The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2013

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

  “The combined effect of Sebeok’s Clever Hans Conference and Terrace’s Science paper,” Sue Savage-Rumbaugh later wrote,

  was . . . to instigate an extremely rapid and violent swing of the pendulum. Ape-language research went from being a field of perceived intellectual excitement and public acclaim to one that, at best, should be viewed askance. Suddenly, it became extremely difficult to have research papers reviewed, let alone published. And funding for most of the major projects virtually dried up.

  The end of Project Nim marked the end of an incautious but intensely curious open-mindedness in the culture of science that was probably reflective of a change in culture at large: free-spiritedness was out, and the skeptical, cynical eighties were in. Jenny Lee’s remark (“It was the seventies”) not only calls attention to the look of the film—all the grainy and garishly colorful footage of chimp caretakers, knee socks, bell-bottoms, and sideburns—but also suggests that this story could not have happened in the way it did at any other time. The backdrop of hedonistic abandon behind this story may strike a viewer today as humorous or appalling. One wonders how much serious scientific inquiry was going on in an environment in which everyone was in bed with everyone, and Nim was plied with booze and pot right from infancy. To watch a chimpanzee puffing on a joint is disquieting, in equal measures funny and disturbing. We enjoy mocking that sliver of biological difference between us and chimpanzees. Yet anyone who has ever looked with curiosity and respect into the face of a chimpanzee has seen a presence there. If we abandon the notion that language is necessarily the bedfellow of consciousness, we get a better understanding of ourselves, while our relationship to the other beings we share this planet with becomes more enlightened, more humble, and more humane.

  TIM ZIMMERMANN

  Talk to Me

  FROM Outside

  STRETCHING NORTH AND east from Grand Bahama Island, the Little Bahama Bank is a vast, crescent-shaped undersea plateau of sugar-white sand, patchy seagrass, and isolated coral reefs, layered under a shallow veneer of translucent water. It sits just 60 miles east of West Palm Beach, across the Gulf Stream. Yet despite its proximity to the condo sprawl of Florida, it is another world, a wild seascape of endlessly changing water and light, fast-moving thunderstorms, and teeming bird and sea life.

  My first contact with its alien underwater culture involved a snorkel, a mask, and fins. I dropped into the 83-degree sea, and on the periphery of my vision six sleek shapes wheeled and turned, gliding with perfect ease. Three were larger and mottled with spots. The others were colored a smooth, gunmetal gray. One broke formation and arrowed my way, scanning me with a sophisticated sensor system. I heard a high-pitched buzz that sounded like a zipper being ripped open and could feel a light vibration in my chest. As the creature shot past, it rolled slightly to make direct and steady eye contact.

  The scientific name for the species is Stenella frontalis. The more common name is the Atlantic spotted dolphin. There is a group of about a hundred of them living near the western edge of the Little Bahama Bank, and for the past twenty-eight years Denise Herzing, a marine-mammal biologist in her midfifties, has devoted her life to learning about them and their culture. Since 1985, she has spent close to one hundred days every summer here, enduring baking sun and nosy sharks so she can observe their wild society. At this point, she recognizes about sixty of the dolphins by sight. (The others she identifies using her photo catalog.)

  Over the years, Herzing has had close to 2,500 encounters with these dolphins and spent some 1,500 hours in the water with them, accumulating research for the Wild Dolphin Project, a nonprofit in Jupiter, Florida, that she founded in 1985. She has an extensive video and sound library of the clicks and whistles the dolphins use to communicate. She has also learned intimate details about their complex world—how males form tight coalitions and cruise the waters like scrappy gangs; how young females babysit calves to prepare for motherhood; how everyone seems to have sex (or at least play at sex) with everyone. “It’s really interesting to see what’s going on in the mind of another species,” says Herzing, who is an affiliate assistant professor in the biological sciences department at Florida Atlantic University and has written or collaborated on some thirty scientific papers about the dolphins. “They have the potential to show you their world in real time.”

