by James Nestor
The Earth’s magnetic field ranges between twenty-five and sixty-five microteslas, about four times less than the field used in the experiment. Whether the subtle magnetic field of the Earth would be strong enough to make the human brain sense direction, though, nobody knows. However, the results of the experiment were significant enough to provoke the Western Ontario researchers to comment: “Magnetoreception may be more common than presently thought.”
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[>] French world champion freediver Audrey Mestre: Many blamed Mestre’s death on husband Ferreras, who was responsible for filling the air tank on the sled. According to a close friend and freediver partner, Carlos Serra, Ferreras was jealous of his wife’s success and the two were on the brink of divorce. Serra and others speculated that Ferreras might have intentionally left the tank empty. Some crew members even recalled asking Ferreras repeatedly before the dive if he’d filled the tank, to which Ferreras repeatedly answered that he had. Even today, many freedivers put much of the blame for Mestre’s death on Ferreras. Ferreras has always maintained his innocence. Authorities in the Dominican Republic absolved him of any crime. A year after Mestre’s death, Ferreras made his own no-limits dive to 561 feet.
[>] dive to depths below 2,400 feet: Irving learned Weddell seals were so adapted to diving that they seemed to gain oxygen from the water the deeper they dove. “From these various accounts, we can conclude that certain mammals have a capacity to resist asphyxia which far exceed the ability of man, and, as a matter of fact, exceed the capacity which we would expect on the basis of oxygen stored.”
[>] Some claimed the ama could stay underwater for fifteen minutes at a time: Later scientific investigation in the twentieth century only deepened the mystery. When Dr. Gito Terouka, a director of Japan’s Institute for Science of Labour, came to monitor working conditions in Japan’s southeastern coast he was dumbfounded by the ama’s diving ability. He watched as an ama dove to depths below eighty-five feet for two minutes at a time. Even in winter, each ama wore only a thin cotton skirt, though the seawater crept below 50 degrees. To Terouka, a medical doctor by training, it seemed impossible. The pressure at eighty-five feet down was almost four times that of the surface, enough to crush human organs and collapse the lungs. Further, the ama should have been suffering from hypothermia within the first hour. And yet they weren’t. For hours, every day, for decades, the ama dove to extreme depths in frigid temperatures and enjoyed, for the most part, perfectly good health. Some ama even dove into their seventies and eighties. Terouka conducted a number of tests on the ama. He probed them, prodded them, and measured their inhalations and exhalations before and after deep dives, looking for some kind of clue to their apparent amphibious powers. His paper “Die Ama und ihre Arbeit,” published in German in 1932, was the first-ever scientific review of breath-hold diving. It offered more questions than answers. The ama’s myth only grew.
In the 1940s the Nazis, inspired by Terouka’s work, conducted tests of their own on the human body’s adaptability underwater. Replicating the ama’s daily dive schedule, the Nazis plunged naked victims into ice-cold water for hours and monitored the molecular, physiological, and behavioral changes that took place. They tested recovery time by throwing victims directly from the ice-cold water into boiling water, exposing hypothermic victims to extreme heat, and injecting them with serums. They deprived victims of oxygen until they passed out, had them breathe mixed gases, carbon dioxide, and more. Most of the data from these grotesque experiments was later destroyed. The little that remained was deemed inconclusive.
Perhaps the real discovery was what Terouka and the Nazis didn’t find. They didn’t find the ama themselves were special in any way beyond having slightly larger lungs than the average woman and a little more fat to insulate against the cold water. They didn’t find any genetic aberration or amphibious trait in their bodies. It was something else entirely, a secret that even today scientists are just at the cusp of truly understanding.
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[>] other cetaceans have x-ray vision: In the early 1940s, Arthur McBride, the curator of a marine park in St. Augustine, Florida, heard about this research and began to suspect that dolphins, whose behavior he observed extensively as part of his job, might echolocate as well. He kept a detailed record of his observations for a decade, but he died in 1950 before he could categorically prove that echolocation existed among dolphins.
