The Odyssey of KP2

by Terrie M. Williams

  “Do you think he is smart enough for this?” I queried Beau before he began training KP2 for the experiments.

  “He has shown me that the only limitations he has are the ones that I place on him.” There was no question in the trainer’s mind.

  I considered the words high praise coming from someone who was used to training dolphins, purportedly the most intelligent of marine mammals. Personally, I have always been uncomfortable when people ask me which animal I think is the most intelligent. To me all animals from dogs to dolphins to seals and sea otters seem intelligent in their own unique ways. Furthermore, I find it impossible to define intelligence without an IQ test specific for each species. What would be considered a mark of intelligence for humans is not necessarily valuable for the survival of an animal in the wild, just as standard tests designed for the general population could not predict the street smarts of a gang member.

  Admittedly, dolphins have proportionately larger brains when compared to other mammals. People have naturally linked this morphological characteristic to intelligence. Based purely on weight, the bottlenose dolphin brain is one of the biggest, averaging 1,600 grams (3.5 pounds). By comparison, adult human brains are slightly smaller, at 1,350 grams (3.0 pounds). If big brains equals smart, then dolphins clearly trump people.

  A fairer comparison, however, is to account for the differences in body size accompanying those brains. Here we use the encephalization quotient (EQ), a measure of relative brain size determined from the ratio between actual brain mass and predicted brain mass based on the size of the animal. Using these calculations, we see a slightly different picture. The EQ of bottlenose dolphins is 4.1—that is, their brains are more than four times the size that would have been predicted based on body size alone. This compares to 2.6 for the killer whale and 2.5 for chimpanzees. Dogs, cats, and seals have EQs that range from 1.0 to 1.4. By far the champion is the human, with an average EQ of 7.0. Thus, pound for pound the dolphin is second only to humans when it comes to braininess, with the seal much farther down the list.

  Determining how much of the big dolphin brain is actually relegated to computing power is a different problem. A bigger computer doesn’t necessarily mean faster or more intelligent processing; that depends on internal chips and wiring. For dolphins a large portion of their brain wiring is dedicated to processing sonar information. This unique sensory capability would be akin to humans having X-ray vision. Brain power is certainly needed for this task, although science has offered no clear answers as to what proportion of the brain is involved.

  It took a Navy experiment in Kaneohe Bay designed to measure Primo’s brawn, not his brain, that changed my perspective regarding the intelligence of dolphins. The research task was an evaluation of the dolphin’s heart rate during swimming. The Navy needed a report on the exercise capabilities of their aquatic watchdogs before they could deploy them on long-distance mine-hunting missions. I decided to use the same exercise testing methods developed for Olympic athletes, with a few modifications for dolphins.

  For months my research team trained Primo to swim next to a moving boat, chasing it the way a dog chases a car. Our racecourse was the deep channel of Kaneohe Bay. With a boat driver, a trainer with a bucketful of fish, and Primo at our side, my crew and I spent our days cruising the blue waters training the dolphin for his physical fitness test. Often we discovered schools of brightly colored tropical fish along the way, and passed boats filled with tourists who screamed in delight. These excursions were truly the most delightful days for the dolphin and me.

  On a beautiful clear Hawaiian day with calm, flat seas, we were finally ready for Primo’s big test. To measure his heart rate, I had bought a $3,000 instrument that was so new to science that it was not even available on the market. The instrument consisted of a tiny microprocessor that fit inside a waterproof metal tube measuring six inches long and one inch in diameter. Two wires leading from one end of the tube connected to suction cups. When the suction cups were positioned on the skin on either side of the dolphin’s chest, the instrument was able to record the electrocardiograph signals from his heart. The tiny high-tech instrument worked in the same manner as the beeping machine in an emergency ward monitors a patient’s cardiac rhythm. This time the technology was going for a swim in the open ocean to record every beat of Primo’s heart.

