by James Nestor
In the mid-1960s, however, Lilly seemed to go astray. Against the wishes of Carl Sagan and the other Order of the Dolphin members, Lilly began a battery of wild and often abusive experiments, hoping for a breakthrough. He injected LSD into some animals and monitored their actions. His thinking was that the psychedelic might spur them into suddenly speaking English. (It only made them extremely friendly and vocal.) Then he decided that, since dolphins were so much smarter than humans, it might be easier just to teach them to speak English. While dolphins didn’t have vocal cords, they had blowholes that Lilly believed could flex enough for them to form human sounds.
In 1965, Lilly began the first English-immersion workshop for dolphins.
Leading the workshop was CRI research assistant Margaret Howe, who agreed to spend ten weeks doing a wet lab with a rambunctious male dolphin named Peter. By day, Howe would give English lessons to Peter, feed him, and interact with him. By night, she would roll up in plastic sheets on a floating bed in the middle of a pool and sleep there while Peter bobbed in the water nearby.
The experiment was a disaster. Howe had trouble sleeping; the constant humidity in the laboratory sapped her energy; she started getting skin infections. In the first three weeks, Peter became sexually aggressive. When Howe swam in the pool, Peter would push her into a corner and thrust his erect penis against her legs. By the fifth week, Peter had grown so obsessed that he had trouble focusing on his English lessons. Howe finally submitted to his sexual advances.
“I found that by taking his penis in my hand and letting him jam himself against me, he would reach some sort of orgasm, mouth open, eyes closed, body shaking,” she later reported. “Then his penis would relax and withdraw. He would repeat this maybe two or three times, and then his erection would stop and he seemed satisfied.”
On one level, it worked. Peter took a renewed interest in English lessons. His inflection and pitch improved, and he could clearly pronounce simple words like ball, hello, and hi. He started talking in “humanoid” language when he was alone. When Howe talked on the telephone to people outside the wet lab, Peter became jealous and would speak English words louder to get her attention. When Peter approached her with an erection, she recalled, “I feel extremely flattered at Peter’s patience with me in all this . . . and am delighted to be so obviously ‘wooed’ by this dolphin.”
IN THE END, HOWE BELIEVED Peter’s English had vastly improved and she was certain that through further instruction, he could develop his vocabulary and perhaps hold a conversation. The results from the English-language-immersion workshop were scientifically inconclusive, but for Lilly they served as proof that humans would be speaking with dolphins within a decade.
Lilly wrote that dolphins would soon be phoning into meetings of the United Nations. They would be starring in television shows. They’d produce underwater ballets, sing pop hits on the radio, and work in underwater industries. But as the years wore on at CRI and the promise of interspecies communication failed to advance much, Lilly grew despondent and depressed. He became ashamed of his work at CRI, where he’d run, as he later put it, “a concentration camp” for dolphins. In 1968, three of the dolphins at CRI died. Lilly believed they’d committed suicide by forcing themselves to stop breathing. He shut down CRI and let the lab’s other dolphins go free.
Lilly left St. Thomas and spent most of the next five years in a sensory-deprivation tank high on ketamine, a powerful animal tranquilizer. In 1972, President Richard Nixon signed into law the Marine Mammal Protection Act. It banned the killing, capture, harassment, import, export, or sale of any marine mammals within the United States. The law protected dolphins and whales from slaughter, and it also prohibited scientists from studying wild dolphins anywhere in U.S. waters.
“LILLY BASICALLY RUINED THE FIELD for the next thirty years,” says Stan Kuczaj, an experimental psychologist who runs the Marine Mammal Behavior and Cognition Lab at the University of Southern Mississippi. “He did some really great research at the beginning. Those reports in Science were really solid,” says Kuczaj. “But he just fell off the deep end.”
It’s around 6:30 a.m. on my fourth day in Réunion. I’m standing with Kuczaj in a weed-filled lot at the La Possession marina. Behind us are two rusty shipping containers that will serve as DareWin’s field office and the conference center for this week’s events. The meeting area is located in the shade of a plastic tarp strung up between the two containers. Seating comes in the form of a few dozen mismatched patio chairs and two wooden stumps. At the center of the seating area is an old door covered in a plastic trash bag and supported by milk crates. This will serve as the conference demonstration table. If we’re hungry, there’s a box of instant noodles inside one container and a microwave to heat them up.
