Voices in the Ocean

by Susan Casey

  We’ve long known that dolphin brains are impressive, bigger even than the brains we consider the gold standard: our own. Yet science still searches for answers to what the dolphins are doing with such metabolically expensive machinery (and, for that matter, what human brains are really up to). No creature would cart around a big brain if this heavy artillery wasn’t in some way essential for its survival. A clue emerged when dolphin brains, like humans’, were found to contain von Economo neurons: specialized cells that relate to higher notions like empathy, intuition, communication, and self-awareness. Interestingly, dolphins have far more of these neurons than we do, and they are thought to have developed them 30 million years ago, about 29.8 million years before Homo sapiens swung their first clubs.

  Even so, despite the similar heft of our gray matter and our shared ability to express irritation, I was surprised to learn that the dolphin genome, sequenced in 2011, bears a striking resemblance to our own. When researchers compared the dolphins’ gene mutations to those of other animals, they found 228 instances where the dolphins had done something smarter, evolving in ways that revved up their brains and nervous systems. These adaptations aligned them more with humans than with any of the other species tested, even those which were more closely related to dolphins. Having been around for so much longer than we have, dolphins had also developed some nifty tricks: one of their responses to type 2 diabetes, for instance, is to internally flip a biochemical off-switch and block the disease’s progression.

  While scientists made news with their dolphin findings, the animals also caught the attention of the film world. The Cove, a movie about a barbaric dolphin hunt in Taiji, Japan, riveted audiences, and went on to win the Oscar for Best Documentary in 2010. Each year, the movie showed, local fishermen conduct this hunt, driving pods of bottlenose, striped, white-sided, Risso’s dolphins—any dolphin they can catch, basically—into a narrow cove, then netting off the entrance and killing the animals with gaffs and long-handled knives. Getting rid of as many dolphins as possible—whom they view as competition for what few fish remain in the vacuumed-out oceans—the fishermen claim, is a vital matter of “pest control.”

  Most of the captured dolphins end up in Japanese supermarkets and restaurants (though the meat is highly contaminated with mercury and other toxins), but some do not. Younger females and calves are separated out, examined by trainers and dolphin brokers, and then sold to marine parks for six-figure prices. Every year, the hunters kill or sell thousands of dolphins.

  Once the Taiji hunt got dragged into daylight, celebrities like Jennifer Aniston and Woody Harrelson and Robin Williams spoke out against it, drawing even more attention to the secretive little town. Sadly, Japan wasn’t the only place dolphins were dying en masse—they were washing up on shores all over the world. Scientists have scrambled to find a possible cause for the global die-off, but pinning down a single problem is hard—there are so many. Over in California, the bottlenose dolphins were suffering from gaping skin lesions. Across Europe, striped dolphins have washed up emaciated and riddled with herpes, their immune systems hopelessly compromised. In Florida, dolphins fall victim to runaway cancers. Dolphins everywhere, from Australia, to North and South America, to Tahiti, are so laden with industrial pollutants—pesticides, heavy metals, flame retardants, carcinogens of the most noxious kinds—that their bodies are disposed of as hazardous waste. If this chemical onslaught weren’t enough, the acoustically sensitive dolphins also contend with a clanging underwater mayhem of drilling, ship engines, oil-rig construction, explosives, and submarine sonar that can blast sound across entire ocean basins; this bombardment harasses millions of animals, and can even kill them. “The future for dolphins is a lot gloomier than their smiling faces suggest,” the magazine New Scientist wrote in an editorial.

  If reading about these travails makes you upset, you are not alone. It’s not just the idea of dolphins in trouble—dolphins in general strike a deep emotional chord in most people. On some level, however vaguely at times, we seem to know how connected we are, the dolphins and us, and how inevitable it is that we share the same fate. Rigorous science balks at the notion that these animals affect us so profoundly because of some innate spiritual connection, but that doesn’t make us feel it any less. Anyone who’s ever spent time around a dolphin, any dolphin, faces abstract, philosophical questions such as these posed by marine biologist Rachel Smokler: “Do [dolphins] have the same powers of reasoning that we have?…Do they feel love and hate, compassion, trust, distrust? Do they wonder about death? Do they have ideas about right and wrong and accompanying feelings of guilt and righteousness? What could they teach us about the oceans? How do they feel about one another? What do they think about us?”

