I have always loved the ocean. We went to Cape Cod every summer when I was a child, and it was during these summers that my passion for learning and science was seeded. I remember long walks on the beach with my dad, scanning the ocean with binoculars and enjoying the waves and sandbars. I remember collecting shells with my mom. I treasure the nature hikes and the nooks and crannies of the dunes and seashore that my family “discovered.” My love for animals also came from my family. The path that would lead to my career studying dolphin communication, however, did not become clear until I entered college. It is a path rooted in family history but forged with friends and colleagues.—Kathleen
When I first heard and saw dolphins underwater, I woke to a realm I had not known existed. This experience not only expanded my perception of the world but reshaped my life. My career as a scientist studying dolphins and being in their presence has revealed so much more than the data I sought to obtain. Dolphins are among my greatest teachers; they have guided me to a deeper understanding of what it means to be human in a world that is so much more than human. Through this interspecies exploration, dolphins continue to beckon and challenge me to deepen my perception as a scientist.—Toni
Dolphins entice us clumsy land-based humans with their aquatic grace, agility, beauty, and mystery, as well as what some have described as an unearthly intelligence and communication system. Over the years, a belief has been fostered that dolphins are directly comparable to people, with hints that they might have humanlike personalities. When we encounter them by boat or from land, we perceive them from our respectively different worlds. When we meet them in their world, by immersing ourselves in their aquatic habitat, two very different species connect on a common playing field.
We continue to learn, be inspired by, and remain in awe of these mammals we study collectively as species and those we have come to know as individuals. It is our privilege to take you with us on our journeys beneath the waves with these complex, perplexing, and perpetually fascinating animals. It is a way for us to share our passion, at times an absolutely consuming obsession, with our quest for a more detailed, comprehensive, and holistic understanding of dolphin communication and social behavior. Part of the beauty of this voyage is how, by studying dolphins in unique ways, we have obtained new perspectives with which to navigate the myriad avenues of conservation and dolphin protection. We invite you to join us on an adventure to become more aware of the intricacies of dolphins’ social lives through personal accounts of our experiences and observations, as well as through our presentation of the most accurate information available about dolphin communication, cognition, culture, emotion, and intelligence. We present our stories in the first person and acknowledge that our use of anecdotes is aimed at illustrating the facts gleaned from our colleagues’ research as well as our own. As the animal behavior expert Marc Bekoff has stated, “The value of a reliably reported anecdote should not be underestimated, even in science.” Our data from almost forty years of collective research form the foundation for our words. To prepare for immersion into the world of dolphin research, we wish to provide a bit more background into the influences on our lives and into the sometimes controversial history swirling around studies of dolphin communication.
Kathleen
I found dolphins as a college student on a summer internship in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1987. I did not love dolphins from birth, though I readily admit to loving animals, the ocean, and school from a young age. Science was always my favorite subject: I was a nerd, a geek, from middle school forward. Even now, I could list for you every science teacher from seventh grade to college, and I am not good at remembering names. Two secondary school teachers, Ms. Chamberlain and Mr. Faustman, stand out in my memory as exceptional. They made me think and work hard for every bit of knowledge I acquired. I credit my parents and these two teachers with laying the foundation I needed to become a scientist. They fostered in me a passion for learning and for questioning my observations.
Ms. Chamberlain was my eighth-grade science teacher. We made model houses that were powered or heated by alternative energy sources (she was ahead of her time!) and learned to make soaps from natural products. Tenth-grade biology was Mr. Faustman’s class, and we had a blast. My most vivid memory of biology with him was the preparation of our spring “Anatomical Foods Night”: each student had to create a dish that was all natural, related to an anatomy lesson, or traditional to our family heritage. Milk from two local farms, haggis, heart, liver, seaweed candy, soy noodles, and other items were feasted on by all who attended. Each dish came with a lesson rooted in biology, and Mr. Faustman provided a comical slide show depicting our efforts as the evening’s entertainment.
