The Dolphin in the Mirror

by Diana Reiss

  Another situation. From time to time we do routine health checks on the dolphins. We teach each individual certain behaviors that help us carry out various procedures, such as lying belly-up at the water's surface so we can inspect its underside or do an ultrasound on an expectant mom; keeping its mouth open so we can examine teeth, gums, and throat; keeping its blowhole open so we can take a swab for a culture. When we did this with Gordo, Terry and Circe would abandon their carefree swimming around the pool and stand vigil until we released Gordo back to them.

  When Gordo was actually sick and needed more invasive medical attention, we lowered the water level in the pool, put a foam mat under him, and supported him in a sling. Under these circumstances, Terry and Circe became seriously attentive and seemingly stressed, so much so that we had to take vigorous actions to keep them at bay. They acted as if they were truly concerned about the welfare of their buddy; they appeared to be agitated, and there was a lot of whistling back and forth. They acted as if they cared. There is nothing unique about Terry and Circe in this respect. Scientists and trainers who have worked with dolphins routinely see such behaviors in individuals, as if the dolphins feel the distress of a buddy in a difficult situation and experience a need to help. It may be the dolphin equivalent of Bill Clinton's saying, "I feel your pain."

  The behaviors I am describing here are what we would call empathy or, more simply, caregiving, and dolphin lore is replete with such tales. One of the earliest examples to find its way into the scientific literature was reported in 1966 by M. C. Caldwell and D. K. Caldwell.1 This observation was of a very unfortunate incident that occurred off the coast of Florida in late October 1954. In the 1950s there was little concern or protection for dolphins, and we were living in the dark ages in our understanding of animal minds. In what can only be described as an act of pure ignorance, at an exhibition for a public aquarium someone set off a stick of dynamite near a group of bottlenose dolphins. The apparently lifeless body of a victim of the explosion rose to the surface, listing awkwardly. Two dolphins immediately came to its aid, one on each side of the stunned individual, supporting it so that its blowhole was above the water. Being underwater themselves, the supporting animals were unable to breathe, and after a few minutes they had to leave their post, only to be immediately replaced by two other individuals. This relay continued until the stunned animal regained consciousness, whereupon it quickly swam away. The rest of the dolphin group had remained nearby, rather than fleeing, and now accompanied the recovered individual. The scientists who reported the incident said, "There is no doubt in our minds that the cooperative assistance displayed for their own species was real and deliberate."2

  Real and deliberate is the key phrase here. It implies the behavior is the product of active intelligent minds, not a blind, hard-wired pattern that merely appears to be a conscious act. Critics argue that caregiving of this sort is just an extension of a hard-wired protective behavior of dolphin mothers with their newborns, who often flail helplessly and sometimes need to be pushed to the surface to prevent them from drowning. But even this protection of newborns is anything but hard-wired. I have seen several newborn dolphins on the verge of drowning, their inexperienced mothers not having a clue what to do, as happened when Circe gave birth to Delphi, and Terry had to intervene.

  Moreover, if this kind of supporting behavior were hard-wired, we would see it on every occasion when an individual is in trouble. Ken Norris tells of an incident in which a pilot whale had been harpooned and its two companions did the opposite of the usual caregiving behavior. Initially they stayed very close to their mortally wounded companion, one on either side, supporting it in the usual way, as it was being reeled in. Yet as the dead animal got close to the ship, the two Samaritans abruptly changed their behavior, leaping onto the lifeless body and pushing it down and away from the ship.3 This is not an isolated incident; similar stories have been reported elsewhere. Rather than being hard-wired, therefore, the response of dolphins and whales to an injured or killed companion shows flexibility encompassing behaviors that are appropriate to particular situations. This flexibility implies a conscious awareness of the nature of the prevailing circumstances, and a conscious decision as to what action should be taken.