  With a roar of the outboard motors we took off for the racecourse, giving Primo a short warm-up sprint before his official test. Once the dolphin and our boat had reached the deepwater channel, we stopped to outfit Primo with his heart rate monitor. Primo had practiced wearing the suction cups and the nylon harness carrying the microprocessor in his home pen. He was a pro and floated easily next to the skiff as we positioned the two body straps around his midsection and shoulders and pushed the suction cups onto his skin.

  With a toss of a fish into his waiting smiling mouth, we were off.

  “We’ll start with a slow five-minute cruise at four knots,” I instructed the boat driver. This was an easy walk for the dolphin, who swam smoothly next to our boat. I made notes, pleased with the session.

  “Okay, now six knots for the next five minutes.” The boat driver put the boat into cruise mode. Again Primo stayed by our side, fluking and breathing steadily as he swam. There was little doubt that he was working to keep up at this rate, which was equivalent to a moderate jog for the dolphin. I also noticed that turbulent bubbles were beginning to form around the harness straps. This was new and I hoped that the straps wouldn’t fail. The dolphin’s body was so well streamlined that we never saw turbulent wakes when he swam even at high speeds. The straps were clearly changing Primo’s hydrodynamic advantage.

  Regardless, the dolphin was holding steady, so I upped the speed to the equivalent of a dolphin run. “Eight knots!” I screamed over the roar of the outboard motors. This time the dolphin arched his dorsal fin out of the water to catch us and tried to ride on our bow wave. This was akin to cheating on his fitness test.

  “Oh, no. No free rides!” I corrected the dolphin and he repositioned himself in the open water. Bubbles were now streaming off the straining harness as Primo swam. The water pressure was so great that one of the straps had twisted, but the suction cups were still in place. At one point, Primo swam up next to the boat, spiraled, and gave me a sideways glance. I never thought of dolphins as being able to change their facial expression. But if I could have interpreted his glance, it unmistakably said, “I’m getting tired of this.” Despite the look, Primo kept swimming in proper position.

  Encouraged by the dolphin’s performance and the heart rate monitor, I shouted, “Let’s try a sprint! Nine knots!” This time Primo leaped high, clearing the water completely with the harness and monitor wires dragging a wave of water with him.

  All of a sudden the dolphin disappeared behind us. As I turned around to find him, our outboard motor coughed as the propellers jammed. We had caught onto something and I was horrified.

  “Stop! Stop the boat!” I yelled. “We’ve hit Primo!”

  We surfed on our own diminishing wake, coming to a bobbing halt in the water with no dolphin in sight. I frantically looked for any sign of Primo or blood. The pit of my stomach cramped. Water slapped the gunnels as we used binoculars to scan the horizon looking for the spray of a dolphin breath. The trainer tried banging Primo’s food bucket on the side of the boat. No response.

  Several nerve-racking minutes passed, and I cursed myself for asking so much from the dolphin. Then slowly a gray head emerged at the stern of the boat.

  “Primo!” I shouted in relief. The dolphin came alongside our boat carrying something in his mouth. Immediately I realized that it was his heart rate harness. He spit the bundle of nylon straps, wires, metal, and a suction cup into his trainer’s hands.

  “What the heck, Primo?” The trainer handed the tangled mess to me, apologizing. “I’m sorry. Looks like we’re finished for today
.” He did a quick inspection of the dolphin, who appeared no worse for the experience. In fact, Primo did a couple of victory laps around our boat as if to say, “Now I’ll show you how fast I can really swim.”

  On the way back to the dolphin pens, as Primo leaped and played in the boat’s wake, I untangled the mess that was once my $3,000 dolphin heart rate monitor. It didn’t take long to piece together what had happened. With remarkable aquatic precision, Primo had used the outboard motor propeller to cut off the harness and the monitor. While the dolphin escaped without a mark, he managed to slice through the nylon webbing and cut the suction cup wires. In addition, the metal casing of the microprocessor had three propeller strikes on it that destroyed the instrument.

  I couldn’t be mad—it was all too incredible. Instead, I marveled at the intelligence of the unencumbered dolphin swimming with ease next to me.

