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Content The D a r k Side of D olphins
4 J> O L P H W ,
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UMI Number: EP61561
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Disseftâtion Pubi “King
UMI EP61561
Published by ProQuest LLC (2014). Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author.
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The Dark Side o f Dolphins
By
Cheryl Aday
This book is submitted in fulfilm ent o f the final project requirements for the
University o f Southern California, Master o f Professional Writing Program.
Approved: Date: ^^^( 8
" Faculty Advisor - M .G Lord
Approved:_____ Date: l ' 2 > ' j i ^ j i
Program Director Brighde Mullins
11
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
Copyright © 2010 Cheryl R. Aday
All Rights Reserved
111
To my mother and father,
who thought I could do anything,
and supported me through trying to do it
IV
Acknowledgments
Thanks to all the people who helped me get this far: My
high school English teacher, Ronald Rude, who gave me great
works of literature to read; my college English teacher.
Dr. Shirley Felt, who taught me to appreciate grammar (any
typographical or grammatical errors in this text are my
sole responsibility); Chris Delorenzo for encouragement t
pursue my dream of a Master's degree in writing; Hal
Markowitz, for his insight into the world of dolphins and
captive animal behavior; Dennis Kelly, for giving me my
first opportunity to work in the field of dolphin research;
Stuart Silberman for listening to my tales of woe and
supporting me nonetheless; Leland Paxton for his
willingness to talk endlessly about dolphins; Susan Barco,
Naomi Rose, Thomas White, and Candace Slater, all of whom
gave up some of their in-demand time to allow me to
interview them; To my family for listening when writing was
tough, and celebrating with me when writing went well; and,
finally, thanks to my tireless graduate advisor, M.G. Lord,
who inspired me by always seeing beyond the writing to the
content, and encouraging me to keep improving.
This thesis couldn't have been completed without each and
every one of you.
V
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ............................................. v
Introduction ....................................... 1
1. Violence in Virginia ...................................... 7
2. Sex in the Sea ............................................ 32
3. Swim At Your Own Risk .................................. 50
4. Why Dolphins Don't Speak English ...................... 63
5. The Dolphins of War ......................................7 9
6. Dimwitted Dolphins ...................................... 100
7. Pests or People? ....................................... 121
VI
Introduction
The butterfly's attractiveness derives not only from
colors and symmetry : deeper motives contribute to it.
We would not think them so beautiful if they did not
flyr or if they flew straight and briskly like bees,
or if they stung...
- Primo Levi, author & chemist
A dolphin is a healthy social mammal, and it behaves
like one, including doing things that we don't find
particularly charming.
- Karen Pryor, author & biologist
December 2005, and I was at the 16th Biennial Conference on
the Biology of Marine Mammals. It was "video night" at the
conference, an impromptu event with research footage of marine
mammals around the globe; usually a pleasurable contrast to the
intense scientific talks. But not tonight.
When the speaker, a woman stepped to the podium, I didn't
catch her name. But I did catch the word "infanticide." I
vaguely remembered hearing the hypothesis that bottlenose
dolphins sometimes kill baby bottlenose. I'd dismissed it -
Flipper would never hurt a baby, let alone kill it. When she
said she had, perhaps, the first footage of infanticidal
behavior in dolphins, I watched with skepticism. I knew some
animals killed babies of their species. But not dolphins.
The high-def footage was taken from directly overhead, from
a blimp - the latest vehicle of favor for observing whales. High
The Dark Side of Dolphins
above the surface of the sea, researchers would float and
videotape the behaviors of animals at the surface, using
telephoto lenses and digital processing to remove any blur
caused by the blimp's movement. The researchers were looking for
endangered right whales - but what they saw instead was an
"endangered" baby bottlenose.
The film started with an six adult dolphins (probably the
mother) and a baby or calf dolphin, about half the length of an
adult, swimming together. Suddenly a group of six or seven
large dolphins (a gang?) approaches on an intersecting course.
At least two dolphins from the new group join the dolphins with
the baby - the others swim off. It's not til five minutes later
that we realize that these two dolphins are trouble.
Suddenly five dolphins turn their heads toward the calf.