  Now Herzing plans to take her relationship with the spotted dolphins to an ambitious new level. She is refining a set of portable underwater communication devices that can recognize and generate dolphinlike whistles, and she plans to use them to establish two-way communication. She’ll start by exposing the dolphins to a few of the whistles, using pattern-recognition software to tell her, via earphones she’ll wear underwater, if they use them to whistle back. Herzing hopes that once the dolphins, who are skilled mimics, get the idea, they can build a communication system together. “Maybe it will lead to an extensive artificial language,” Herzing says. “But the real breakthrough would be if the dolphins introduce their own vocalizations and whistles.”

  It’s a radical goal. Herzing the scientist is trying to achieve something that has never been done before: two-way communication with a wild species. Herzing the person has a more existential aim: to open up an entirely different view of the planet and its creatures that is not so monumentally human-centric. “I think it could be our salvation,” she says. “Because if we don’t start including other creatures in the formula, there is not going to be a planet.”

  To launch this grand experiment, we will spend ten days at the Little Bahama Bank on the Stenella, the 62-foot power catamaran Herzing uses as her oceangoing research base. Herzing has two experienced dolphin researchers, two graduate students, and two computer techs on board to help her. A captain, a mate, and a cook keep the boat running smoothly so she can focus on her work. Inside, there’s a well-stocked galley, twelve bunks, a large lounge area to review video footage and log dolphin data, and generators to power the electronic gear and the air conditioner.

  We’ve dropped anchor in 14 feet of water. No dry land is visible. We are alone—save for the occasional passing boat—in a vast ocean wilderness, rocked gently by a building swell.

  Humans have always been fascinated by the idea of communicating with other species, and the past forty years have seen some impressive breakthroughs. Koko, a gorilla born in 1971 at the San Francisco Zoo, learned American Sign Language and knows more than 1,000 signs. Kanzi, a bonobo chimpanzee at the Great Ape Trust in Iowa, mastered a keyboard with more than 300 lexigrams and can understand some 3,000 words of spoken English. Alex, an African grey parrot that lived from 1976 to 2007, could vocalize about 100 English words and count to six.

  Harder to grasp is the idea that dolphins, nonprimates that live in water and have been on a separate evolutionary track from humans for 95 million years, might be capable of two-way communication. Humans and their more evolved primate cousins, it was long assumed, were unique in possessing the necessary intelligence for sophisticated communication. But the two other dolphin cognition experts aboard the Stenella—Adam Pack, forty-nine, an associate professor at the University of Hawaii, and Matthias Hoffmann-Kuhnt, forty-seven, an acoustics specialist living in Singapore—know more than most about how wrong that assumption was. They met at the University of Hawaii’s Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory, founded by Louis Herman, a psychology professor and former air force intelligence officer. From the 1970s through the 1990s, Herman masterminded a series of experiments with his bottlenose dolphins, which lived in two interconnected saltwater pools near the beach in Honolulu and demonstrated startling language and cognitive skills. Herman’s dolphins learned the meaning of more than thirty signals, including nouns and verbs. They also mastered syntax and grammar rules. If a trainer signaled “person, surfboard, fetch,” the dolphins would bring the surfboard in the tank over to the person. But if the trainer changed the order of the words and signaled “surfboard, person, fetch,” the dolphins knew to bring the person to the surfboard.

/>   The Kewalo dolphins were also able to grasp abstractions. They understood the difference between left and right, could comprehend the existence of an object even if it wasn’t present, and correctly responded to a trainer shown on a television screen, understanding that it was a representation of the real world.

  Then, a decade ago, another extraordinary fact of dolphin intelligence was established. For centuries, humanity basked in the egocentric belief that humans alone were self-aware. In the 1970s, however, Gordon Gallup Jr., a researcher at Tulane University in New Orleans, used a mirror to show that chimpanzees are also self-aware and can recognize that the image they see is not another animal but themselves. In the 1990s, Diana Reiss, now a professor of psychology at New York City’s Hunter College, in collaboration with Lori Marino, a doctoral student in Gallup’s lab, started using the mirror test on dolphins. By the way the animals acted, they, too, demonstrated that they were seeing themselves. To corroborate, Reiss used a nontoxic black marker to mark the dolphins: when one swam past the mirror for the first time with a mark on its head, Reiss says, it did a “classic double take” and immediately returned for a look. A human child starts to react to a mirror in the same way around age two.

