I've always been fascinated by dolphins. I remember watching the show Flipper as a boy, which was basically Lassie with a dolphin instead of a collie. Flipper not only could perform amazing tricks, but he was incredibly smart, and could seemingly understand what people were saying to him. He would click and whistle and nod his head in response to conversational speech, as though he understood every word. He could tell when danger presented itself and had the wherewithal to not only warn his human companions but also to take action to protect them. For years we thought that this idea of dolphin intelligence was purely the romanticized notion of Hollywood writers. We thought that dolphins were no more than intelligent than any other animal trained to perform for our amusement. We thought they simply repeated moves they had been trained to execute in response to hand signals or audible commands. We thought they had no higher intelligence, no true understanding of language, and no true understanding of self. It seems however that science is starting to prove that dolphins are much smarter than we thought - perhaps even smarter than we have romanticized them to be - and this is placing our past and current treatment of them in an extremely negative light.
Book 12 - The Dolphin in the Mirror - Diana Reiss
In The Dolphin in the Mirror, Diana Reiss explores the mind of the dolphin, and makes a case for putting a stop to the poor treatment to which they have been subjected at the hands of fisherman, water park and aquarium owners, and even other scientists. She starts out by regaling us with her tales of her role in the rescue of Humphrey, the humpback whale who wandered into the San Francisco Bay not once but twice in the mid-eighties/early nineties. You may be saying to yourself, "I thought this book was about dolphins?" Dolphins and whales are closely related however, and in addition to sharing sophisticated social structures, they both employ echolocation so advanced, that it makes the U.S. Navy envious. This natural sonar plays a big part in how they got Humphrey to return to the ocean, and how Japanese fisherman drive thousands of dolphins to their death each year.
After telling us how she became interested in studying these magnificent creatures, and giving us a bit of history of how man has interacted with dolphins over the ages, Reiss walks us through three decades of research, mostly her own, which sets out to understand if dolphins have intelligence, an understanding of language, and a sense of self. She engages in various studies of different dolphins, trying to decipher their speech (a difficult task without a dolphin "Rosetta Stone")), seeing if they can make associations between symbols and objects, and testing to see if they are self-aware. This last effort, which involves studying dolphin interaction with mirrors, yields some intriguing results. To this end, Reiss subjects dolphins to the mark test: a mark is placed on the dolphin's body and the animal is provided a mirror for self-examination. The dolphin clearly shows awareness that it is himself in the mirror, an ability that was previously thought to exist only in humans and higher primates such as chimpanzees.
Free from the rigors of a scientific paper, Reiss can relate some of the more anecdotal aspects of her research. She is acutely aware of the scientific danger of anthropomorphism, the act of bestowing human traits onto animals that aren't there, but feels that anthropocentrism, the notion that human intelligence is the only "real" intelligence, is equally seductive, and to be avoided as well. She argues that we may lack sufficient points of reference to fully understand what goes on in the dolphin mind.
Reiss devotes one of the final sections of the book to her pet project: trying to put an end to the slaughter of dolphins that takes place every year in the Japanese village of Taiji. Each year the fisherman of Taiji form a barrier with their boats and bang on pipes submerged in the water. The noise creates a wall of sound which causes the acoustically sensitive animals to flee in the other direction. The fisherman herd them into a cove, where after selecting a few choice specimens for sale to aquariums, they set about brutally slaughtering the rest, killing tens of thousands of dolphins until the cove runs red with blood. This horrific event is captured in the 2009 documentary film The Cove.
I probably have not done justice to this fascinating book. Perhaps I should let the author try to make her case as well. Diana Reiss appeared on Talk of the Nation: Science Friday this past week (11/4/2011). There is a link to her segment here: Diana Reiss Interview.
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