It's as though "everyone" is staring at the baby. Three of them
ram him - the impact flipping him into the air. It might look
like play - but a baby getting hit that hard will have cracked
ribs, not to mention internal bleeding.
It's a free for all after that - one dolphin rams the calf
again, flipping it on its side. Another pushes it under water.
Yet another rams it repeatedly. Finally, the calf is held under
water by two adults. Are they trying to drown it? The savage
attacks continue off and on for 40 minutes. The calf did not die
on camera, the scientist points out from the podium, so this is
The Dark Side of Dolphins
not conclusive evidence of infanticide. But with cracked ribs
and internal bleeding, the baby very likely died soon after.
Was this baby the equivalent of the devil's spawn - the
"Damien" of dolphins - to merit such treatment? Could any baby
dolphin do something that justified adults torturing and killing
it?
Was this a one-time thing?
Do all dolphins do it?
Why hadn't scientists discovered this before?
How dolphins do such a thing?
These weren't the dolphins I'd studied for the seven years.
These were another animal entirely. I'd worked with Atlantic
White-sided dolphins at the Steinhart Aquarium in San Francisco.
They weren't angels - they did fight with each other, and
sometimes left deep rake marks as they scraped their teeth on
each other's skin. But this was child'splay compared to what I'd
seen today.
Like many people, I like to look for the good in others,
even in animals. But I determine to re-read everything about
dolphins with an eye to the dark side. If dolphins could kill a
baby of their own kind, what else might they be doing, that I'd
somehow screened out of my consciousness?
The Dark Side of Dolphins
I expanded my search for nefarious activities to include
all dolphins - not just the ubiquitous bottlenose, but dolphins
of all shapes and sizes. The bottlenose dolphin is just one of
many species of toothed whales - the largest in its family the
killer whale or orca, the smallest the four foot long harbor
porpoise.
Orcas didn't start out with such a squeaky clean
reputation as dolphins. These animals, also known as killer
whales, are known to kill and eat other species of marine
mammals (cannibalism?). They kill not only smaller marine
mammals, but will even attack a blue whale (though usually a
calf). Wastefully, the black and white marine park stars don't
usually eat all of a blue whale kill - they eat only the tongue.
These giant dolphins certainly earned the name "killers."
From my research I knew dolphins were considered to be a
hypersexual animal. It did surprise me when I read about
research which purported to be about male dolphin "alliances,"
and it turned out these alliances were focused on kidnapping
females and forcing them to have sex.
Still, dolphins have never hurt people - in fact, they
saved them, right? Thousands of people pay to swim with the
smiling, well-meaning dolphin each year. Nothing bad ever
happened to them, right? It turns out that indeed dolphins may
The Dark Side of Dolphins
intentionally injure humans, sometimes even kill. Not to mention
sexual harassment.
Dolphins continue to catch the imagination of the general
public and scientists alike. In May 2010, a group of scientists
and activists convened in Helsinki to discuss the rights of
whales and dolphins. As part of their meeting, they published a
Declaration of the Rights of Cetaceans (the text for this
declaration can be found in the last chapter of this book),
including " . . . cetaceans as persons have the right to life,
liberty and wellbeing."[1] Do dolphins really exhibit that
characteristics and behaviors that persuade us they deserve
rights to be declared non-human persons? For some reason,
dolphins and whales seem to be unusually important to humans.
Can the popular idea of "Flipper" be reconciled with the
sexual, potentially dangerous animals that science is revealing
dolphins to be? Carefully. Dolphins may not who we expected them
to be. They indulge in infanticide, are highly sexual, aren't
always safe to swim with, can't speak English, may have killed
the enemies of the U.S., and may not be as smart as people think
they are. Read on, and discover the real animal, the dolphin
behind the myth and under the sea.
The Dark Side of Dolphins
References
1. Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans: Whales and Dolphins,
in Cetacean Rights (www.cetaceanrights.org). 2010:
Helsinki, Finland.
1. Violence in Virginia
In many [animal] populations, infanticide is a
normal and individually adaptive behavior.
