The Dolphin in the Mirror: Exploring Dolphin Minds and Saving Dolphin Lives

277 Pages·2011·4.15 MB·English

Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Photo
Copyright
Dedication
List of Video Illustrations
Prologue
1. Minds in the Water
2. First Insights
3. In Search of the Dolphin Rosetta Stone
4. Nonterrestrial Thinkers
5. The Face in the Mirror
6. Through the Looking Glass
7. Cognitive Cousins
8. Reflections on Dolphin Minds
9. Into the Cove
10. Ending the Long Loneliness
Consortium of Marine Scientists and Zoo and Aquarium Professionals Call for
an End to the Inhumane Dolphin Drives in Japan
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
Footnotes
Arion, the seventh century B.C.E. poet, is rescued from the sea by a dolphin
in this illustration by Albrecht Dürer, ca. 1514.
Copyright © 2011 by Diana Reiss All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
www.hmhbooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Reiss, Diana.
The dolphin in the mirror: exploring dolphin minds
and saving dolphin lives / Diana Reiss.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-547-44572-4
1. Dolphins—Psychology. 2. Dolphins—Conservation. I. Title.
QL737.C432R457 2011
599.53'15—dc23
2011016064
Book design by Melissa Lotfy
Printed in the United States of America DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For the dolphins
To my husband, Stuart, &
my daughter, Morgan
List of Video Illustrations
The subjects below, from indicated chapters, can be viewed via streaming video
at www.hmhbooks.com/dolphinmirror. Specific links to each one can be found
in footnotes in the appropriate location of each chapter.