  When I hooked the heart rate microprocessor to a computer, I found that the data was intact. It revealed how dolphins lowered their heart rates when bow wave riding. I wrote a paper on our serendipitous discovery, which was turned into a lead article in the international scientific journal Nature. Primo in all his leaping glory was the cover boy on the issue headlined “Why Dolphins Hitch a Ride.” Primo didn’t ruin my science. Instead, he had demonstrated that my hypothesis was wrong.

  • • •

  I’VE KEPT the battered microprocessor monitor casing on my desk as a reminder of instinct versus intelligence in animals, and I took Primo’s scientific lesson to heart. Since that incident, as well as those with Austin and many other creatures, I’ve relied on animals to lead my science instead of the reverse. It would be the same with KP2, and it was guaranteed to be much more interesting than I ever could have imagined.

  14.

  Breath by Breath

  There were so many pressing questions that needed to be answered for Hawaiian monk seals. Were there enough fish in the oceans around the Hawaiian Islands to satisfy both the monk seals’ and human appetites? Was climate change impacting the ability of Hawaiian monk seals to survive? Why were so many young seals dying? And most important, would we learn the answers fast enough to keep this incredibly unique tropical species from disappearing forever?

  The first experiment I had in mind was not a fancy, high-tech molecular showstopper. Instead it was a time-tested 1940s technique with a few variations to accommodate KP2’s aquatic habits. We were going to measure the seal’s metabolism as he rested in water. Just as our own metabolism determines how much each of us needs to eat and dictates whether ingested calories go to heat or onto our hips, KP2’s resting metabolic rate would indicate the minimum number of fish it takes to sustain a monk seal. With that one number I could begin to match the monk seal’s metabolic needs to the fish available in the Hawaiian Islands. I knew this was literally entering into very dangerous waters, for the answer could very well pit the livelihood of Hawaiian fishermen against the survival of Hawaii’s monk seals.

  There was no predicting what we would find. By living in warm waters, the Hawaiian monk seal was different from any other phocid seal. They were the only pinniped living in the islands, and I wondered if the tropical seal species had set its thermostat on low in comparison to temperate-living or polar-living seals, which needed to digest lots of fish to keep warm.

  • • •

  FOR KP2’S FIRST EXPERIMENTS, we created a spa pool and metabolic chamber next to the big sealarium pool. We scavenged an old plastic tub and mounted a skylight dome on top to create the airtight chamber. By adjusting warm salt water and ice we were able to simulate Hawaiian temperatures in the spa, from the coldest that occurs below the oceanic thermocline, where monk seals dive for fish, to the warmest waters that make shallow tropical lagoons feel like a Jacuzzi. To ensure that we didn’t train KP2 to ramp up his metabolism in anticipation of a particular temperature, Traci randomized the spa water temperatures; every test day would be a surprise for the seal and for me.

  All we needed was KP2’s cooperation. As much as the young seal seemed to thrive on the human attention, he had other ideas when it came to joining us at the spa pool and sitting still. There were many days in the beginning of his science training when I could not tell if I was asking too much of the seal, if he was playing the obstinate two-year-old, or if he was just not that bright.

  For weeks Traci and Beau tried to get KP2 to understand the research task before him. I’d watch from the sidelines as over and over again the young seal played in the spa like it was his private bathtub. We could barely see the seal for all his splashing.

  “Are you sure he can do this?” I repetitively queried the trainers every few days, convinced that we had finally met our match in KP2. Puka and Primo, as well as Wick, Morgan, and Taylor, had all figured out the metabolic game. The dolphins and the sea otters quickly learned to float quietly on the water, enthusiastically reaping all the fish rewards for being asked to do so little. KP2, with his boundless energy, scuttled every attempt at science.

  His first day in the spa he dove with his tail stuck up in the air and hind flippers whirling. He explored every inch of the small pool, circling and splashing until he’d created a whirlpool. He sniffed and dove, constantly looking for something to butt his head against or chew on. When tired of exploring the bottom of the pool, he came to the surface to roll upside down with his belly button exposed. Then with a snort he performed a somersault. KP2’s fun time repertoire seemed endless.

