Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Cetaceae
Conservation status: some species
Critically Endangered, others
Least Concern or not listed
Dolphins . . . follow men’s voices, or gather in shoals when music is played. There is nothing swifter in the sea. They often leap over ships in their flight.
An English bestiary of the thirteenth century
For they work me with their harping-irons, which is a barbarous instrument, because I am more unguarded than others.
Christopher Smart
Some experiences can give rise to joy so powerful that it transforms your sense of what it is to be alive. Among these are surviving a brush with death, and witnessing acts of great beauty. Such, at least, is my experience. Once, I sailed in a small boat in a storm so violent that some of those on board with much more experience than I feared we would not get through. When, a couple of days later, we did make it into port – battered and exhausted but essentially fine – I felt as if reborn, my body made of sunlight. Another time, with a different crew and in a different place, I encountered wild dolphins at play. In calm weather and deep water just off a remote mid-ocean island we spent a good part of an afternoon in a dinghy watching a large pod put on an amazing show of jumps, somersaults, twists and other capers. Every now and then, one or two came right alongside us and gently splashed two young children leaning over the gunwales. The children would squeal with delight, and the dolphins would power away and then stop to look back at the hilarity they had caused.
These two incidents from my own direct experience have no particular connection except that both were transfigured by joy. The first didn’t involve dolphins but, having experienced both, I understand a little better the power of stories that recur from ancient times until today in which humans (and other creatures such as whales) are saved from drowning by dolphins.
Think of a dolphin and the chances are that the Bottlenose, Tursiops, comes to mind. These are the easiest to train and most often kept in captivity. But there are nearly forty other species, and they vary considerably in size, shape and colour. The smallest (Maui’s dolphin) is the size of a wild boar, while the biggest (the orca) can grow as big as a bus. Several, including Common dolphins, have ballooning, melon-shaped foreheads and beaky snouts similar to the Bottlenose, but others (notably, some of the smaller species) have much less prominent snouts, and daintier faces. When it comes to skin colour, the gun-metal grey that we associate with the Bottlenose is not typical. Common dolphins are often dark slate along their spine, snout, fins and tail, but buff-to-mustard on their sides, and light grey on their hind flanks: curvaceous and muted variants of the dazzle camouflage of World War One fighting ships. Several species are black and white in the manner of Holstein cows but with the difference that the contrasting patches are symmetrical and elegantly shaped: on the Dusky dolphin, black and white curve around each other like flames; on the Hourglass dolphin a broad, horizontal, white band along each side of an otherwise black body is squeezed in the middle as if between a giant black finger and thumb.
We’ll probably never know when or how people and dolphins first met. Early modern humans foraging along coastlines and estuaries would surely have encountered the beached bodies of river dolphins and pelagic dolphins that were dead or dying, and in some cases fed on them. (Neanderthals living in caves on the Rock of Gibraltar had already acquired a taste for them.) But people would also, over hundreds of generations, have spent a lot of time watching dolphins fishing and at play out at sea or in the wide rivers. And just as earlier generations of humans on the African savannah would have learned much about hunting and scavenging from watching other predators there, so early coastal foragers would have observed dolphins in pursuit of fish and learned from their techniques, such as corralling fish and driving them towards shore where they are easier to catch. It wouldn’t have taken long for two such curious and intelligent species to have learned to work together. Far from being antagonistic, then, many of our earliest encounters may have been cooperative and playful.
Certainly, the practice of humans and dolphins fishing together was well established by the historical period. Pliny the Elder describes cooperative fishing for mullet in a marsh at Latera in what is now southern France, and gives a clear sense that the dolphins were as confident and in control of the situation as the humans. ‘Dolphins’, he writes, ‘are not afraid of humans as something alien.’ Similar interactions are reported on the coast of Brazil and Burma going back to at least the nineteenth century.