- Glenn Hausfater and Sarah Hrdy
(biologists).[1]
God forbid that any book should be banned. The
practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
- Rebecca West (author and journalist)[2]
Twenty miles south of Chesapeake Bay, we drove slowly
down the beach a large white pickup with "POLICE" stenciled
boldly across the driver's door. We watched the GPS for the
readout to arrive at 36 degrees, 35.6 minutes north; 75
degrees, 52.1 minutes west. Closer. Closer. Officer Swain
stopped the truck. Smooth blue sparkled to the left; white
dunes sprouted beach grass and sea oats to the right. Such
a paradise was hard to imagine as setting for violent
death. Check the coordinates again, I urged.
Christine Trapani pulled a portable GPS from her bag,
and double-checked. This, she assured me, was definitely
the place. She knows how to use GPS - as a member of the
Stranding Response Team, finding the bodies of dead or
injured marine mammals and sea turtles from the beaches is
part of her job.
The Dark Side of Dolphins
I jumped from the vehicle onto firm white sand. From
the other side of the truck I heard a splash. I ran to the
water's edge. Not fifteen feet from where I stood on shore,
a bottlenose dolphin slapped its tail -- bang -- against
the surface. The dolphins were waiting for us. Was this the
irritable kind of tail slap directed toward us, the kind of
dolphin behavior that might be interpreted as "get away,
can't you see we're fishing here?" Or was this a special
tail slap, the kind a guilty dolphin might use to grab the
attention of nearby associates to warn "Hey! The Feds are
here. Everybody look casual."
The beach off False Cape State Park, where these
dolphins now swam, had been dangerous for wayfarers in the
past. Assistant Park Manager, Cameron Swain, driving the
truck, told me the park received its name because 19th
century mariners often mistook this area for a safe port.
The actual port. Cape Henry, was 20 miles to the north.
Thinking they had arrived at their destination, the mouth
of the Chesapeake Bay, ships turned to shore and grounded
on the sandy shoals just off the beach. It wouldn't have
been out of the ordinary for beachcombers then to encounter
a dead body, maybe several dead bodies, lying on the sand.
The 2000-plus recorded shipwrecks along this coast earned
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the perilous waters the nickname "Graveyard of the
Atlantic."[3]
There were no bodies on the beach today, but it was a
different story eleven years ago - May 6, 1996.[4] On this
date, a three-and-a-half-foot body had been discovered. The
corpse of a baby bottlenose dolphin. Not the victim of a
shipwreck, but a victim, all the same. The first in a
series of deaths.
* * *
The dead dolphin had been reported to Virginia
Aquarium's Stranding Response Program. Dolphins, seals, sea
lions, turtles and even whales wash up on beachs frequently
enough that recovery teams called stranding networks exist
around the world. These teams answer the call when people
find marine mammals or sea turtles on the beach. Sometimes
they're alive; most of the time they're dead (95% of the
time, according to the Virginia Aquariums's official
volunteer requirements).[5]* If they're alive, the team
* Stranding team work is demanding. From the Virginia
Aquarium stranding team requirements: "Must be able to lift
and carry 25 pounds and assist with lifting and moving
larger loads(re: lifting a 700 pound dolphin into the back
of a pickup truck)."
The Dark Side of Dolphins
must assess and make the call as to whether a stranded
animal is well enough to ever be returned to the wild. The
lucky animals -- usually turtles and seals -- are driven
back to the stranding center to convalesce in tanks until
they’re well enough to return to the wild. But most of the
time the stranding team's calls lead them to the bodies of
dead animals. Much of the team's job is examining carcasses
to determine cause of death, then reporting findings to
government agencies and scientific researchers.
Before I braved the stranding center's nauseating
aroma, I met Susan Barco, the program's director, for
breakfast. We chatted amicably over omelettes at her
favorite local hangout. I would have pegged her for a
primary school teacher: an open, friendly woman, with curly
brown hair, who obviously enjoyed her work. Much of her
satisfaction, she told me, came from knowing that her
team's efforts were contributed to improving the welfare of
sea turtles and marine mammals around the world. I realized
I had somehow expected someone who worked with dead animals
the majority of the time to dress and sound more gothic.