The best compliment I have ever received was from my parents, Sandy and Pete Dudzinski. In 1992 I spent six weeks on a small island off the coast of Belize studying bottlenose dolphins. It was midsemester, and my fellow graduate students were busy with classes. My parents offered to join me because “they wanted to know what exactly it was that I did, and what my career as a scientist would involve.” My parents had instilled an independent streak in me and my sisters; they taught me to have confidence without cockiness, to be strong-minded and inquisitive. It was okay to disagree with them in our regular dinner-table debates as long as we could defend our point of view. They supported me when I raised chickens in an urban community as part of my Future Farmers of America project, ran a traveling petting zoo with peers to teach kindergartners about farm animals, and kept a variety of odd, inedible items in containers in our refrigerator, just because. (My sisters were not thrilled with the last indulgence and lobbied our folks for an end to the container repository. As a compromise, I was relegated to the storage fridge in the basement.)
After my summer internship in Massachusetts, I began reading about dolphin and whale social and behavioral ecology—the research and periodicals section of the University of Connecticut library became my haunt. I began graduate school in 1990 under Bernd Würsig in Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences at Texas A&M University. After various modifications related to a change of study animal and location, I settled into a four-year stint that had me on a boat six months a year observing Atlantic spotted dolphins underwater in The Bahamas. This was not a vacation (but it was fun): every week, six to eight paying volunteers joined me to learn about and swim with these dolphins. All my fieldwork at each location where I have studied dolphins has been cosponsored by ecotourists. My early years of learning to work with inexperienced volunteers, learning in fact how to communicate my science with nonspecialists as I was becoming familiar with it, ingrained in me a passion not only for investigating dolphin communication but also for sharing what I learned with people.
The ultimate opportunity to share my research and the dynamic results of my colleagues in a public forum was offered about six months before I began postdoctoral research in Japan. I was in my parents’ kitchen when I received a phone call from a film company based in California. While my mom listened to my side of the conversation, Teresa Ferrera spent thirty minutes asking about my research, results, tools, and details about dolphin social behavior. She told me that her company, MacGillivray Freeman Films, was planning to make a large-format film on dolphins for imax theaters. Would I visit their office to talk about dolphins to her boss and their production team, she asked. I’d been interviewed before for programs that never materialized. I said, “Sure, but I’ve just finished school, you’ll need to cover the plane ticket and expenses.” Four years later, Dolphins opened in March 2000 in imax theaters nationwide. This forty-minute film is visually stunning and true to the science of dolphins. The work of seven scientists fills the frames, giving viewers the largest, most vivid picture of dolphin life. The National Science Foundation supported an educational lecture series for a fellow scientist in the film, Alejandro Acevedo-Gutierrez, and me to visit forty science centers and museums to complement the film. This experience was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to share my enthusiasm for science and dolphins with students of all ages.
In 2000, as Dolphins was premiering, I founded the Dolphin Communication Project (www.dolphincommunicationproject.org) as an umbrella for my research into dolphin communication and to provide an avenue for cultivating educational opportunities (such as ecotours, workshops, and seminars) that could inform the public. The mission of the Dolphin Communication Project is dual in its aim to foster opportunities for students in the sciences and to promote an awareness of marine mammal conservation. With my students (representing five universities) and through the project, I offer hands-on experiences during research expeditions and internships, fostering collaborative endeavors between scientific and educational programs.
I have been able to share my research, my passion for science and for dolphins with people throughout the United States, Japan, and Europe. I am humbled by how many people are openly and completely reverent about dolphins. When people find out that I study dolphins, they usually want to know all about my work, what I have learned about dolphin communication and intelligence, and what exactly I do. This is the link that we can foster with communication to promote conservation of dolphins and their ocean home. People will only protect what they love; they will only love what they know. It is our job to teach them, to inform them, and to pave the way for assistance.
Toni
I began to study dolphins a little more than twenty years ago. I am often asked how my career began, which takes me back to my childhood. That’s when I began my quest to unravel the mysteries of the animal mind and heart. As a toddler, I was enthralled with animals, even those considered by others to be bothersome or boring. As a teenager, my first experience with dolphins came on a visit to an amusement park. My friends and I stopped at the dolphin tank and watched a performance, after which everyone turned to leave for the roller coaster. “Wait!” I cried out. This was my first chance to see “live” dolphins do what they do in their free time, not performing tricks requested by trainers during a show. My friends grew restless watching the dolphins slowly mill about, and moved on to the rides. To me, however, nothing in the park compared with watching these beautiful, lustrous animals. Enthralled, I watched the dolphins for the rest of the day and caught up with my friends later. Only years later did my enthusiasm for that experience wane when I came to know enough about dolphins to question the practice of keeping these keenly aware animals confined in a raucous amusement park tank.