  Published in 2001, it was a breakthrough study, and dolphins became the first nonprimate species to show evidence of self-awareness. The work affected Marino deeply. “Despite being so different in terms of how their brains are organized, and where they live and what they look like, dolphins show a surprising degree of similarity to humans in terms of the kind of self-awareness they have,” says Marino, now a senior lecturer in the neuroscience and behavioral biology program at Atlanta’s Emory University.

  Marino, who has worked with Herzing, concluded that it wasn’t ethical to keep and study such an intelligent creature in captivity and switched to using MRI and other imaging technology to analyze the size and structure of brains from dolphins that have died of natural causes. One of the simplest ways to get a sense of brain potential is the encephalization quotient, which compares real brain mass with the brain mass expected for a given body size. An EQ of 1, for example, means the brain mass is what you would expect for the body housing it. Humans have the highest measured EQ on the planet, at 7, meaning our brains are seven times larger than our body size would predict. Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, come in with an EQ of 2.3. Marino’s calculations on dolphins showed that bottlenose dolphins have an EQ of 4.2, and dolphins on average have a higher EQ than primates. In short, Marino showed that dolphins are second only to humans when it comes to brain complexity.

  Herzing, who has worked with dolphin researchers from all over the world, is respectful of captive research. But diving into the dolphins’ world is her preferred way to learn about them. (Most captive research has involved bottlenose dolphins; Herzing works with spotteds because they happen to be the dolphins she has the fullest access to in the wild.) “A captive dolphin can tell you things about its cognition,” says Adam Pack, who also studies humpback whales. “But a wild dolphin can teach you things about its culture. And to have a dolphin assist you in understanding what other dolphins are doing is an area that we haven’t ever gotten into.”

  Herzing has named each spotted dolphin at the Little Bahama Bank, using monikers like Little Gash, Linus, and Pointless (for a dolphin that lost its dorsal tip, likely to a shark). When they race in to ride the bow wave of the Stenella, she enthusiastically greets them with a wave and a whistle, grinning as they roll onto their sides to look up at her. One afternoon we watch underwater as Deni, a young female, tries to teach Cobalt, a new calf she is babysitting, how to fish. Deni uses her beak to show Cobalt how to dig a garden eel out of the sand, and then she deftly helps keep the eel in front of Cobalt as he learns to track its frantic course. Suddenly, Bijyo, a juvenile female, glides in and gulps down the eel, bringing the lesson to an abrupt and unscheduled end. Deni appears outraged, as if Bijyo has committed a serious offense against the sanctity of babysitting. She goes after Bijyo, opening her mouth in an aggressive show, and the two start twisting and turning in the water.

  Herzing, Pack, and others believe that such structured social patterns may help explain the dolphin brain. “It’s sometimes called the Machiavelli hypothesis, and it is that individuals who live in complex social groups require complex cognition,” says Stan Kuczaj, a professor of psychology at the University of Southern Mississippi, who has been out on the Stenella with Herzing. “To thrive, you have to understand what the social rules are—when you have to obey them and when you can get away with not obeying them—and who the players are.”

  The desire to better understand the dolphin brain led to efforts to communicate with the animals. Starting in the 1980s, Reiss and a few others, including Kuczaj, introduced keyboards and artificial sounds into their research. (In the late 1990s, Herzing, with Pack’s help, also attempted to use a whistling keyboard at the Little Bahama Bank, but it proved too clunky.) The captive research showed that dolphins could mimic and understand artificial whistles and would perhaps even use them on their own.

  Herzing wants to build on that work by exposing wild dolphins to artificial whistles and associating those whistles with specific toys, in the hope that the animals start using the whistles to request the toys. The holy grail would be if, over the years, the whistle vocabulary developed to a point where the “conversation” might include social needs and insights into the dolphin world, with the spotteds perhaps communicating about things like predators, family, or sex.