Kuczaj, who looks a bit like Tom Petty, has been studying dolphin behavior and communication for twenty-five years and is considered one of the world’s top scientists in the field. He came to Réunion in part because studying wild dolphins in the United States is prohibited. But what really interested him was Schnöller’s archive of wild dolphin and sperm whale footage, which he called “exceptional and extraordinary.”
Every morning, Kuczaj and the rest of our group will meet at the DareWin conference center to drink coffee and eat croissants before taking a ride out along Réunion’s coast to search for dolphins and whales. If we spot any, we’ll stop, get in the water with an assortment of video cameras and audio recording devices, and document as much of the encounter as we can. Around noon, we’ll motor back to La Possession and reconvene to share footage on Schnöller’s laptop. Every evening, a scientist will present new research to the panel and contribute to Schnöller’s action plan for cracking the cetacean language code in the next few years.
Although Kuczaj is very skeptical that humans will ever have a conversation with cetaceans, he’s certain that, if it does happen, it won’t be through our language but through theirs.
He mentions interspecies research done with Koko, a gorilla born in the San Francisco Zoo in 1971 who learned to understand a thousand signs in American Sign Language; and Kanzi, a bonobo who, during the 1980s and 1990s, learned more than three thousand English words.
“Koko and Kanzi might have heard us,” he says, “but they only comprehended us in some very limited way.” The problem, Kuczaj says, is that researchers have no idea if gorillas or chimpanzees have the capacity to communicate by sounds with one another, let alone with other species. If they don’t, then researchers have been trying to teach Koko and Kanzi not just English, but verbal communication—a huge leap.
Dolphins, however, most likely already share a very rich vocal communication. If humans are ever going to talk to the animals, he says, DareWin’s approach of trying to crack the whistle-and-click language they already use seems like a good place for us to start.
TODAY FOLLOWS THE SAME PATTERN as the last four days of Schnöller’s conference. We wake up before dawn, climb into motorboats, and search the coast for six or seven hours in a vain quest for whales or dolphins. Finding none, we head back to the marina, eat a late lunch, attend an afternoon conference, then an evening conference, drive back to our rooms, sleep for maybe five hours, then do it all over again.
By midweek, I’m beginning to dread Schnöller’s morning knock on my door. Being overworked in any environment is unpleasant; it feels somehow criminal on a tropical island. Kuczaj and the rest of the team were hoping to get a few days to relax and see Réunion—but that’s not going to happen on Schnöller’s watch. There’s always too much work to do and too little time to do it.
And so, on the fifth day of the conference, I awake yet again to a knock at 5:20 a.m.; stumble around in the dark until I find my bathing suit; throw a water bottle, sunscreen, and a notepad in a backpack; and rush out to my rental car before Schnöller starts honking and threatening to leave me behind.
On this day, our luck changes. At around eleven o’clock, we’re a few miles off the coast of La Possession. Sudde
nly, Schnöller stops the boat. “Dolphins,” he announces. “Grab your things and get ready.”
Swimming with dolphins requires patience and persistence. Schnöller told me he sees them only 1 percent of the time he’s out looking; he gets to swim with them only about 1 percent of that time. Those numbers are probably exaggerations, but I get the gist of what he’s saying: This is hard work, with very few rewards.
“Dolphins must choose to come to you,” he says over the rumble of the outboard motors. “You can never go to them.” Chasing them might allow us a quick peek from a distance, but if you get in the water, they’ll be spooked and will almost always dive deep. Approaching them very slowly at a 45-degree angle allows them time to observe you and decide whether to interact.
We’re about a thousand feet away from the pod when Schnöller instructs me to get a mask and prepare to jump. Kuczaj will be my partner.