Respectful, and sometimes playful, relations with dolphins seem to have been common at one time or another in many places that the species co-exist. The Wurundjeri people of southeastern Australia, for example, held dolphins to be sacred. Killing dolphins was therefore forbidden and the Wurundjeri would only take fish they believed the dolphins did not need. They would also consult dolphins on important questions by the use of telepathy, and believed that the spirits of their dead would transform into dolphins and remain offshore to help and guide family members who stayed as humans on land. The anthropologist Douglas Everett reports that the Pirahã, a remote Amazonian tribe known for an exceptionally simple way of life and for having no concept of time, number or religion as we think of them, greatly enjoy games with river dolphins or porpoises. According to Aristotle, dolphins and small boys in the Greece of his day would develop strong mutual attachments and the dolphins would give the boys exhilarating rides.
The oldest known representation of a celebratory relationship with dolphins comes from the Minoan civilization centered on Crete. In the ‘flotilla fresco’ painted at Akrotiri about 3,500 years ago, dolphins are paired with running deer as great leaping animals, full of life, in one of the most beautiful and serene depictions in the history of art of humans at home in the world. Later Greek civilization linked dolphins with the divine. Apollo, the god of harmony, order and reason, was said to have taken the form of a dolphin when he travelled from Crete to the mainland to establish the seat of the oracle at Delphi (itself named for the dolphin). When, in winter, Apollo left Delphi for Hyperborea, he would leave the oracle in the care of his brother Dionysus, the god of wine and ecstasy, who had the power to turn people into dolphins.
Today, most people will agree with the general proposition that dolphins are amazing animals, worthy of particular attention. But what exactly is special about them and how precisely we should treat them are matters of dispute. One of the sharpest differences of opinion concerns an annual cull in Taiji in Japan, in which thousands of dolphins are slaughtered (ostensibly to reduce competition for local fishermen, but also for sale rebranded as whale meat) and a smaller number are taken alive for sale to entertainment complexes and aquaria around the world. In 2006 leading marine scientists called for a moratorium on this practice. Dolphins, they said, are ‘highly intelligent, self-aware and emotional animals with strong family ties and complex social lives . . . [and] inhumane treatment and killing of these highly sentient mammals’ must stop. But Japanese fishermen carried on, as the 2009 film The Cove showed. And other practices, which may be at least as destructive of dolphins in the long run but are more insidious, continue. Tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of dolphins die each year when they become trapped in nets set by fisherman who are trying to catch something else, or as a result of other human acts of carelessness. The effects on the health of dolphins (not to mention whales and other marine animals) of pollutants such as mercury and PCBs are uncertain but they are likely to increase the number of still births, developmental problems and general morbidity. And masking these horrors, as misleading as the ‘smile’ on a dolphin’s face (which is not an expression of emotion but simply the shape of its mouth), are the aquaria and fun parks around the world where hundreds of thousands of people still flock to see captive dolphins – denatured, shrink-wrapped slaves – being drilled through acrobatic routines.
Is there a better way forward? Is it achievable? The philosopher Thomas I. White suggests that we confront two questions: what kind of beings are dolphins?; and what does our answer to that question say about the morality of human/dolphin contact? White concluded – in line with many marine scientists – that dolphins are ‘non-human persons’: different enough from humans that it’s fair to regard them as something like extraterrestrial intelligences, but no less imbued with dignity or worthy of respect than ourselves. And the inescapable conclusion from that was that abuse of dolphins is indefensible.
Cynics will say that we’ve been here before. The claim that dolphins are ‘not something to kill, but someone to learn from’ has already been made by (among others) John Cunningham Lilly, an eccentric scientist who studied dolphins for forty years up to his death in 2001. The website archiving Lilly’s work greets you with the smiling face of the late great man between dolphins rampant like heraldic beasts. Blobs of pinkish-purple light rotate and pulse across Lilly’s forehead – a reminder of the mind-bending drugs and altered states he explored with friends such as Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg (as well as how bad web-page design could be a dozen years ago). Lilly, you may recall, is the model for the scientist played by George C. Scott in the 1973 science-fiction film Day of the Dolphin. Scott, clad in shorts much too small for a man of his age, discovers that his groundbreaking work on human–dolphin communication is being perverted as the animals are suborned into a fiendish plot to kill the President of the United States. The dolphins save the day when Scott, chastened, tells them that man is evil.