  Dolphins and whales are well known for sticking by a hurt or mortally wounded companion, a behavior we might regard as admirable in human terms, displaying as it does a sense of loyalty and care. But it also makes them easier to hunt, a trait that whalers have exploited through the ages. A mid-nineteenth-century report is one of the earliest published observations of such behavior. Whalers spotted a pod of Pacific pilot whales off the coast of Panama and managed to harpoon one. "The school hovered around their injured schoolmate and refused to depart for some time," explained a later review of the behavior, "even after the dead animal had been hauled aboard ship."4 Hanging around the scene of loss leaves the pod vulnerable to further killing, which was exactly what whalers often did.

  Dolphins displayed the same all-for-one, one-for-all behavior in the infamous hunt drives at Taiji, Japan. The dolphins are driven toward shore and trapped behind nets in the bay; the dolphins have the physical ability to leap over the nets and escape, but their desire to stick together is apparently too strong, ironically leading to the wholesale slaughter of entire social groups, including mothers and young.

  Earlier I mentioned stories from ancient times of dolphins showing caregiving not only to their own kind but also to other species, most notably humans. Some of these tales may be just that, stories based on a sliver of truth that became embellished in the telling through the ages. But contemporary accounts are plentiful enough to allow us to suspend some disbelief. On one high-profile occasion, Elian Gonzalez, a Cuban six-year-old who was fleeing with his mother to the United States in 2000, survived for two days in the Caribbean lying on an inner tube after his boat sank, his mother having gone down with it. The two fishermen who plucked Elian from the sea said there were dolphins circling the boy on his tube. And Elian himself told reporters that dolphins surrounded him and would push him back up onto the mini raft when he was losing strength and slipping off. I have an acquaintance who assisted young Elian in the days following his rescue, and the boy claimed that the only time he felt safe was when the dolphins appeared. Similar sentiments have been expressed by many others who have been on the receiving end of dolphin rescues.

  I have a tale of a dolphin rescue myself, albeit a vicarious one. I was a guest on a radio show shortly after the Asian tsunami of December 2004, and I was asked to speak about whether animals have special sensory systems that warn of impending disasters. A man called in with the following story. He and his family were vacationing in Indonesia and were in a small boat far offshore, fishing. All of a sudden they noticed fins circling their small craft. They thought they were about to be attacked by sharks. But it turned out that the fins belonged to dolphins, which proceeded to push the boat to shore. Then the tsunami hit. "These animals saved me and my family," the man told me. "I am convinced of it." Not long afterward, I got a phone call from a woman in Greece who said that dolphins had saved her life too. "I go swimming in the sea all the time," she told me, "and I often see dolphins, but they never come near me. But on this one occasion I got into trouble and thought I was going to drown. Then I felt a nudge, and I was moving rapidly toward the shore; this dolphin was pushing me. The dolphin saved my life."

  Here is a story of an incident off the coast of Venezuela near Isla de Margarita, a place where it is said that people have a special relationship with sea creatures. Tony Salazar was on a sailboat with his brother, taking part in the first race of the South Caribbean Ocean Regatta, in June 1997. With brisk winds and a choppy sea tossing the boat around, Salazar fell overboard while trying to execute a maneuver with the spinnaker. Because the boat was moving so fast, by the time the crew turned it around Salazar was nowhere to be seen. Salazar screamed and waved as he watched the boat disappear into the distance. He thought he was doomed
. After about half an hour, he realized he was surrounded by dolphins, which was a great relief to him, as he knew that dolphins are natural enemies of sharks, which were common in those waters.