“Okay, we go,” Schnöller says softly. He has Vanessa, a research assistant from Paris who’s joined us for the week, take the steering wheel. Schnöller grabs his camera and then points at me. “You get in behind me, yes?” he says. I nod. The dolphins are in hot pursuit of a school of fish swimming parallel to our boat. Schnöller dips quietly into the water with his camera and kicks away.
Dolphins can be vicious hunters. Schnöller once watched from a boat as a pod attacked a school of five-foot-long tuna. The dolphins swam in circles to gain speed, then shot their pointy noses into the sides of the enormous fish like spear tips. The water soon ran brown and red with blood. (Schnöller got in the water anyway and shot some amazing footage.)
There are no tuna in the water now, at least none we can see. Kuczaj and I pull on our fins and masks and dive in, swimming in the front of the pod in order to intercept its course.
Dolphins get nervous with big groups of people in the water. Having two small groups—Schnöller and a local freediver, Kuczaj and me—enables them to choose whom they’d like to swim with. If they don’t like either of us and move on, we must not pursue them. They’ve chosen not to interact, and we have to respect that choice.
I look up and see that dolphins are now just two hundred feet away. They are swimming directly toward us.
Schnöller motions for us to stop. It’s important that we stay as calm and still as possible, so the dolphins don’t feel threatened.
While Kuczaj and I float on the surface, Schnöller, about fifty feet ahead, freedives twenty feet down with his camera, ready to capture the encounter. So far, we can’t see anything—the visibility is only a hundred feet today, poor by Réunion’s standards. But we can certainly hear the dolphins; their clicks sound like a hundred typists pecking away on old Underwoods. This cacophony strikes me as urban and dissonant, something I’d never imagine could come from the natural world.
As I sit there floating stomach-down with my head in the water, I realize that while I can’t see the dolphins from this distance, they are watching me. Each of the clicks I hear is bouncing off my body and back to the dolphins, developing in their brains like a thousand little snapshots.
Today’s encounter lasts a few minutes, then the clicks fade; the slick backs of the dolphins recede toward the horizon, and they’re gone. We turn and kick back to the boat.
“They did not want to play today,” says Schnöller. “They must be hungry. Tomorrow—we’ll get them tomorrow.” Schnöller starts the motor and heads back to the marina. He doesn’t seem at all disappointed. And neither am I; I’ve finally felt echolocation in action.
IT’S SUNDAY, MY LAST DAY IN RÉUNION, and Schnöller and I are sitting around a large wooden table on the front deck of a rented studio apartment in the back of the family’s house. Up a staircase to our left is an empty swimming pool, its concrete floor covered with wet leaves, dirt, and puddles of oily water, dark brown like coffee. A robotic pool cleaner, tangled and broken, lies mockingly in the deep end. Above the pool, through an unwashed corner window of the house, sunlight illuminates a room piled high with sofas, board games, clothes, and other old junk. Schnöller’s disheveled office is up a cracked staircase at the back of the house. The whole scene looks like a stage set for a tropical-themed Grey Gardens. When Schnöller and I talk, as we have most nights after the conference, we meet in my room to avoid having to tiptoe through the rubble.
When I arrived in Réunion ten days ago, Schnöller mentioned that he might be on the cusp of a “big discovery” in cetacean click-and-whistle language but wouldn’t tell me what it was. I hounded him all week, but between the DareWin conference, helping out at Planet Nature, and taking care of three kids, he hasn’t had the time. Two hours before I leave for the airport, he declares himself ready to give me specifics.
“This is very insane,” Schnöller says, repeating his favorite word. “And it’s very hard to understand at first, so you must be patient.”
Schnöller tells me that scientists know that dolphins use first-name signature whistles to identify themselves in pods, and that they use pod-specific dialects to identify where they’ve come from and who they’re traveling with. Whether dolphins and whales use echolocation clicks as some form of sophisticated language is still a mystery. This is one of the things DareWin hopes to figure out.
But beyond aural communication, Schnöller believes these cetaceans also share a visual language, something called holographic communication. This nonverbal form of communication allows cetaceans to share fully rendered three-dimensional images with other cetaceans, the same way you might snap a photograph on your smartphone and send it to a friend. Schnöller believes cetaceans can share what they’re thinking and seeing with one another without ever opening their ears, or their eyes.