  Regardless of the dolphins’ allure, few people feel as close to them as Sharon Tendler, a concert promoter from London who became the first human to officially marry one. Tendler and her groom, a thirty-five-year-old male bottlenose named Cindy, had courted for fifteen years at the Eilat Reef resort town in southern Israel. The bride wore a flowing white gown, a veil, and a headdress of orchids as she kneeled dockside to kiss Cindy, who accepted her gift of mackerel. Though dolphins do have a reputation as ladies’ men, showing an unusual amount of interest in interspecies amour, Tendler declared that the marriage would remain unconsummated. “I’m the happiest girl on earth,” she told the press, adding: “I am not a pervert.”

  Clearly, dolphins are charismatic enough as plain old wild animals; they don’t need to be angels or gods or spiritual guides in the bargain. Undeniably, though, they get nominated for these positions. Walk through any New Age bookstore and note the dolphins per square foot; you’ll find them on bookmarks and posters and stickers, glittering in 3-D notecards and tinkling on wind chimes, adorning CD covers and T-shirts, leaping across the covers of countless journals. (Note, too, that in the forest or the savannah or the jungle, even the most impressive beast is not usually mistaken for husband material.)

  What is it about dolphins? Why do we obsess about them so? As far back as anyone can cast in history, there is evidence of a unique bond between us. The Maoris and Aboriginal Australians and Pacific Islanders, the Greeks and Romans: Odysseus, Poseidon, Apollo, Aristotle, Socrates, Plutarch, the Plinys Younger and Elder, the Emperor Augustus—they were all dolphin crazy. Actually, everyone was. Dolphins were painted on palace walls, sculpted into statues, stamped on gold coins, tattooed onto bodies. In ancient Greece, apparently, dolphins had the same rights as people. Perhaps even greater rights: while it was considered perfectly all right to snuff your disobedient slave, to kill a dolphin was equal to murder. Our relationship might even have included literal conversation. In his 350 BC Historia Animalium, Aristotle wrote, “The voice of the dolphin in air is like that of the human in that they can pronounce vowels and combinations of vowels, but have difficulties with the consonants.”

  The image of a sea creature poking its head above the water to speak to us is like something out of Alice in Wonderland or the latest Pixar masterpiece—an irresistible thrill. Theoretically, anyway, dolphins have the brainpower and the communication skills to do this, and so they occupy a singular place in our imaginations. They take us back to our earliest years, to that little blip of time when we believed that we could communicate with other creatures, because there was no separation between their world and ours. “When we were children we wanted to talk to animals and struggled to understand why this was impossible,” the naturalist Loren Eiseley wrote. “Slowly we gave up the attempt as we grew into the solitary world of human adulthood.” This loss of hope, Eiseley pointed out, is a very sad thing.

  Dolphin intelligence may come in a different package than human intelligence, but a thread of awareness connects us. It’s an ephemeral link, an ember almost. Although we can’t easily define it, we seem to long for it. In some deep-seated way, we hope to find other wisdom, other guidance— others. It’s the reason we point telescopes toward the stars, and wonder if there’s anyone out there
who wants to talk to us. Even the slightest possibility that the answer might be yes both terrifies and enthralls us. Given our curiosity about the bigger questions, our hunger to know more about the purpose and scope of our lives, it’s really not that unreasonable to wonder if behind their Mona Lisa grins, dolphins might be in on some good cosmic secrets.

  When I think back on it now, my swim with the spinners in Honolua Bay was an experience as mystifying as it was uplifting. Who were those creatures? It’s been said that humans are the only animals who believe the stories they tell about themselves—but what about the dolphins? What is their story? And what about those haunting sounds they made? Their whistles and clicks and squeals seemed to me like a liquid symphony, a communiqué from another realm, a galaxy of meaning conveyed in a language that defied translation. When I saw the pod, I felt joy. I felt awe. And I felt the slightest bit frightened, though the dolphins were not scary. I felt their beguiling mix of mystery and reality; I felt a sense of bottomless wonder.