Winthrop Kellogg, an American psychologist, continued McBride’s work. He gathered two dolphins and placed them in a pool. In the middle of the pool, Kellogg had installed a large net with a hole at each end just large enough for a dolphin to fit through. Kellogg watched as the dolphins easily located the holes and briskly swam back and forth through them. At random, he closed off one of the holes with a piece of clear Plexiglas, which was invisible underwater. Kellogg moved the Plexiglas from one hole to the next. The dolphins had no idea which hole would be covered; underwater, the two holes also looked exactly the same. Yet they chose the Plexiglas-free opening ninety-eight out of a hundred times.
To Kellogg, these experiments proved that dolphins were using something other than vision to navigate, and it was probably echolocation. But others wondered if dolphins just had really good eyesight and could see a reflection of the Plexiglas underwater. In 1960, Kenneth Norris, a zoologist from the University of California, Los Angeles, proved dolphin echolocation once and for all.
He built a maze of vertical pipes in a swimming pool, each separated by only a few feet. Next, he brought in a dolphin and stuck rubber suction cups over its eyes. The cups were an effective blindfold, completely cutting off the animal’s vision. Norris released the temporarily blinded dolphin into the swimming pool. It shot through the water, nimbly avoiding the pipes. Norris then threw a fish in the maze. The dolphin immediately swam between the pipes, located the fish, and ate it. During the fifty-eight experiments, the blinded dolphin did not collide with a single pipe. Norris had proved not only the existence but the remarkable accuracy of dolphin echolocation.
[>] equivalent of a human talking on the phone while chatting online: Lilly said of the experiment, “They can be talking with whistles and talking with click trains, the whistles and the clicks completely out of phase with one another. They can be using the silence of the whistle exchange with the click exchange and filling the silences of click exchange with the whistle exchange, in this each are polite in their same mode. Thus one pair of dolphins talking can sound like two pairs of dolphins talking, one pair exchanging clicking, the other pair exchanging whistles.” (See Lilly and Miller, “Vocal Exchanges Between Dolphins.”)
[>] cracking the cetacean language code in the next few years: As Kuczaj and I nibble on croissants and wait for the rest of the crew to arrive, he fills me in on more of the star-crossed history of dolphin-language research. Around the time Lilly opened CRI, the U.S. Navy hired three scientists to work with the U.S. Naval Undersea Warfare Center to create a machine that could translate human speech to dolphin whistles and back again. They named it the Man/Dolphin Communication Project. By 1964, the project’s team, led by Dr. Dwight Wayne Batteau, a professor of physics and mechanical engineering at Harvard, was running trials on two dolphins, Puka and Maui, inside a secret laboratory in Hawaii. The machine, called a man-dolphin translator, worked like this: Batteau would speak an English word into a mike and the audio signal from the microphone would translate the word into a matching dolphin whistle, which would be broadcast through an underwater speaker into a pool outside the laboratory. When Puka and Maui responded, the translator would work in reverse, processing the whistle into a matching English word.
Patrick Flanagan, one of the scientists working with Batteau, claimed that the man-dolphin translator could successfully process thirty-five shared words between dolphins and humans. With the learned vocabulary, Puka and Maui were able to create simple sentences and respond to questions. Flanagan predicted that, within ten years, the team would establish a five-hundred-word shar
ed vocabulary. In 1967, the team finished the research and were preparing a final report. They wrote that the project had successfully established verbal communication between humans and dolphins, and Batteau insisted that the project continue and the shared vocabulary be expanded. His claim made national news, and Harvard invited Batteau to give a lecture on his research. Unfortunately, before the final report was filed, he was found dead at a beach outside his house. The coroner’s report said the cause of death was asphyxia due to drowning. To some, it was suspicious; Batteau was an excellent swimmer and had been in perfect health. The U.S. Naval Undersea Warfare Center shut down the Man/Dolphin Communication Project and classified all records. Most records of the projects have since disappeared.