Lilly certainly had some strange ideas. He wanted to build a floating lab-cum-living room through which wild dolphins and humans would be able to converse directly at times and places of their choosing. Believing dolphins to be morally superior, almost angelic beings, he said they should get representation at the United Nations as a ‘Cetacean Nation’. Humans (such as himself, presumably) would act as their representatives until such time as the two species understood each other better.
Lilly made some claims he could not substantiate with data. But many of his essential intuitions about the intelligence, communicative abilities and emotional richness of dolphin lives were visionary and have been substantiated by various other researchers since his death. Perhaps Douglas Adams got it right when he satirized Lilly as Wonko the Sane.
And the questions posed by the philosopher Thomas White can be answered. We do have enough evidence to begin to build a sound understanding of dolphin nature, laid on the ‘solid foundation . . . [of] experience and observation’ (to borrow David Hume’s phrase for a projected study of human nature). Through method we can add to whatever wisdom we find in myth and at the same time avoid a descent into sentimentality. This can help us overcome the present calamities inflicted on dolphins by humans. And it has the potential to help us develop a better sense of the world of which human consciousness is a part.
The earliest known attempt at what we would now call scientific description was made by Aristotle around 350 BC. Aristotle understood that dolphins are mammals – air breathers which suckle live young – and that they are highly gregarious both toward their own kind and humans. All the behaviour he describes in the following passage is plausible given what has been documented in recent years:
Many stories are told about the dolphin, indicative of his gentle and kindly nature . . . The story goes that, after a dolphin had been caught and wounded off the coast of Caria, a shoal of dolphins came into the harbour and stopped there until the fisherman let his captive go free; whereupon the shoal departed . . . On one occasion a shoal of dolphins, large and small, was seen, and two dolphins at a little distance appeared swimming in underneath a little dead dolphin when it was sinking, and supporting it on their backs, trying out of compassion to prevent its being devoured by some predaceous fish.
But in the following description of their physical abilities Aristotle confuses hunting and display behaviour, and exaggerates the height they can jump out of the water, which seldom exceeds three metres, or 10 feet:
Incredible stories are told regarding [the dolphin’s] rapidity of movement . . . It appears to be the fleetest of all animals, marine and terrestrial, and it can leap over the masts of large vessels. This speed is chiefly manifested when they are pursuing a fish for food; then, if the fish endeavours to escape, they pursue him in their ravenous hunger down to deep waters; but, when the necessary return swim is getting too long, they hold in their breath, as though calculating the length of it, and then draw themselves together for an effort and shoot up like arrows . . . and in the effort they spring right over a ship’s masts if a ship be in the vicinity.
More than a century of modern research has added enormously to Aristotle’s account. We know, for example, that dolphin sex is as exuberant as that of bonobo chimps. Dolphins court and make love the year round, and with lots of foreplay – they rub, caress, mouth and nuzzle each other’s genitals. Both males and females have a genital slit, so penetration is possible in both sexes, and the penis, the tip of the nose (the beak), lower jaw, dorsal or pectoral fin, and tail fluke are all used. Female Spinner dolphins have been observed riding ‘tandem’ on each other’s dorsal fin, the female beneath inserting her fin into the genital slit of the other and the two swimming together in this position. Spinner dolphins of both sexes sometimes engage in orgies of more than a dozen individuals, known as ‘wuzzles’. Some dolphin species engage in ‘beak-genital propulsion’. Dolphins can make strong enough sounds to stimulate each other at close range. Spotted dolphins perform ‘genital buzzing’, in which an adult directs a rapid stream of low-pitched clicks at the genital area of another, usually a calf. Genital buzzing usually occurs between males, but also in heterosexual courtship in this species. Male Bottlenose dolphins even try to mate with other animals including sharks and sea turtles, inserting their foot-long hooked penises into the soft tissues at the back of the turtle’s shell.
