The Dolphin in the Mirror

by Diana Reiss

  9. Into the Cove

  I FELT A POLITE tap on my shoulder as I was peering at the poster display, my own, for the hundredth time, wondering whether people would be able to see the real story behind it. I turned and saw a tall, deeply tanned, silver-haired man next to me, his steel blue eyes holding me in a determined gaze. "Excuse me, but are you Diana Reiss?" I nodded. He was a total stranger to me, and he had a strong presence about him. There are a lot of big, bronzed, outdoorsy guys in my line of work, so this inquisitive stranger was nothing out of the ordinary. It was late in the afternoon, my session was coming to an end, I was tired, and I was looking forward to meeting up with some colleagues for a quiet dinner. I was unprepared for what the stranger said next: "I am interested in doing a film about the environment that will really make a difference and I have access to someone who has the monetary equivalent of a shah to do it. Someone told me I should talk to you."

  It was the middle of December in 2005, and I was attending the sixteenth biennial conference of the Society for Marine Mammalogy (SMM).These events are the go-to venues for scientists engaged in research on marine mammals, such as dolphins, whales, seals, sea lions, walruses, sea otters, and so on. That year it was being held at the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego, and there were more than two thousand participants, including five hundred students, thirty-eight companies and organizations displaying their wares in various ballrooms, more than three hundred oral presentations, and almost a thousand poster slots. It was, as this genre of scientific gatherings usually is, a zoo.

  Five years prior to the San Diego meeting I had by chance become interested in what can best be described as distress calls, the kind made when dolphins are under duress, such as in pain or severe stress. On a spectrograph, the distress call looks like a short rising whistle followed by a longer falling whistle. It sounds to me like a falling bomb. John Lilly was the first to recognize distress calls, in the mid-1950s, and René-Guy Busnel, my professor in France early in my career, had suggested that bottlenose and other dolphins and whales produce distress calls when injured or in pain; for example, when harpooned. But the topic wasn't prominent in anyone's mind when I came across it through happenstance in the year 2000.

  In the late fall of that year, a young female dolphin, which we named Mara, had become stranded along with an older female presumed to be her mother in the Shrewsbury River in New Jersey. Officials at the National Marine Fisheries Service had been monitoring the dolphins for weeks and decided they had to be rescued before winter came and the river iced over. The older female had internal injuries, probably from a collision with a boat, and other severe medical problems, and unfortunately, she died during the rescue attempt. Mara, however, was carefully transported to the National Aquarium in Baltimore by the aquarium's marine mammal rescue program. I was a visiting research scientist there at the time. Some rescue-team members told me that prior to the death of the older female, the two dolphins were exchanging a distinctive odd whistle that sounded like a falling bomb. I raced to the aquarium the next day to record Mara's vocalizations. She was medically isolated in the aquarium's rescue pools and ministered to day and night by the veterinarians and marine mammal rescue staff. She looked like a healthy, albeit lonely, little dolphin, but people were always there with her and provided her with a variety of objects to play with while the rescue team waited for the medication they'd given her to work. Sadly, after a short period, Mara died too, but not before I had had the opportunity to record whistles of the sort that Lilly and Busnel had identified. I was puzzled about why Mara had been producing distress calls so persistently, but the mystery was solved with the autopsy: she had fibrous adhesions throughout her internal organs, the same medical condition from which her mother had suffered; and stomach acid had leaked into her body cavity. The poor dolphin must have experienced major pain. Dolphins, like many other animals, often mask their pain. This is highly adaptive for many species because predators seek out weak, ill, or injured individuals. Only her whistles signified her suffering, though we didn't realize it.

  A light bulb lit up for me. I had been searching for a Solomon's ring, a decoding cipher to understand how dolphins use their whistles to communicate with one another. Now I realized that if we could confirm that dolphins produce these falling-bomb calls when they are in physical duress and at no other time, then we would have a terrific veterinary and welfare tool; if an individual produced these particular whistles, we would know that it was in distress, and we could then try to ameliorate whatever was causing it. Two years later I gave a talk on my observations of Mara. The principal reason I had gone to the San Diego meeting in 2005 was to introduce some even newer data on distress calls. My poster presentation included audio of the calls and a sonogram, or sound picture, of them. I also had a photograph of one of the dolphins that had been producing the calls.