  Meanwhile, the powerboat Gala was searching for Salazar in a zigzag pattern. The crew noticed a pair of dolphins approach and then turn and swim away. This happened several times, and the Gala's captain had a hunch that the dolphins were trying to tell him something. He turned the Gala to follow the dolphins, even though they had already searched in that vicinity. After a short while the crew spotted Salazar and hauled him out of the waters, exhausted, numb, and cramped after this two-hour ordeal. It was Salazar's fiftieth birthday, and he really had something to celebrate.5

  A decade earlier, a story of dolphins rescuing not one but three sailors in trouble was reported. Peter Stock, Terry MacDonald, and Roger Hilligan had been sailing a mile from the mouth of the Great Kei River on South Africa's east coast in rough weather when their yacht capsized. The three men managed to stay close to the boat and struggled to right it, but they felt themselves being dragged out to sea, toward waters where they had seen sharks the previous day. Understandably, the shipwrecked sailors were apprehensive. But then dolphins appeared on the scene. "It was only then that I didn't mind falling into the water," Stock told the Johannesburg Star. "I felt safe." Stock said that the dolphins stayed with the boat as they clambered back aboard, and even steered it to safety, away from rocks and toward shore. "As soon as we were all safely ashore they disappeared," Stock said. "They gave us a feeling of security and spurred us into action."

  In the book Beautiful Minds, coauthor Maddalena Bearzi tells an extraordinary story of the efforts of a group of dolphins to save the life of a young woman off the coast of Malibu, California. Bearzi was studying the foraging behavior of the group of nine dolphins as they encircled a large school of sardines just off the Malibu pier. Soon after the dolphins started feeding, one of them abruptly left the circle and swam away at high speed. Almost immediately the other eight dolphins abandoned their feeding and followed their companion. "This was an odd behavior for my metropolitan dolphins," Bearzi observed. "To abruptly stop feeding and take off in an unrelated direction was rather peculiar."6

  Curious, Bearzi set off in her powerboat in pursuit of the dolphins. About three miles offshore the dolphins came to a sudden stop and formed themselves into a circle, for no reason that was obvious to Bearzi. "That's when one of my assistants spotted an inert human body with long, blond hair floating in the center of the dolphin ring," wrote Bearzi.7 She maneuvered the boat toward the unconscious woman, and the crew hauled her aboard. The dolphins swam away. The young woman was hypothermic and would have died had she been in the water much longer. This is an extraordinary tale. How did the first dolphin know that someone three miles distant was facing death? And why would the group be motivated to save her?

  I have a collection of ancient myths and modern tales from newspapers about dolphins coming to the rescue of humans. I have a drawer full of them. There must be some truth to these stories. (Although if dolphins ever did the opposite, pushed a person away from safety to his death, how would we ever hear about it?)

  Why does the impulse for caregiving exist among dolphins and whales, if indeed these stories really do imply the behavior of active thinking minds? Gordon Gallup was the first to point out that behaviors that can be described as caregiving occur only in animals that have large, complex brains and are able to pass the mirror-self-recognition test. Membership in that club is small: humans, great apes, dolphins, elephants, and, as recently discovered, magpies. "Organisms that are aware of themselves are in a unique position to use their experience as a means of modeling the experience of others,"8 he said. This is not limited to having insight into another individual's practical reactions, but also into their mental states, their emotions.

  The primatologist (and my colleague and collaborator) Frans de Waal, author of The Age of Empathy, said that in chimpanzee societies, instances of one individual actively consoling another, often after a fight, are quite common. "A victim of aggression, who not long ago had to run for her life, or scream to recruit support, now sits alone, pouting, licking an injury, or looking dejected," wrote de Waal. "She perks up when a bystander comes over to her to give her a hug, groom her, or carefully inspect her injury. Consolation can be quite emotional, with both chimps literally screaming in each other's arms."9 Does the bystander go to the victim of the fight and give comfort because she knows that under those same circumstances she, too, would be emotionally hurting and would like to be comforted? Do Terry and Circe stand vigil over Gordo when he is having a medical procedure because they know that they would feel distressed under those circumstances and would want to be comforted?