Patrick Flanagan, who in 1961 was recognized by Life magazine as “one of the 100 most important young men and women in the United States,” went on to study the mystical power of pyramids. He now sells face lotion and a water additive called Crystal Energy that he claims turns tap water into an elixir that can promote health and longevity. His YouTube videos garner hundreds of thousands of views.
By the 1980s, two scientists at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow claimed to have identified more than three hundred thousand units of communication shared by dolphins. In one report, the lead scientist, Vladimir I. Markov, wrote that dolphins exchanged information through a wide range of acoustic signals, similar to a tonal language like Cantonese. These signals were organized like human language and included phonemes, which the dolphins combined into syllables, then words, and finally full sentences. Dolphins, Markov reported, had an alphabet consisting of fifty-one pulsed sounds and nine natural tonal whistles. His 1990 paper “Organization of the Communication System in Tursiops truncatus montagu” was published to little fanfare. The next year, the Soviet Union dissolved, and funding for Markov’s communication projects dried up. Markov himself went off the map.
In the past three decades, research into dolphin communication has largely been co-opted by the New Age movement. Websites make spurious claims that dolphin echolocation can heal chronic depression, reverse Down syndrome, and correct various degenerative diseases. Dolphin-guided swims have become a multimillion-dollar business, even as dolphin communication research has become a fringe science.
The few legitimate researchers in the field are often forced to work outside academic or government institutions, raising their own money. Not many of them bother. One who has is Dr. Denise Herzing, a marine biologist who’s been studying dolphins for two decades. For the past fifteen years, she has spent six months annually in the Bahamas trying to create a new dolphin-English translator. In 2011, she enlisted the help of artificial intelligence engineers at Georgia Tech. The prototype for the system, called Cetacean Hearing and Telemetry (CHAT), has so far failed in all its lab and field trials.
[>] neither he nor Kozak ever tested the hypothesis: In 2010, Jack Kassewitz, a freelance dolphin scientist in Florida, claimed to have proved holographic communication by recording a dolphin echolocating against a triangular object and then playing the recording back to another dolphin, which immediately recognized the signal and fetched the triangular object from the seafloor. Kassewitz has yet to submit any details of his experiment to the scientific community. One researcher I talked to dismissed him as a “well-intentioned New Age dreamer.”
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[>] live below three thousand feet: Nobody can agree on the actual numbers of undiscovered species in the ocean—or on land—because nobody knows. The numbers I used here were gathered from The Deep, by Claire Nouvian, and 2012 presentation slides provided by Bruce Robison, research division chair at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. A 2011 study published in PLOS Biology (http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001127) suggests that there are only about 500,000 to 1,000,000 undiscovered species in the ocean, not including viruses and bacteria (which are nearly impossible to count). The Census of Marine Life Scientists (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110823180459.htm) argues that there are 6.5 million species on land (86 percent of which are undiscovered) and the percentage of these species at depths below three thousand feet is not known, mostly because humans have investigated less than 1 percent of this area. On average, 50 to 90 percent of the specimens pulled up from nets at depths below three thousand feet are unidentified specimens, and, in most cases, new to science.
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[>] surprising similarities between the two species: But size isn’t everything. There are multiple factors that affect intelligence, including complexity of the cortex and presence of particular brain cells, such as spindle cells. Because most of an animal’s brain is relegated to overseeing bodily functions, scientists in the 1960s argued that a more accurate gauge of intelligence is the proportion of brain to body mass. The thinking here is that the more body mass an animal has, the more brain it will need for bodily functions; any excess of brain mass would then most likely be used for higher-level thinking and thus could suggest higher intelligence. The calculation they created to compare brain to body mass was called the encephalization quotient, or EQ. An EQ of 1 means the animal has an average amount of brain for the body mass it is controlling. Humans have the highest EQ, around 7. That makes the human brain about seven times larger than would be expected given body size. Our cousins the chimpanzees have an EQ of about 2.5. Dogs don’t fare as well, with an EQ of 1.7. Cats weigh in at an EQ of 1—exactly average. While the bottle-nosed dolphin scores an impressive 4.2 (the second highest of all animals), the sperm whale comes in at a dismal 0.3—about 30 percent of what you’d expect to find in an animal of its size. The same EQ as a rabbit.