  “Hoa, give it a rest . . . please?” After several weeks Beau was on his knees in front of the spa practically begging the whirling seal to calm down. This was not a position any animal trainer wanted to be in. Once you resorted to pleading, you’d lost the game. KP2 had effectively demoted Beau to one of those dog owners being dragged down the street on the end of a leash imploring, “Stop, Cookie, stop!” Unfortunately, I had placed Beau in this terrible predicament. He was stuck between KP2 with all his two-year-old energy and me with my demanding research schedule.

  Beau sighed but appeased me by lowering the dome on top of the spa and splashing seal. For a brief moment the seal stopped moving.

  “There—see? All he needed was a little distraction,” I gloated, and began taking oxygen measurements from the dome air outlet. With fresh air pumping in through a hose, KP2 became fascinated with the stream of air on his whiskers and face at the inlet. All too soon, the seal had his muzzle jammed into the end of the hose. The vacuum pump supplying the air at two hundred liters per minute screeched. I could hear the motors strain and smelled the burning of bushings. With KP2’s muzzle wedged in the hose, the pump began to create a vacuum in the dome and the water rose quickly.

  “Stop! He’s going to flood the pump!” I yelled. In an instant, Traci had the skylight dome raised, and the water receded. KP2 watched all the frantic activity around him with the same nonchalant expression he had in Hawaii when he was the center of chaos at the Kaunakakai Wharf. As the commotion finally settled, the seal looked up at us and rumbled a robust “brrrrauughhrrr!” He informed my team that it was time for his breakfast.

  We were getting nowhere. But I had seen it all before, and from a much more formidable marine mammal than the young seal. The most creative and one of the most intelligent animals that I’d placed under a metabolic dome was Shouka, the female killer whale from Six Flags Discovery Kingdom in Vallejo, California. At six thousand pounds, she was the biggest animal I’d ever tried to measure.

  For Shouka, the skylight dome was fittingly huge—over eight feet long on either side and four feet in height. It took two people to maneuver the dome into the killer whale’s pool. We used several Sears shop vacs plumbed in series to pull over five hundred liters of air per minute through the giant dome to accommodate the size of Shouka’s explosive whale exhalations.

  Almost immediately Shouka had begun inventing games during our metabolic experiments. First she developed a habit of sticking her
massive pink tongue out to lick a plastic float meant as a chin rest. Then Shouka chomped down, crushing the white float, ripping it from the post, and tossing it to the feet of her startled trainers. In the following sessions the killer whale began to spit water from her blowhole, coating the inside of the dome with orca gusto. When not spitting, she began humming. The sound grew louder and then shifted into the high-pitched “eeeeeeee” groan of a creaking door opening slowly. There were squeaks and rumbles, creaks and pops, whistles and hums.

  Through it all, we kept monitoring the whale’s metabolism and discovered that there was a measurable energetic cost to orca vocalizations. That finding had immense implications for wild killer whales that vocalized when disturbed by ship traffic. Several years later, scientists from the National Marine Fisheries Service used this information to conduct a larger study regarding the effects of boat traffic noise on killer whales and their impact on the salmon populations of Puget Sound. Without ever refusing a session, Shouka had changed the course of killer whale science.

  It was this type of surprise that made animals so fascinating to study. As frustrating as it was for Beau and Traci, I knew that if we were patient with KP2, he would eventually show us something amazing. It didn’t take him long to prove me right.

  • • •

  ONE DAY, SIX WEEKS LATER, Beau and Traci called me down to the spa pool.

  “Water,” Beau called cheerily to KP2. The seal immediately hauled out of his sealarium pool, inchwormed his way down a connecting walkway, and slipped in his typical molasses ooze over the edge of the spa pool. He took a quick look around underwater and then popped his head up, waiting for the next challenge.

  “Chin,” Beau instructed KP2. The seal gently set his chin on a bar in front of him and closed his eyes, resting peaceably.

  The first time I saw this I was astounded.