  Poster sessions at these extravagant scientific gatherings give researchers an opportunity to display new research and research in progress, often prior to publication. Huge ballrooms are divided into multiple narrow passageways by temporary walls on which three-foot-by-four-foot displays are hung, some hurriedly put together, others the products of months of careful construction. I actually don't care for poster sessions. As a presenter, I feel like a vendor, hawking my wares, desperate to find a sympathetic ear. I much prefer to present a spoken talk to an audience rather than doing a poster presentation, and I generally do not submit papers for that purpose. Until the San Diego meeting.

  The reason I decided to go against my rule was not so I could talk about the use of distress calls in veterinary or aquarium practice only, although my recent work was focused on that idea. My motivation was different, something that compelled me to step out of my usual role as a pure scientist and become a scientist-advocate. It was not an easy shift. There is great pressure in academia to remain pure and "above the fray." Many scientists believe advocacy should be left to others, to those who work with environmental agencies, political organizations, and other NGOs with a mission—to those who need not be concerned that their scientific reputations and credibility might be besmirched by straying into politics. But something sinister and disturbing pushed me past this objection.

  About four years before the San Diego meeting, not long after I had pinpointed dolphin distress calls with Mara, I learned of a practice that had been going on for many years, a practice about which most people were unaware, even in Japan, where it was carried out. In a small coastal village, Taiji, in the southern part of the Japanese archipelago, there were yearly drives of hundreds of dolphins at a time; they were trapped in a blind cove, where they were brutally slaughtered by fishermen. By the end of each season, more than two thousand dolphins have been killed in this gruesome manner. I have a short video clip of one of these types of killings, and I always warn people who want to see it that the images are extremely disturbing. This gory video clip, which had been surreptitiously recorded, also had an audio track that carried distress calls of the kind produced by Mara before she died.

  My stomach turns every time I watch the killing and hear the calls. Every time. Every time. My three decades of work with dolphins has taught me that dolphins are not biological automatons, devoid of feeling, emotion, or an awareness of themselves and what is happening around them. Bottlenose dolphins are sentient, highly social, and highly intelligent animals. The annual slaughter of bottlenose dolphins and other dolphin and whale species is therefore inhumane beyond words. For me, it is unjustifiable from any perspective. In 2001 I committed myself to doing whatever I could as a scientist-advocate to stop the killing. It became my mission, running parallel with my mainstream scientific research.

  The 2005 San Diego meeting was the first time I had gone into the conventional scientific arena openly promoting this cause. The Society for Marine Mammalogy, like many scientific societies, discourages people from using its gatherings for anything but scientific ends. I had, however, managed to persuade society officials that the dolphin driv
es were such an egregious affront to marine mammal integrity and dignity, they should allow me to seek signatures to a petition calling for its termination. I had to agree that I wouldn't aggressively pursue people in the corridors to corral signatures. With help from colleagues and graduate students, we set up a demonstration, including a video of the drives, in a side room and invited people to sign the petition if they felt so moved.

  We were seeking signatures from our colleagues, an international group of marine mammal scientists, and I wanted to make sure we had representation from both younger scientists and established researchers. My colleague Lori Marino worked with me on the petition, and we asked our colleague Sam Ridgway to help us draft the scientists' statement we were asking participants to endorse. Sam Ridgway was the world's preeminent dolphin veterinarian; he literally wrote the book on dolphin biology and physiology. Sam was an old friend as well as a colleague, and for political reasons, I didn't want the petition statement to be from the pens of women only. The long statement addressed to the government of Japan urged it to "lead the way and take action in stopping the inhumane treatment and killing of these highly sentient mammals." It turned out to be easy to get people to sign. About three hundred scientists did so during those few short days of the conference. We also posted a second public petition open to all on our website (www.actfordolphins.org), which I'd started with Paul Boyle, then the director of the New York Aquarium, and Lori. Within a year, the number of signatures had climbed to more than a hundred and twenty-five thousand.