However, more recent research suggests that the EQ is an inferior measure of gauging potential intelligence compared to whole brain size and the ways in which an animal’s brain evolved. Critics of the EQ point to animals such as the whale shark, which can grow up to forty feet long and weigh as much as forty-seven thousand pounds and yet has a brain the size of 36 grams, giving it an EQ of just .45. And then there are birds, which have extremely small brains but have demonstrated remarkable cognitive functions, including communication and tool use. Other animals, such as jellyfish, have no brain at all but know how to hunt, mate, and function in environments under extreme stress.
When I discussed the merits of the EQ with Stan Kuczaj, he summed it up by saying: “We simply don’t know how the brain works well enough to make any of these assumptions with any of these equations at this time.”
[>] “these are extremely intelligent animals”: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10661-whales-boast-the-brain-cells-that-make-us-human.html.
[>] sperm whale language may be digital: While creaks are used strictly for short-range echolocation, usually within an area of a few thousand feet, regular echolocation and social clicks can extend for tens or hundreds of miles. Low-frequency, slow sperm whale clicks may even carry from one side of the planet to the other along something called the SOFAR (sound fixing and ranging channel)—a depth of two thousand to four thousand feet where sound can travel great distances without dissipating. It’s the same basic effect as speaking into a tin can connected by a string to another can.
In the 1950s, the U.S. Navy sunk hydrophones down to the SOFAR channel to listen in on distant enemy submarines. Along with hearing sub noises, engineers started picking up strange moaning sounds, which they named the Jezebel Monster, after the name of the top-secret sub-surveillance project they were running. It wasn’t a monster at all but the vocalizations of blue and fin whales. Whales, it appeared, had been using the SOFAR channel to keep in contact with one another hundreds, perhaps thousands, of miles apart.
Later, in the 1990s, an international group of scientists collaborated to construct a giant telescope and sink it eight thousand feet below the ocean’s surface, off the coast of Toulon, France. The telescope, called Antares, was designed to detect the neutrinos, subatomic particles that the scientists believed could help them unde
rstand black holes and dark matter. When Antares was deployed in 2008, the first things it picked up weren’t neutrinos but whale songs. It turned out that whales had evolved to transmit vocalizations across the deep ocean at the same superefficient wavelength that enables subatomic particles to traverse millions of miles through deep space.
[>] the whale’s body on a south-facing beach: For what it’s worth (probably not much to most of you), the events of the Hussey legend, now centuries old, don’t jibe with historical fact. Historians argue that, per the records, at that time, “Christopher Hussy” would have been either a six-year-old boy or twenty years deceased. They suspect the Hussey of legend was probably one of Christopher’s grandsons. But nobody really knows.
[>] about 20 percent of the total population: Ellis, The Great Sperm Whale.
[>] cetacean research feels like a race against time: These figures taken from the 2005 documentary A Life Among Whales (IndiePix Films, 2009).
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[>] “there’s all these animals down here”: Kaharl, Water Baby.
Bibliography
Anderson, Kelly. “Inside Windfall Films’ ‘Sperm Whale.’” Realscreen.com, August 5, 2011. http://realscreen.com/2011/08/05/inside-windfall-films-sperm-whale/.
Ashcroft, Frances. Life at the Extremes: The Science of Survival. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
———. The Spark of Life: Electricity in the Human Body. New York: W. W. Norton, 2012.