Holographic communication sounds far-fetched, but it’s not that much of a stretch compared to what cetaceans have already been doing for some fifty million years. Schnöller believes that, since cetaceans can already construct sonographic images from sounds, they might be able to replicate these images and send them elsewhere.
This concept isn’t new. In 1974, a Russian scientist, V. A. Kozak, proposed that sperm whales used a video-acoustic system that enabled them to translate the echolocation information into images. Lilly believed sperm whales use sonographic images to communicate, but neither he nor Kozak ever tested the hypothesis.
In the year following the Réunion conference, DareWin researchers plan to conduct the first scientific tests of holographic communication using wild dolphins and sperm whales.
“This is how it will work,” Schnöller says, pulling a chair up to the kitchen table. He takes a pen from his pocket, flips my notebook open to a blank page, and starts drawing dolphin figures surrounded by what look like billows of smoke. That smoke represents sound, he says; the circle beneath each dolphin’s head represents the melon.
Sound doesn’t travel in a straight line, the way it looks on a spectrogram, but instead expands in three dimensions, like a mist. Unlike ears (which process sound from two channels), the cetacean melon has the equivalent of thousands of channels that can collect this mist from all directions. “The melon is just like a sonogram,” Schnöller says. “Only it’s in very high definition.”
For humans to perceive sonographic images through echolocation isn’t easy. Scientists would need to construct an artificial melon filled with thousands of little microphones to mimic the tiny receptors, then build a computer capable of processing all the data collected. Few scientists have the interest or funds for such a venture.
Schnöller and Markus Fix, DareWin’s lead engineer, are instead building a low-fi version of the cetacean melon out of a panel of ten hydrophones wired in series. “The image will be very low quality—like a ten-pixel image on a computer,” says Schnöller. “But it might be enough to give us an idea.” Schnöller plans to record the “sonar images”—basically, the echo of dolphin and sperm whale clicks—then process this sound through software, and play it out of a panel of thirty-nine speakers to gauge the dolphins’ reaction. “We have to be careful, you kn
ow,” he says. “We don’t want to send a picture that is negative or violent.”
Through this primitive visual exchange, Schnöller hopes to make the initial steps of contact with these animals. We’ll see how they view the world, then we’ll send pictures of our world back to them, the way two ancient travelers from different lands might have drawn symbols in the sand.
BY 6:00 P.M., THE SHADOWS OF THE bamboo bunch outside the rental have grown long, and the sun is low and lazy-looking on the horizon. The mosquitoes are out. It’s time for me to pack for my thirty-six-hour flight home.
Before I leave, Schnöller mentions that he’s planning a DareWin expedition to record sperm whale clicks with some new equipment that he hopes will help with his holographic research. The team will leave in about four months.
I can come under one condition: I must learn to freedive.
−2,500
ERIC PINON IS SHORT AND narrow, with sleepy eyes, thinning hair, and a meticulously trimmed Fu Manchu mustache. On land, he walks softly, speaks with a slight stutter, and his demeanor verges on meek. But get Pinon in water and he will destroy you. He once speared an eighty-two-pound giant kingfish—stabbed it in the gut at six stories deep—chased it into a cave, rammed his hands inside its gills, and rode it to the surface like a bucking bronco. He can hold his breath for more than five minutes and dive to depths below a hundred and fifty feet.
But Pinon didn’t drive three hundred miles from his home in Miami, Florida, to a concrete-block classroom in Tampa to teach us how to kill things in the ocean. He wants to show us how to survive in it.
Thirty years ago, Pinon died. He was freediving with some friends near a pier in the Caribbean and wanted to impress the group with an extra-long breath-hold. So he dove down ten feet, grabbed a pylon, closed his eyes, and tried to stay there as long as he could. Minutes passed. Somewhere along the way, he blacked out. Eventually, his body floated to the surface; he unconsciously exhaled all the air from his lungs, and then he inhaled water and sank like a stone back down to the seafloor.