Along with all other cetaceans, dolphins are descended from animals that looked something like a cross between a wolf and an exceptionally agile hippo (which may be their closest relation on land). These ancestors evolved to hunt rather like crocodiles do, lurking in murky shallows ready to pounce. And their descendants are of course ruthless, brilliant hunters. Orcas, the ‘killer whales’ which are actually the largest members of the dolphin family, take this to a spectacular extreme when they rush up to grasp young seals basking on a beach or taking refuge on an ice floe. Sometimes an orca will repeatedly toss a broken seal, like a cat playing with a mouse. The prowess of dolphins as hunters means they only have to ‘work’ for a few hours a day, which is why they have so much time to socialize.
Just because dolphins are highly social does not mean that they are not sometimes extremely aggressive towards each other. Males gang up to rape females, and sometimes kill calves that are not their own. But in general they are great cooperators and communicators. Young dolphins are dependent for an extended period on their pod for care and education. Mothers in at least some species use a kind of ‘baby talk’ to communicate with their offspring, and ‘carry’ them by positioning them in their slipstream (as a result, the mother only swims three-quarters as fast for the same effort but the calf’s average speed is increased by nearly a third). Mothers even share childcare with each other.
There’s some evidence that, at least in some species of dolphin (and toothed whales), every individual has its own characteristic whistle sound to identify itself to others. Others in its pod will imitate that sound when responding or trying to get that individual’s attention. In short, each dolphin has a name. It is also evident that not only are dolphins self-aware but they can have a keen sense of the capacities of others. When including a human in a game of tag or piggy-in-the-middle, for example, they will make allowance for the human’s vastly inferior swimming ability, giving the human a chance to play in a game in which he or she would otherwise be hopelessly outclassed. They pass on group-specific knowledge – ‘culture’ – and are adept at teaching new things to each other and to humans. Researchers conclude that many species of dolphins have a well-developed theory of mind.
Another aspect of dolphins’ lives that we are still only beginning to appreciate is the role that sound plays in their lives. At a relatively trivial (but pleasing) level, dolphins often make a particular flat-toned whistle when they ride the bow waves of boats, which some marine biologists suggest is the equivalent of a child going ‘wheeee!’ But the matter goes far beyond that. In the sea, where sound travels four times as fast as it does on land and light dissipates in a short distance, sound serves them for both ‘vision’ and ‘language’. And their ability to echo-locate with sound gives them powers of perception beyond anything so far achieved by humans with the most advanced technology. It opens a world of communication we are just beginning to understand.
To produce the sounds with which they ‘see’ objects, dolphins have a series of air sacs underneath their blow-hole. They can use the air in these sacs to create clicks that last less than a thousandth of a second. These clicks are projected off the parabolic surface of the front of the skull and pass through fatty tissue shaped rather like a melon which the dolphin probably alters in shape rather as we do the lenses of our eyes. The clicks then pass out through the water, bounce off an object and return as echoes that are retrieved through the dolphin’s lower jaw and pass along as vibrations to its inner ear. The clicks vary in intensity and frequency. Lower frequencies, which sound like a creaking door, give a rough sense of an object and are used for ones that are further away. Higher-frequency clicks, which sound more like a high-pitched buzz, produce more detail. Depending on circumstances, dolphins emit between 8 and 2,000 clicks per second. The most rapid clicks sound like a buzz to our ears. But dolphins can distinguish each one: they don’t send out a new click until the first one returns.
Those clicks and squeaks – focused outwards through the forehead, bouncing off objects and received again as vibrations in the jaw from where they pass to the ears – can locate objects many kilometres away, but they can also penetrate the skin of a human or dolphin a few metres away to ‘see’ a beating heart or the movements of a baby in the womb. According to some reports, dolphins have recognized women as pregnant before the women themselves knew, treating the women as they do pregnant dolphins. They can distinguish textures and shapes of objects that are distant and hidden from view: small shapes made of wood from identical ones made of plastic or of metal, and discs made of copper from those made of aluminium. They can detect differences of thickness of just a few tenths of a millimetre (less than the thickness of a human fingernail) from ten metres, or thirty feet away, a feat that requires them to discriminate returning echoes less than a millionth of a second apart.
