changed over time; and some were cross-sectional, comparing different groups at the same times.
In the early 2020s, breakthroughs started happening in decoding cetacean language and communication.
Research into whale and dolphin sounds showed that they use
3D imagery in much of their communications, making a type of sono-pictorial or quasi-holographic language. Sound-pictures can be shown in a rapid sequence, something like the individual frames of a film. This language could convey subtleties even more complex than our own, rather one-dimensional, human languages.
Whale and dolphin researchers and watchers around the world were reporting a propensity by some, especially older matriarchs and lone males, to come closer to boats and show more interest than usual, with more eye-contact and sounds produced, often almost human sounds. This gave researchers new hope of progress in communicating with cetaceans.”
CHAPTER 4
“What are the latest developments in understanding and communicating with cetaceans?
After closer contact between humans and cetaceans, many people became very excited, and money from sponsors poured in as never before.
Marine linguists converged on a few notable spots for cetacean contacts all over the world, from California to Costa Rica, Argentina to Ireland, South Africa to Australia, and Samoa to Japan. In the Southern hemisphere, late Winter to early Summer is a time when most whales do not feed or have to go anywhere in particular, other than for some to calve or mate, so they have some ‘free time’. One of those spots was in my home-town of Plettenberg Bay, a well-sheltered sweep of curving shoreline and well away from the underwater noise of the shipping lanes and fishing boats.
We had hydrophones and a reliable network of spotters on a stretch of coastline about 150 kilometres long, from Knysna to Robberg, ‘Plett’, Keurboomstrand, Nature’s Valley and Storm’s River.
Have I ever made friends with a whale or dolphin, and what type of personality (or ‘dolphinality’) did it have?
I have always found cetaceans friendly when the situation is right and they don’t feel threatened.
While we monitored all recordings closely, we also went out in boats, and found that whales and dolphins were coming closer as they got to know us better. We had already learned some basic communication skills, including having our own ‘signature calls’, and had established relationships with some of the ‘regulars’. A whale, an old loner male whom I had come across many times and with whom I had talked before, known as Aristotle, was the first to arrive. He was in good spirits and seemed deeply appreciative that I was there. He related directly to me and
looked me straight in the eye at all times, seeming to convey subtle nuances of expression by moving his eyeball or pupil slightly as he made each sound. He encouraged me to talk a lot and listened intently as I spoke, his eyeball flickering in rhythm with my speech.
If I stopped, he would imitate my last few words in urgent tones, as if to spur me on again. But he also realised that I had an understanding of whale language and would use sounds that I understood, and would teach me a few new expressions, which I would record and store in the memory of the whale voice synthesiser which we used for talking ‘Whalesh’.
We were also fortunate to have with us a well-known and gifted animal communicator, who uses telepathy and thought projection, giving and receiving images and ideas rather than exact words and sentences. She could inform me, when I was stuck in translation or had lost the plot, what the general idea or feeling was that the whale was trying to convey, and could similarly inform the whale what I was trying to say. She had the whale emit distinct chuckling sounds sometimes.
The growing success of our efforts over the weeks led to Aristotle becoming very serious, saying he wanted to tell us a story, which can be loosely translated as follows:
“I had a mate some time ago called Angel because she was so kind to all, but there really was something special between us and we liked to be together. One year we mated and she became pregnant. Some other males also mated with her but I had a feeling I was the father. She went off with an old midwife to give birth, but I stayed nearby to give any help, like chasing off any sharks.
But even worse, the day after the birth, a whaling ship came by and spotted her. They chased her because they knew that mothers with young calves will not leave the calves, and so they have to swim slowly, and are then easily harpooned. I tried to help, to push the baby faster, in vain, as the whaler was catching up fast. I told Angel to leave the baby and escape with me, but she refused. She begged me to leave them and save myself. I was so desperate that I wanted to turn around and try to capsize that ship, but I knew it was too big.