1. Dolphins using keyboards (chapter 3)
2. Dolphins using a learned whistle to represent an object (chapter 3)
3. Dolphins blowing bubble rings and playing with them (chapter 4)
4. Dolphins watching themselves in a mirror (chapter 5)
5. Dolphin spinning and watching herself (chapter 6)
6. Observing and recording wild dolphins in Bimini (chapter 7)
Prologue
SAVING HUMPHREY
IN OCTOBER 1985, millions of people the world over followed the plight of
Humphrey the humpback whale, a lost, stray, forty-ton leviathan who
accidentally wandered into San Francisco Bay and swam far inland. Humpbacks
were migrating south along the Pacific Coast, from Alaska to the warmer waters
of Baja, Mexico, Hawaii, and beyond, but Humphrey was in danger of beaching
and never making it back to the open ocean. At first, few paid attention. But as
the days went by and Humphrey remained trapped, the headlines began to
appear.
One chilly afternoon, I was sitting on the edge of the dolphin pool at my
research facility at Marine World Africa U.S.A. in Valejo, California, feeding
two young bottlenose dolphins, Pan and Delphi, when my assistant got a call.
The director of the California Marine Mammal Center (CMMC), the regional
marine mammal rescue center, explained to my research assistant that it was
urgent that she reach me. My assistant took over the feeding of the dolphins, and
with my wet hands covered in fish scales I answered the phone. Peigin Barrett,
the center director and a dear friend, was speaking quickly about the forty-five-
foot-long humpback whale that had swum under the Golden Gate Bridge nearly
two weeks before.
Humpback whales are best known for their hauntingly beautiful songs that can
travel great distances in the seas. Although the purpose of the songs remains
unclear, researchers believe they have something to do with mating behavior,
male-male competition, and perhaps social contact and individual identification.
Imagine a population of whales spread out over hundreds of miles of ocean, their
identity and relative location broadcast through song; effectively, they form an
acoustic network. Humphrey had probably become separated from other
humpback whales traveling south, and I wanted to help save him.
I was a science adviser for the Marine Mammal Center. I also helped rescue
marine mammals. Injured and stranded dolphins and small whales were brought
to our facilities, and my research assistants and I worked with a veterinarian,
trainers, and other volunteers in efforts to save them. Now we faced a new
challenge: an on-site rescue. Whales had been observed in San Francisco Bay
waters before, but they generally made brief, albeit well-publicized, tours and
then exited uneventfully. Humphrey had turned unexpectedly and wandered
inland, swimming through a series of connected bays and waterways, each one
smaller than the last, until he was eighty miles from the open ocean! When
Peigin called me, Humphrey was swimming back and forth in the Sacramento
River and into ominously small, fingerlike sloughs near the small sleepy town of
Rio Vista.
***
The previous week, a rescue attempt using underwater whale calls had failed.
Some of my colleagues, local marine mammal scientists, had conducted a
playback experiment; that is, they'd played recordings of the calls of killer
whales, a natural predator of humpback whales, hypothesizing that upon hearing
such sounds, Humphrey would quickly depart. But it was no surprise when this
approach failed. Previous playback attempts over the years using predator calls
had failed to deter dolphins and whales from dangerous areas laced with fishing
nets. These animals are pretty smart; apparently, they check out their
environment, realize there is no true threat, and ignore the acoustic "scarecrows."
By now, Humphrey had been in both brackish and fresh river water for a week
and a half, with little or nothing to eat. The water changed the appearance of his
skin. Buoyancy is quite different in fresh water than in salt water, and Humphrey
had been forced to expend more energy with less food consumption. The clock
was ticking. We had to get him back out to sea.
A military helicopter picked up Peigin and me at San Francisco International
airport at five that evening and took us to the Operation Humphrey headquarters,
a makeshift control center at a U.S. Coast Guard station near Rio Vista.
We landed in the darkness on the bank of the Sacramento River, and Peigin
and I were immediately ushered into the bright fluorescent lights of Operation
Humphrey headquarters. A meeting room there was already filled with federal
staff from the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the U.S. Coast Guard, as well as
CMMC staff and some local officials and townspeople.
A rather stiff-necked NMFS agent whom I will call Dave took charge at the
front of the room and began the meeting. He reviewed the past week and a half
and Humphrey's travels farther and farther from salt water and food. But Dave
stunned us when he expressed his overarching concern: If the whale died in the
Sacramento River, his rotting carcass could present a health issue. Saving the
whale was, it seemed, a secondary issue.
Dave then brought forth and uncovered what looked like a medieval torture
device: a barbed round object on a stick. It was a radio tag that he wanted to use
to track Humphrey's location. Radio tracking was an excellent idea, but
unfortunately the only tag available had to be attached to the whale by
embedding the barbs into its blubber and muscle. The CMMC veterinarians and
our rescue staff strongly opposed this idea. The whale was already compromised
and stressed, and the barbs would only add to his problems. Dave dropped the
idea—at least for the time being.
By the end of the meeting we'd arrived at a plan. The next day, with a flotilla
of Coast Guard boats, a few riverboats used in the Vietnam War, and a myriad of
small private boats owned and manned by local residents of Rio Vista, we would
try to find the whale and form a boat barrier to herd Humphrey back to sea.
We arrived at the dock the next morning and Peigin and I were assigned to the
lead boat, the Bootlegger, used by some of the CMMC staff. It was a small
fishing boat owned and operated by a local fisherman, Captain Jack Finneran,
who'd kindly donated his time and vessel to help in the rescue. On the boat with
us was another researcher who worked with the CMMC, Debbie Glockner-
Ferrari, and her husband, Mark, a wildlife photographer. Debbie had been
studying humpbacks in Hawaii and could determine the sex of these enormous
animals while swimming with them. We set off upriver in search of Humphrey.
En route I used a hydrophone (an underwater microphone) to obtain some
recordings of normal noise levels in the river. As we moved northward under the
Rio Vista Bridge, I noticed that the noise level was much greater in the waters on
the north side of the bridge than on the south side. This finding would play an
important role later in the rescue, though I had no inkling of it at the time. Then
the boat's radio crackled: Humphrey had been spotted in a small slough near
Sacramento. We raced off in the direction of the whale.
I was absolutely stunned to see this huge whale in such a small body of water,
flanked on both sides by grassy fields with grazing cows.
Humphrey was an amazingly large yet graceful whale, a lost alien in this
bizarre landscape. I could barely see him below the water line until he raised his
blowhole out of the water for an explosive breath. We observed him slowly
moving through the sloughs; to our surprise and continual frustration, Humphrey
demonstrated an uncanny ability to disappear into these very small bodies of
water. We tracked him by following his "footprints," smooth, round circles on
the water's surface created by his tail movements. Yet at frequent intervals, the
footprints would suddenly cease. It was weird; for hours, even aerial surveys
couldn't spot him. Our small boats seemed ineffective at guiding him in any
direction, no matter how coordinated we tried to be.
At midday I called my colleague Dr. Kenneth Norris; considered by many to