  The one thing I didn’t feel was alone.

  Hawaii’s Big Island is huge and low-slung, the product of five feisty volcanoes. The youngest of the visible islands in a 3,600-mile-long undersea mountain range, it sports dramatic whorls and swirls of lava, punctuated by tufts of pale green fountain grass. Steering my rental car out of the Kona airport, it was impossible to miss massive, crouching Mauna Loa, the world’s largest active volcano, or fail to note the lunar starkness of its surroundings. Even a sparkling new Target store built on the lava fields below couldn’t disguise the elemental nature of the place, the clash of molten rock and sea. Anyone visiting this island must confront the daunting truth that its story sprawls more than 500,000 years back, far beyond prehistory—and yet it has barely begun.

  I drove south toward the town of Kailua, an infinity of ocean to my right, fronted by more charred black lava. To my left the clouds hunkered low, exposing Mauna Kea’s summit. If you traced this volcano down to the bottom of the ocean, you’d be measuring a mountain higher than Everest; most of Mauna Kea happens to be underwater. At its peak I could make out the glinting domes of its thirteen telescopes, world-famous perches from which astronomers study the night sky. Here in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, far from the diluting lights of cities, they can more clearly glimpse the heavens than anywhere else on the planet—the billions of stars, the planets and exoplanets and their many moons, the solar systems with their nebulas and starbursts and voids, the asteroids and comets and supernovas, our sun and other suns, all the question marks floating out in space. “Hawaii is Earth’s connecting point to the rest of the Universe,” the Mauna Kea Observatories’ Web site proclaims.

  But I had come to the Big Island to look down, rather than up. It was the depths that interested me, the universe below the ocean’s surface; and it was there, underwater, that I hoped to find my own connecting point: these waters teemed with dolphins. There were spinner multitudes here, megapods hundreds of animals strong, and each morning they appeared so reliably in certain bays along this coastline that an entire community of people had formed around them. They called it “Dolphinville,” though it was less an actual place than a shared state of mind. “There are approximately 200 of us, and we live in separate homes along a 30-mile stretch of the Kona Coast, connected in spirit to each other,” I read, in a description of the group. “Many of us who live here have been called by the dolphins. We have become like a family who swim, meditate, and work together. Swimming among the dolphins day after day, we are in deep communication with them.” Accompanying this description was a group photo with dozens of suntanned, smiling, athletic-looking people who seemed like they were having a hell of a lot more fun than anyone I knew back on the mainland. Nobody looked demonstrably crazy.

  I was enchanted to learn about Dolphinville, figuring that even if it was a wacky cult it would be the first one I’d heard of that involved three- and four-hour open water swims. My interest was further piqued when I found out that Dolphinville’s creator (or pod leader, depending on how you look at it) was a woman named Joan Ocean. A New Jersey–born psychologist turned New Age dolphin guru, Ocean had, by her own estimate, logged over twenty thousand hours with wild dolphins. When I’d e-mailed to see if I could come to the Big Island and join her for a swim, she’d not only responded yes, but also invited me to stay at her house.

  I was anxious to get back in the water. After my first encounter with the spinners I’d reshuffled my priorities, making time and space to explore the strange, enduring, occasionally tragic, and often wonderful relationship between humans and dolphins. My reasons? Because the idea of such a quest brightened my life—and my father would have encouraged it. Because I was too curious not to follow wherever the dolphins might lead me. Because I wondered if there was some greater understanding possible at the place where our world and theirs intersect, and what that might mean for both of us. And because I really wanted an answer to this one confounding question: Why had a mere ten minutes in the dolphins’ presence been such a soul-shaking experience?

  Since the sixties, dolphin research had proceeded at a heady clip, revealing much about the animals’ biology and physiology and cognition, but the more we learned, it seemed, the more we needed to make sense of our findings, not only with our minds but also with our hearts. I knew the questions I was asking couldn’t be answered solely by consulting scientific papers or marine mammal textbooks, fascinating as those were. My answers could only be found out there, in the ocean.