As a teen, I caught the end of a television show featuring a biologist studying dolphins and seeking ways to communicate with them. Something clicked, and I knew that I wanted . . . no I had . . . to study dolphins for the rest of my life. I am usually methodical about making decisions, so this sudden career declaration was hard to explain, let alone justify, to myself. I knew I needed to begin a course of study. I found books written by the pioneering researcher John C. Lilly and learned that his foundation was located near where I lived in Los Angeles. I also began to read the works of other researchers, especially Kenneth Norris and Louis Herman. When I wasn’t in school, I was volunteering for Lilly’s Human-Dolphin Foundation and Marineland of the Pacific, where I worked primarily in rehabilitating stranded marine mammals. I also assisted in a boat- and land-based census of wild bottle-nose dolphins along the southern California coast. Lilly’s foundation invited me to participate in research on dolphin-human communication with Joe and Rosie, two captive bottlenose dolphins who had just been moved to the Florida Keys. After only a few days of working with them, I changed my plane ticket home to one with no specified return date.
My experiences with Joe and Rosie were fascinating. Also of interest were the other dolphins housed in the facility next to them. Every day, I watched dozens of people pay to get into the water and swim with those dolphins. Little did I know that I was witnessing the first commercialized “swim-with-the-dolphin” program. This also gave me a unique perspective on human impacts on dolphins and led me eventually to conduct the first studies of these swim programs. Toward the end of my stay in Florida, Joe and Rosie were being “untrained” in preparation for their reintroduction to the wild. The research project was ending.
At the conclusion of this life-changing summer, I received an incredible opportunity to live on a boat in The Bahamas for two weeks to interact with and study spotted and bottlenose dolphins in the wild. To see dolphins underwater, interacting not only with people and one another but also with the many natural features of their underwater environment, was an education beyond belief. I felt as though I had come home. Auspiciously, dolphin scientist Denise Herzing was on the boat. She was initiating research that would eventually become the longest underwater study of individual dolphins in the wild.
I began graduate school missing the dolphins and the crystal blue waters. Yet I was charged with renewed enthusiasm and had the good fortune to have respected researchers in the field as my academic advisers. So began my unique specialization in dolphin-human interaction and communication, as well as in behavioral indicators of dolphin stress in both captivity and the wild. I was encouraged, yet cautioned that academia would be critical, even cynical about my study of dolphin-human communication. Pop culture had of course romanticized this subject in earlier decades. But the persistence of this attitude felt stale and charged with anthropocentric assumptions and a lack of scientific objectivity. I wondered if underlying the resistance to this research was the idea that it was sacrilege to study humans in a way that other social mammals are studied and that dolphins, not being human, did not deserve such attention. This did not seem a very objective approach to the study of animal behavior since we are animals, too. With my professors’ guidance, I applied ethological techniques to analyze dolphin-human interactions and found the results even more exciting than the glamorized, media-enhanced accounts of these encounters. The study of the dolphin-human bond certainly did not require a lapse of scientific precision. If anything, the interspecies sociality between dolphins and humans was more brightly illuminated by it.
My graduate research consisted of conducting the first studies on dolphin behavior in the context of swimming with humans in captivity and then in the wild. Subsequently, I received numerous solicitations from international government and regulatory agencies, movie production companies, and nonprofit animal welfare, conservation, and environmental groups to evaluate a variety of captive and wild marine mammal behavior in order to provide recommendations regarding their welfare, conservation, and management. I studied dolphins used in swim programs, petting and feeding programs, various species of captive and free-ranging groups of dolphins, as well as solitary sociable bottlenose dolphins, belugas, and orcas. My career has taken me to regions of the world that I never expected to visit, much less work in, and introduced me to a rich diversity of people ranging from animal protectionists, fishers and hunters to celebrities and prime ministers. The creation of a nonprofit organization, Terra Mar Research (www.terramarresearch.org), gave me an independent yet structured organizational container for this profession.
When people ask me what is unique about my work, I reply that I feel privileged to study the complexities of dolphin communication and the effects of human interaction on so many different species under such varied conditions. I hope that my research helps to validate and encourage the scientific study of interspecies communication and the psychological and emotional lives of other animals. One aspect of my work stands high above all else: to conduct research that makes a positive contribution to the lives of our nonhuman kin. This is not only my scientific responsibility but a great honor. My goal is for people to appreciate dolphins for who they are as individuals, not just what they are to us.