  It is a difficult topic for humans to discuss dispassionately because, being the super-empathetic creatures that we are, it is impossible for any one of us to see or even imagine another distressed and not feel an emotional tug in the stomach and an urge to give comfort. But it remains true that the existence of a theory of mind in a species does not automatically lead to the experience or expression of empathy and caregiving in one individual for another. Mind reading could, in principle, be an experience entirely free of emotional identification. Psychopaths can "read" other people—they just don't care a whit about them. Some further cognitive step needs to be taken to go from emotionless mind reading to identification with another's psychological state to the urge to ameliorate suffering or distress.

  I suspect dolphins and whales, with large, complex brains living in complex societies, may use their smarts to read the psychological states of other individuals as a tool. Some biologists balk at this idea, most notably Daniel Povinelli. "Gallup speculates that the capacity for self-recognition may indicate that chimpanzees are aware of their own internal, psychological states and understand that other individuals possess such states as well," he wrote. "I have come to doubt this high-level interpretation of chimpanzees' reactions to seeing themselves in mirrors."10 Povinelli argued that the brains of great apes are exquisitely wired to monitor the position of every part of their bodies, at all times. He describes this as chimpanzees' "kinesthetic self-concept," an ability that allows great apes to navigate deftly and safely in a hazardous environment. To Povinelli, humans can only be certain about their own mental states and can infer things about the mental states of others. "Other species, including chimpanzees, may simply be incapable of reasoning about mental states—no matter how much we insist they do."11

  Danny Povinelli could be right, of course, but I believe his is an extreme position. As I have said on more than one occasion, when one spends time in the presence of dolphins and becomes highly attuned to them, as I have, or with chimpanzees, as Sue Savage Rumbaugh has, or with African Grey parrots, as Irene Pepperberg has, one forms the strong impression that there is "somebody" there, the presence of an intelligence that goes beyond a neural machine monitoring the physical actions of the body. While I am aware of the snares of anthropomorphism, I am also aware of the patterns that connect us, and when I am with a dolphin, I feel in my gut that I am in the presence of mind, not just body.

  There seemed to be mind at work in a remarkable episode that involved the rescue of another humpback whale, this time near the Farallon Islands, about eighteen miles off the coast of San Francisco. In mid-December 2005, the animal, which measured some fifty feet long and weighed around fifty tons, became desperately entangled in hundreds of feet of crab-pot ropes and multiple weights. One line was in the whale's mouth. Crab fishermen spotted the whale early on a Sunday morning, and by that afternoon a rescue team was at the spot to attempt what would be an extremely hazardous venture. Divers had to swim around and under the whale in order to cut the ropes free or it would sink and drown. Yet with one flip of its massive tail, a humpback can kill a man. "I was the first diver in the water, and my heart sank when I saw all the lines wrapped around it," said James Moskito, who worked for a cage-diving outfit and led t
he rescue team. "I really didn't think we were going to be able to save it."

  Moskito and three other divers spent about an hour cutting the ropes with a special knife. Some lines were so tight that the divers had to dig deep into the whale's flesh. During the entire ordeal the whale remained calm, as if it knew that the men were there to help it. "When I was cutting the line going through the mouth, its eye was there winking at me, watching me," said Moskito. "It was an epic moment in my life." When it was finally free, instead of immediately swimming away, the whale made small circles around the men, and then nudged each of them in turn. "It felt to me like it was thanking us, knowing that it was free and that we had helped it," said Moskito. "It stopped about a foot away from me, pushed me around a little bit and had some fun." Mick Menigoz, another of the divers, said, "I don't know for sure what it was thinking, but it's something I will always remember."12

  I fully empathize with the emotional impact that this close encounter had on those men, especially experiencing the lingering eye contact. It brings to mind that moment two decades earlier when Humphrey, having mistakenly started to swim north from San Francisco Bay, returned to our flotilla, came to my boat, bellied up to the side, and gazed at us for several long seconds as we looked down at him. Like the divers, I didn't know what Humphrey was thinking, but it was hard for me to believe that his eye was a window into a blank mind.