  “Why Denise’s work is exciting is that none of the dolphin studies have been truly two-way,” says Heidi Lyn, also a professor at the University of Southern Mississippi, who has worked with both Kanzi, the bonobo chimp, and the Kewalo dolphins. “The humans could request or the dolphins could request, but Denise is working to achieve a back-and-forth. And if the dolphins introduce their own whistles, that would be amazing.”

  On our first afternoon at the Little Bahama Bank, the Stenella is swinging to her anchor under a humid sky. Herzing, wearing a bathing suit, visor, and dark glasses, is on the back deck, preparing to test the communication equipment in the water. Everyone has to be ready to don snorkeling gear and jump in any time a dolphin appears. (Herzing doesn’t scuba-dive, because the bubbles distract the dolphins and the apparatus is too bulky for a fast gear-up.) “It’s kind of like being a fireman,” Herzing told the group during a briefing the first night. “You sit around a lot, and then there’s a sudden rush.”

  To build the underwater communication devices, Herzing partnered with the Wearable Computing Lab at Georgia Tech, which I visited with her last April. There’s no shortage of futurism there: when you step out of the elevator, two eyeballs stare at you from a screen and track you as you walk away. The lab is run by Thad Starner, a PhD in computer science from MIT who, together with a former student, developed a superfast pattern-recognition algorithm. “To really prove the value of the algorithm, we hope to use it to help Denise learn something new about dolphin vocalization,” Starner says.

  Starner and his team have dubbed the communication devices CHAT boxes, for Cetacean Hearing and Telemetry. Two of Starner’s whiz kids—Stewart Butler, a beefy twenty-three-year-old computer science major, and Daniel Kohlsdorf, a twenty-six-year-old PhD student, both of whom are on the Stenella—have spearheaded work on a prototype for months. Each unit consists of a milled aluminum box, about the size of a laptop, that contains a cell-phone processor and is loaded with pattern-recognition software written by Kohlsdorf. Wired to the box are an underwater speaker, two hydrophones, and a keypad. Buttons on the keypad allow a user to emit artificial whistles at frequencies within both human-hearing and dolphin-vocalization range—which extends at least ten times beyond a human’s. For the initial work, Herzing has matched specific whistles to toys she knows the dolphins like: a rope, a scarf, and sargassum, a common local seaweed that dolphins often play with.

  The whistles should be easy for the dolphins to mimic, though hoping
they’ll confine their responses to the limited human range is sort of like asking them to speak very low and slow, the way a person might when trying to communicate with a foreigner. The hydrophones serve as underwater “ears,” and the pattern-recognition software has been programmed to identify the defined whistles—and to allow for some variation in frequency and modulation for a potential dolphin “accent.” Whenever the box detects a designated whistle amid all the other chatter that often accompanies dolphin encounters, it will convert it into the assigned English word and pipe it into the snorkeler’s ear via the underwater earpiece. Starner’s team is also working to embed an LED system into a specialized mask, programming it to indicate where a whistle is coming from, to give Herzing a better sense of which dolphin is vocalizing. “The real-time communication is key,” says Herzing, a dynamic and direct woman who loves to laugh and has short, sun-bleached hair. “Imagine trying to have a conversation where you go away to figure out what was said and come back twenty-four hours later and try to pick it up again.”

  Herzing is joined on the aft deck by Pack. Butler and Kohlsdorf bring out the equipment, which is far from streamlined at this stage, giving the whole exercise a garage-invention feel. Herzing and Pack don yellow vests that have Velcro straps to snug the CHAT boxes against their chests. Once the boxes are secure, the keypads are strapped to their forearms. “First ve deploy zee Denise, zen ve deploy zee Adam,” declares Hoffmann-Kuhnt in an exaggerated German accent. This is his first time out on the Little Bahama Bank. His lab in Singapore builds all sorts of underwater gear, and he’s an improvisational whiz. Later he’ll layer cut-up pieces of a Mini-Wheats cereal box to the interior of the CHAT devices to absorb any leaks.