  Meanwhile, in the earnest academic intensity that was the poster session, my presentation was something of a paradox. It showed a photograph of a small cove and fishing boats, and another photograph of a single dolphin, its blood-covered head plaintively raised above the water. But then there was a spectrograph of an audio recording of dolphins being driven into the killing cove; it showed the type of whistles, the number of whistles, and an acoustic analysis of them. All very sterile and devoid of emotion.

  It was something of a schizophrenic experience for me, this division between the scientist coolly amassing evidence and the scientist-advocate desperately trying to find ways of changing the world. Many of my colleagues know me as a passionate person with a determination to increase global protection for dolphins and whales. My fervor to stop the killing at Taiji was even more than usually high-octane. So when the silver-haired stranger introduced himself to me in front of my poster, I literally grabbed him by the lapels, dragged this giant of a man into a nearby room, sat him down, and announced: "You've got to do your film on the dolphin drive. And I'm going to tell you why."

  ***

  Taiji is a small coastal village that clings to the southeastern lip of the Kii Peninsula of Japan's Honshu Island, some 260 miles southwest of Tokyo. To the proud people of Taiji, population around three thousand, the broad Pacific Ocean has been for generations not only the source of their livelihood but also their sole medium of transport. In the past, the rugged, majestic terrain that's so typical of this part of Japan's main island made overland access to the coast all but impossible. Modern road and rail links now join this remote village to the rest of Japan and the rest of the world. Nevertheless, what goes on today in Taiji remained little known in 2005.

  A source of pride of the people of Taiji lies in the town's history as the spiritual home of the country's whaling industry, going back to the 1600s. Indeed, visitors to the town see signs of that link everywhere, from the prominent whaling museum (built in 1969) to the images of whales and dolphins on billboards, buildings, and sidewalks. For centuries, with great ritual and considerable skill, the men of Taiji put to sea in swift, elaborately decorated boats to hunt whales, primarily right whales, which provided more than enough for the villagers' subsistence needs and plenty for trade to other parts of the country.

  This long-lived tradition would not last forever. Their vigorous whaling activities and the incursion of other whaling nations into Japanese waters in the nineteenth century led to a decline in right whale populations. And a terrible storm in the winter of 1878 resulted in the loss of most of Taiji's whaling fleet and the death of its men, more than a hundred. That incident contributed to the breaking of Taiji's spirit as a whaling community.

  A global ban on commercial hunting of large whales in 1986 formally ended the tradition for good. The International Whaling Commission (IWC) was created in 1946 under the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling to provide for the proper conservation and management of whale stocks. Japan, Norway, and Iceland continue to ignore pressure to end commercial whaling and together kill over two thousand whales each year. But at least the IWC has a ban on the killing of large whales; there is no such ban on killing small cetaceans—dolphins and small whales. Herein lies Taiji's more recent, and less honorable, reputation. In Western eyes, Taiji has come to symbolize human disregard for other living creatures. The government of Japan allows the Taiji fishermen to kill twenty-three hundred dolphins and small whales each year in the most brutal and inhumane manner imaginable.

  Every year, beginning in October and running through April, a small group of fishermen, about thirty-four, sets out to sea from Taiji in a dozen or so motorboats to locate groups of dolphins. The fishermen position themselves between the groups and the open ocean and then herd the dolphins toward shallow lagoons using the oikomi method that we used to save Humphrey the humpback whale: The fishermen hold long metal pipes tipped with flanges over the side of their boats and rhythmically beat them with hammers. Underwater, the sound of the hammering is greatly amplified and travels far, a wall of sound from which the dolphins flee in terror. Frenetic and exhausted, they become trapped in a lagoon that the fishermen seal with a net across the entrance. Each drive hunt, as it is called, corrals social groups of dolphins, usually from twenty-five to two hundred individuals, including mothers and calves.