Exactly how we met is hard for us to remember. Our first conversation was probably an excited discussion about dolphin communication, probably punctuated by a mutual dissection of the methodology used or the conclusions reached in some scientific paper we were both reading. In 1990, we were fledgling graduate students at Texas A&M. Under Jane Packard’s expert direction, we participated in lively debates about ethology. Though we hailed from opposite coasts—Kathleen from the east, Toni from the west—we shared a mutual obsession for learning the mysteries of dolphin communication as well as a passion for studying dolphins underwater. Kathleen’s interest in delving deeper into the study of dolphin-dolphin communication and Toni’s curiosity about the scientific analysis of dolphin-human communication eventually evolved into our respective doctoral research projects. In graduate school, we occasionally assisted each other in the field. We have collaborated on many papers. The complementary nature of our differences and our similarities is reflected in our writing, which we hope contributes to the value and enjoyment of this book.
We are thrilled that dolphin communication is swiftly becoming a topic of choice among young scientists. There is much to learn. The cutting-edge research on dolphin communication of such early pioneers as Melba and David Caldwell, William Evans, Louis Herman, John Lilly, Kenneth Norris, Karen Pryor, William Schevill, William Tavolga, and William Watkins has inspired us and informed our collaboration with contemporary cetologists. Although we, too, have pioneered aspects of study into dolphin communication, we do not work in a vacuum. Science is an amazing journey; competing explanations, or alternative hypotheses, are often presented to describe one behavior. Discussion and debate infuse a field already flooded with questions. Readers will encounter examples of competing hypotheses in the following chapters.
To cover all points of view and provide an exhaustive review of dolphin communication would require several volumes of text and many years to write. In fact, we could not help but include some information from such related aspects of dolphins as their anatomy, evolution, conservation, and cognition. Still, we adhere to what we call the “Umi shopping analogy.” Umi is Kathleen’s “mighty sea beagle,” and she loves rawhide treats and squeaky, stuffed animals. Kathleen delights in shopping for new toys for Umi but brings home only one toy at a time and only on special occasions. Umi is not aware of all toys from which Kathleen could select, but she is thrilled with each new arrival. In a similar way, we focus on the explanations and hypotheses we have come to know and trust based on our experiences and data. We do not present a complete catalogue of the varying explanations of each dolphin action, vocalization, or interaction. Curious readers are encouraged to pursue the additional readings we recommend and draw their own conclusions. Similarly, as your guides for this journey, we focus on landmarks we have visited and are most familiar with. In this way, you will become privy to our individual experiences with dolphins.
Referring specifically to the animals of our book, we should clarify what we mean by dolphin because the name alone can be a source of confusion. If you ask a fisherman about the animal that looks like the television star “Flipper” when he is out fishing, he will likely answer “porpoise.” In some regions, fishermen use the term porpoise to refer to all dolphins and porpoises in an effort to avoid confusion between the dolphin and the dolphin fish, or mahi-mahi. The interchanging use of dolphin and porpoise occurs when these two words are used more generally in conversation and is not meant to ignore the existence of the Phocoenidae, which includes six species of porpoise—individuals different in several morphological and physiological characters from dolphins. We use the term dolphin to refer to members of the taxonomic family Delphinidae, which consists of thirty-three species of dolphins ranging from coastal to pelagic and tiny to large. For example, killer whales (orcas) and pilot whales are dolphins. Use of the nickname “whale” refers to their length, which is greater than 24 feet (about 8 m).
Although we focus on research from the study of dolphins, beluga whales (also toothed cetaceans and members of the family Monodontidae) make a significant appearance. This is because of Toni’s extensive work with these animals and the extraordinary similarities that have been observed in their behavior and communication, particularly in terms of interspecies communication. We also include information on other cetaceans to provide comparative examples or because details are lacking on specific topics in dolphins. For this reason, readers will encounter sperm whales (the largest of the toothed cetaceans), baleen whales, and other marine mammals, such as seals and sea otters. Elephants, parrots, dogs, ravens, lions, human children and adults, and other terrestrial and avian animals also occasionally join us through these pages into the world of dolphins.