How could someone who loved animals go to work every day,
knowing their job was to take calls about dead and dying
animals. While many of the turtles can be rehabilitated,
Barco said, marine mammals, specifically whales and
10
The Dark Side of Dolphins
dolphins, are not likely to survive a stranding on the
beach. With these animals, the duty of the stranding team
is to recover the body and, like coroners, determine the
cause of death. Does this sound cheerful to you?
After breakfast, I followed Barco by car from the
restaurant to her office. The Stranding Response Program
offices are several miles away from the Virginia Aquarium
and Marine Science Center. The Stranding Response building
is set well back from any nearby houses and busy roads. And
it's a good thing. When you get out of your car, the first
thing that strikes you is the smell. Flies are everywhere.
I've smelled worse, but to judge from behavior of the
visiting teenagers I saw with t-shirts pulled up to cover
their noses and mouths, most people haven't.
The smell of decomposing flesh is unmistakeable. One
can see why it might be evolutionarily advantageous for our
ancestors to instinctively avoid this smell. Decomposing
bodies do not usually bode well for those around.
In this case, however, the decomposing flesh was of
less dangerous origins: it came from the remains of dead
bodies of dolphins, seals and turtles in nearby trash
dumpsters. After dissecting the body of an animal to find
out why it died, one had to do something with the leftover
parts. When you dissect a dead human body to determine the
11
The Dark Side of Dolphins
cause and circumstances of death, it's called an autopsy;
when an animal is the subject, it's a necropsy. Each of the
animals collected by the Strandiny Response Team was
necropsied for cause of death. Following the necropsy, some
body parts are packaged and sent off to scientists and
research institutions around the world, from a scientist
"wish list." The team checks the list of wanted parts and
remove and ships those pieces off. unwanted remains are
then deposited into a trash container next to the necropsy
area, to await the nose-holding arrival of (probably
unhappy) city waste disposal workers.
Not all bodies are dissected immediately, however.
Some may be put aside, and frozen whole for later
examination. That's what had happened to the baby dolphin I
was interested in. His death hadn't seemed unusual enough
at the time to merit immediate necropsy - it wasn't until
later that the body was removed from cold storage and the
cause of death identified.
After a tour of the facilities, I turned the
conversation to the main reason I was there - to discuss
the deaths of a series of baby dolphins. Barco and I had
just started talk when another staff member waved the two
of us to her desk. "You're interested in the baby dolphins?
Have you seen the photos yet?" she asked. She handed over a
12
The Dark Side of Dolphins
photo album and Barco opened it to an 8 x 10 glossy of a
dead three-foot long dolphin. The animal's skin had been
slit lengthwise across the midsection, and the skin and
underlying fat was pulled back exposing the pink and red
tissues and white bone. It reminded me of a real-life
version of a stuffed bear I had that started falling apart
when a seam came unravelled.
Barco got very scientific. "This one," Susan
explained, "showed subcutaneous bruising and multiple
fractures." Dark red blotches. Broken ribs. The photo was
full color: grey and white and red. Too much red. Yet the
dolphin still sported a "joyful" grin.
The first dolphin with these kinds of wounds had
washed up on the Virginia shore in 1996. It wasn't until a
year later when someone became suspicious: Dr. William
McLellan. McLellan presided over the necropsy of a
"pristine" baby dolphin, the surface of its skin smooth and
unmarred. McLellan described the massive damage he found
beneath the skin in 2004 documentary The Dolphin Murders :
" . . . complete massive fractures of all the ribs on
one side. So it looked like the ribs had just
been imploded into the lung. Then when you look
at the lung, and the lung had this massive
fracture. You could actually fracture soft tissue
also. And there'd be a tear all the way across
the surface of the lung. You'd take the lung out,
13
The Dark Side of Dolphins
and then you'd see actually another fracture,
through the liver."[6]
The wounding pattern was so striking, he called in
fellow professor and dolphin research Dr. Ann Pabst in to
see them. "Some of the injuries were really quite
astounding," said Pabst. "Fractured skulls, fractured
vertebrae, a fractured ear bone - which is really one of
the densest bones on the surface of the planet."[6]
Pabst called Stranding Response Team Director Susan
Barco for help. Did the Team have the bodies of any other
baby dolphins that had washed up in the past several years?