  The dolphins are left in the cove, sometimes for days, until the next affront occurs. Trainers arrive from aquariums (excluding those in the United States, Europe, and Australasia) to inspect the milling dolphins and pick what they consider to be the crème de la crème for their dolphin shows. Flipper delighted children with its escapades on television in the 1960s, and since then, people's interest in watching dolphins' amazing physical skills and in swimming with them has grown. Aquariums, marine parks, and swim-with-dolphins programs make up a multibillion-dollar industry today. Here, then, is the motivation for the fishermen of Taiji: A dolphin sold locally as meat or for fertilizer will fetch a few thousand dollars, but a potential Flipper can haul in twenty-five thousand dollars or more. These "lucky ones" are shipped to destinations around the globe (Japan, China, South Korea, and the United Arab Emirates), forever separated from their natal social groups and their mothers.

  The fishermen then herd the rest of the social group, the unlucky ones, to the killing cove in Hatagiri Bay, with craggy, scrub-covered cliffs rising steeply on three sides. Within minutes, the emerald green waters of the cove turn a deep crimson as blood gushes from spear wounds and deep gashes inflicted by long knives and harpoon blades. The terrified animals thrash and writhe in their own blood. Some try to escape, frantically swimming toward the head of the cove, losing blood as they try to breach the barrier, only to fall back, usually twitching a few more pathetic times, and then sinking below the surface. Many drown in nets that prevent them from reaching the surface.

  The fishermen drag the wounded animals toward boats, using grappling hooks that often pierce eye sockets or breathing holes, tearing their living flesh. Years ago, in similar hunts in Futo, Japan, cranes hoisted animals by their flukes, leading to a kind of modern-day version of medieval torture. In water, dolphins are virtually weightless, and their anatomy is adapted to that state of near equilibrium. In air, gravity grabs at each one's eight hundred pounds. The dolphin is suspended by its tail, and its spinal column is stretched and ripped apart, causing pain we can only begin to imagine. (Something like this was done to traitors in the
Tower of London in ages past, on a feared contraption called the rack.) Smaller knives are used next, as the fishermen eviscerate the dolphins, many of which are still alive. All the while the air is filled with the sounds of the fishermen shouting and laughing, of dolphin tails thrashing in water, of bodies flip-flopping on land in a dance of death, and a cacophony of dolphin vocalization. And all the while, too, the dolphins' "smiles" remain frozen on their faces, macabre masks of death.

  The scene I just described has been witnessed firsthand by very few people not intimately connected with the Taiji fishing community. Townspeople go to great lengths to prevent prying eyes from seeing the slaughter. DANGER and KEEP OUT signs are posted at the few access points to the killing cove. Razor wire blocks off the unauthorized. Vigilant policemen turn back inquisitive foreigners carrying cameras. Large tarpaulins are hung as curtains across the cove to further restrict the view. But by the time of the 2005 San Diego meeting, a few intrepid activists had managed by ingenious means to capture the killing on film so that the full horror was beginning to be known. This was the scene I described to the silver-haired stranger who approached me at the San Diego meeting. He told me his name was Louie Psihoyos and that he'd been a photographer for seventeen years at the illustrious National Geographic magazine but that he had no serious experience in making movies. I knew him by reputation: he was someone with a knack of capturing the essence of a complex situation with a single, profound image.

  Louie looked at my academically framed poster on distress calls and the drive hunt, and he seemed puzzled, not knowing quite what to make of it. I wasn't surprised; it was rather abstruse. But when I told him about the drive and showed him a short clip, he seemed to get it completely.

  I explained to Louie that the townspeople of Taiji had recently become extremely defensive about the drive hunts. A growing international protest in the media and several attempts by activists to film or disrupt the drives had led to that. Doing a full documentary, I said, would present unusual challenges.