‘Echo-location’ seems like an inadequate word to describe these superhuman abilities, which resemble hearing and seeing but are also unlike either and in some ways surpass both. Occasionally humans approach delphic powers of perception. Ben Underwood, the ‘dolphin boy’, became completely blind as a result of retinal cancer at the age of two but learned to navigate around his neighbourhood with ease by clicking his tongue and listening to echoes bouncing off surrounding objects. He could even play table football merely by listening for where the ball was. The percussionist Evelyn Glennie, who is profoundly deaf but grew up surrounded by music, learned to register even the subtlest vibrations through her body and has become an internationally celebrated orchestral musician. Achievements like these are extraordinary in human terms but all dolphins habitually do much more.
The extent to which dolphins use sound to ‘speak’ is far less well understood than how they use sound to ‘see’ things. One researcher claims to have identified 186 different whistle types, of which twenty are especially common. The whistles, she says, can be put into five classes which are typically associated with different kinds of behaviours. There is good evidence that dolphins also communicate with each other by body position and gesture. Dolphins can clearly say more than ‘it’s me!’ and ‘wheeee!’ but how much their utterances resemble human language or constitute a communication system of a quite different kind is not yet clear.
According to some studies, Bottlenose dolphins in captivity have learned sixty or more different signals for (human) nouns and verbs – enough to construct around 2,000 sentences which they demonstrably understand. But as Carl Sagan (who died in 1996) put it, ‘it is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English . . . no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese.’ This may be about to change, or at least we may learn to meet them about halfway: at the time of writing, experiments were under way to ‘co-create’ a language that uses features of sounds that wild dolphins normally use to communicate with each other.
Although it now looks as if John Lilly may have been over-optimistic about our ability to communicate with dolphins, his view was at least an advance on one that was firmly entrenched in Western thinking until at least the late twentieth century. Even the iconoclastic philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was conservative when he said that humans are the only beings on Earth that are ‘world-forming’. Everything else was either ‘without world’ (inanimate objects such as stones) or ‘poor in world’ (all non-human animals). Non-human animals, said Heidegger, were entirely captive to their encircling environment and released into activity only by features of that environment that disinhibited their instinctual drives. Only humans, he said, freed from such captivity by their conceptual and linguistic powers, had the ability to stand outside life and see it ‘as-such’, aware of the finitude of life and the imminence of their own death.
Our growing understanding of dolphins (and other intelligent animals) casts some doubt on Heidegger’s view. We can already see that dolphins have a communication system that is complex and subtle, and that their lives are rich in meaning. As the linguist James Hurford argues, ‘mental representations of things and events in the world come before any corresponding expressions in language; the mental representations were phylogenetically prior to words and sentences’. And, as the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre observes, dolphins may not use words but they do share our fate as ‘dependent rational animals’. They are extremely adept at the ‘simple’ things that, in the end, make humans happy too – notably, endless play. They are anything but ‘poor in world’.
In the beginning, perhaps, was not the word but the gesture. And, as those in the emerging field of biosemiotics argue, we are beginning to see beyond the painted theatre-set where human language ostensibly directs meaning to a larger world in which human language is just one phenomenon in a web of meanings. Perhaps the revelation does not stop with dolphins.
Dolphins remind us that we too (and not we only) are essentially sympathetic creatures. David Hume had a musical metaphor for this facet of our nature: ‘humans resonate among themselves like strings of the same length wound to the same tension’. This is not our whole truth, but it is part of it. We may recall the modest humanism of Boccaccio in the preface to the Decameron, which was written at a time of plague and betrayal: umana cosa é aver compassione degli afflitti – it is human to have compassion for the afflicted. Dolphins present us with possibilities of friendship and hope, which, as Artistotle’s younger contemporary Epicurus suggested, may be the greatest virtues of all, even if he didn’t have another species in mind.