Indeed, they had. Barco did a quick necropsy of her own, on
a small dolphin that had just washed up. Immediately upon
opening up the body she knew she was seeing something
unusual - and mysterious. "I emailed him [McLellan] before
I finished the whole necropsy and said 'you need to tell me
if this is what you saw, ' " Barco told me. " . . . I think we
need some help here. We're seeing something that we don't
know how to interpret." 'Send more bodies' came the call
from McLellan. Bodies were sent. The hunt was on.
McLellan and Pabst contacted veterinary pathologist
Dale Dunn, of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. His
response after examining a body - "It looks like someone
has taken a baseball bat and just literally beaten these
14
The Dark Side of Dolphins
animals to death." Pabst asked Barco for more dolphin
bodies. No one had noticed anything suspicious when these
bodies had washed up in 1996 and 1997, but Pabst's
necropsies revealed that nine of the dolphin calves had
died from blunt force trauma^ - that they had died from
multiple impacts with a large dull object.
To recap: over several years, more than the usual
number of dead dolphin calves had washed up on the beaches
of Virginia. Many of the bodies were very young, dolphins
less than three months old. Necropsies showed an unusual
pattern of injuries in nine of the bodies.[4]
Who or what could have done this? Who would have both
the motive and the means? Or just the means? The team
considered a number of possibilities: sharks, boat
collisions, angry fishermen, wave damage, and even
underwater blasts by the military or construction. None of
the suspects fit all the facts.
Blunt force trauma here refers to the blunt force
trauma, the medical classification, not Blunt Force Trauma
the hardcore punk/thrash band from Austin, Texas, although
sounds that are too loud can indeed kill whales and
dolphins, which rely on their sensitive hearing for
survival.
15
The Dark Side of Dolphins
If sharks or other large animals had been the cause of
death, pieces of flesh - shark bites - should show up on
the bodies of the baby dolphins; the bodies had few
external wounds. One did have a bite mark - it had been
bitten in the jaw, but the wound was not the jagged,
tearing kind that could have been left by a shark.
The nets of fishermen leave signature criss-cross
stripes on a trapped dolphin's skin; the skin of these
bodies was smooth, with the exception of a few rake marks.
Rake marks are white, parallel indentations left on a
dolphin's skin by a set of teeth scraped hard enough
against the skin to peel away the top layer.
As surfers know, getting caught inside a waves can
indeed kill. If the wave-roll occurred on hard rocks, the
hapless surfer's body would most probably suffer bruises
and broken ribs, sounding comparatively close to the
injuries found on the calves. Even on sand, wave rolls
could cause drowning and death. But the calves showed no
sign of the scraped skin that would accompany such an
event. Other than the rake marks (and a bite on one calf)
mentioned above, the skin of the calves was unscathed.
That left underwater construction, or military sonar
blasts, as the potential culprit. While blast injuries
might explain broken bones, this type of injury would not
16
The Dark Side of Dolphins
injure in selective areas. The part of the dolphin closest
to the blast would certainly be more traumatized, but any
bones on that side of the dolphins' bodies would be broken.
The mysterious baby dolphins had fractures to the bones
around their midsections only. The blows they suffered
seemed to have been intended to kill - injuries were
focused on the calves' hearts, lungs and liver. This
specificity pointed to a grim possibility — that the baby
dolphins had been killed intentionally.
Unbeknownst to the Virginia team, the key to these
dolphin deaths had already washed up on a beach in
Scotland. Between 1992 and 1996, the bodies of five baby
dolphins had been found on the beaches of Moray Firth, a
long narrow indentation in the eastern seacoast of Scotland
that opens onto the North Sea. It wasn't the dead baby
dolphins on which Scottish researchers focused: they were
more concerned with the bodies of ninety harbour porpoises
that had washed ashore during the same period of time.
These porpoises had few external injuries, but multiple
skeletal injuries (lots of broken bones) and contusions
(bruises). Harbor porpoises, often found in the same parts
of the world as bottlenose dolphins, are significantly
smaller. They look like dolphins, but adult harbor
porpoises are smaller, an average of five feet in length.