  “I call what I do ‘participatory research,’ ” Joan Ocean said, standing barefoot on the harbor dock, flashing a high-voltage smile. We were waiting, along with about twenty other people, for a dive boat called Sunlight on Water to start up its engines and take us out in search of local dolphin pods. The morning was bright and wide open, the sea an inviting marine blue. While everyone else carried the standardissue dorky array of snorkeling gear, Ocean held a pair of free-diving fins with sleek, attenuated blades. Among the clot of tourists, she stood out. Her long hair was a tangle of silver and blond, but it was her eyes you noticed first. They were a laser shade of aquamarine, animated with an excited, kid-like energy. She wore a diaphanous floral cover-up over a black bathing suit, and sparkly pink toenail polish. Ocean, seventy-four, was a great-grandmother, but she looked oddly ageless. “If you wanted to learn about any culture, you would move in with them if they allowed it, and observe them and then try to be like them,” she continued. “So that’s what happened with the dolphins. The first twelve years I lived here, every single morning I was in the water. You just learn a lot.”

  When Ocean first took up with the animals back in the late seventies, she hadn’t even known how to swim; she was forty-five when she took her first stroke. But she quickly made up for lost time, regularly swimming miles at a stretch. The new saltwater world she had entered, she said, “was like being on another planet, only better.” In the years before she became immersed in dolphins, Ocean had spent gritty time in the human realm, counseling abused children, delinquent teenagers, battered women, fractured families. She had empathy, she cared, and she tried with everything she had to coax her clients out of destructive patterns, only to watch in frustration when they repeated themselves. She prayed. She meditated, asking for better ways to help people. What she got back in her mind’s eye were images of dolphins (and the occasional whale). She began to seek them out: bottlenoses in Florida, orcas in British Columbia, spinners in Hawaii, botos in Brazil. Every encounter with them lifted her spirits—why, she wondered, wouldn’t this be the same for others? She felt the animals were communicating messages of love and wisdom, imparting information that we desperately needed to hear, albeit telepathically. From that point on, Ocean’s purpose was clear: introducing people to cetaceans.

  The resident Kona pods, she explained, lived in what was known as a “fission-fusion” society. Essentially, the mass of dolphins moved in fluid, constantly changing groups, much like people milling around at a cocktail party. This
was a sophisticated arrangement, uncommon in nature, requiring the animals to recognize one another, form bonds, trade favors, recall past associations, and get along in unfamiliar circumstances. Scientists had wondered what factored into a dolphin’s decision to leave one group or join another; they discovered that dolphins bopped between social clusters for the same reasons humans might. A teenage dolphin swimming along with his mother, for instance, might defect to a band of teenage dolphins who were having raucous fun; females with calves liked to hang out together; mating pairs were mostly interested in one another. In dangerous situations or tricky hunting conditions these subgroups would merge back together into one larger pod. When the heat was off, they would drift apart again. To researchers it seemed likely that the spinners along this coast all knew one another, at least on an acquaintance basis.

  Ocean, as she was quick to point out, was not a scientist. She did not publish academic papers or bear any special set of credentials. “I didn’t choose that particular path,” she said. But she knew these dolphins. She had observed their society in action, day in, day out, for twenty-six years. She knew their habits and their quirks, their likes and dislikes and the body language that expressed them, their fondness for playing with the leaves that fluttered down from hala trees into the ocean. She recognized individuals, and charted the company each dolphin kept; she noted when one animal showed up with a cookie-cutter shark bite, a missing divot of flesh, or another bore signs of a boat propeller strike. She knew their rhythms. Each morning after dawn, pretty much like clockwork, the spinners would return from a night of feeding in deeper waters and move into the island’s shallower bays, circling slowly, schmoozing, and in general taking it easy until mid-afternoon, when they’d begin to commute offshore again. This nocturnal hunting schedule was for good reason: at night, schools of fish, squid, and shrimp rose from the depths and became a dolphin smorgasbord.