17
The Dark Side of Dolphins
This means adult harbor porpoises are in the same size
range as three-month-old baby bottlenose dolphins.
So, in the U.S. they had baby dolphins washing up on
shore with numerous internal injuries; In Scotland they had
lots of adult harbour porpoises and a few baby dolphins
washing up on shore with the same type of injuries. Lots of
bodies. Lots of evidence. So who was the culprit? A few of
the deceased porpoises and dolphins had similar wounds --
parallel, rake-like lacerations - when seen in adult
dolphins these types of skin lesions are caused by one
dolphin scraping its open mouth and teeth against another
dolphin. What species of dolphin, they wondered, would be
attacking harbor porpoises? The shape, size and spacing of
the teeth marks was a definitive way to track down the
offending species.
Ben Wilson [check on this] took a plaster cast of the
rake marks and matched them to existing skeletons they had
archived at [find out where]. The tooth marks were an exact
match for only one dolphin species -- Tursiops truncatus,
the beloved bottlenose dolphin. Dr. Wilson himself was
shocked at his discovery: "It was, 'Oh my God, the animals
I've been studying for the last 10 years are killing these
porpoises.' "[7]
The Dark Side of Dolphins
With this new information in mind, Scottish
researchers realized they might have actually seen murders
in progress - and misinterpreted the attacks on the
porpoises as play. In 1995, a Scottish citizen caught a
violent dolphin-porpoise interaction on video: "At first I
thought the two dolphins were playing with a salmon," said
Mike Hancox, "But when I looked more closely I could see
them flipping up a porpoise with their beaks and battering
it when it landed on its back in the water."[8]
The video of dolphins had been killing porpoises gave
the researchers in Scotland a new perspective. They took a
second look at the bodies of the baby bottlenose that had
washed up on their shores. Their conclusion: adult
bottlenose dolphins were killing not only harbour porpoises
- they were also responsible for the deaths of many of the
baby dolphins. The Scottish researchers were on the verge
of publishing their findings when U.S. researchers called
to discuss the mysterious injuries to the baby dolphins
they've found. Did the Scots have any ideas to explain the
mysterious injuries see in the Virginia Beach corpses? They
suddenly realized that dolphin infanticide was not confined
Lo Moray Firth.
All sorts of animals commit infanticide, not just
dolphins. Lions do it. Meerkats do it. Warthogs do it. In
19
The Dark Side of Dolphins
fact, pretty much every species of animal seen in the Lion
King is known to kill the young of its species under
certain circumstances. So dolphins aren't alone in this
dark practice. But why kill babies?
Why do animals kill infants of their own kind?
Scientist believe that behaviors like infanticide that are
seen in large numbers of animals are a result of
evolutionary pressures. Inheritance can determine not only
anatomical features, like blue or green eyes, but can also
determine an animal's behavioral tendencies. As humans, we
tend to dismiss this idea - we like to think that our
personalities and lifestyles are our choices -- completely
independent of our genes. Most scientists, however, believe
that genes are associated with behavior, and that behaviors
that lead to more living offspring (children,
grandchildren, etc.) for animals will, over time, become
more and more common. In short - if you have more children
than your neighbors, and they have more children, then more
and more individuals in your neighborhood will share some .
of your genes (and in this case, behavior). If killing
babies of its own species means that the baby killer will
have more grandchildren to dandle on its knees, then at
least some individuals in that species will be genetically
predisposed to, well, kill babies.
20
The Dark Side of Dolphins
When food is hard to get, and infants are around, you
often get infanticide. Some animal mothers react
particularly badly when stranger wants to share their milk:
this is euphemistically termed "adoption avoidance." For
example, when seal babies get lost from their mothers,
suckling at the wrong nipple is risky - female seals bite
the stranger, even though it's just a baby, sometimes
leading to the desperate pup's death. Hunger (the
"predation hypothesis") can drive animals to consider their
own species as food: male and female chimpanzees sometimes
hunt chimp babies (not their own!) to eat.
The need for things other than food can also drive
infanticide. The dominant female in a wolf pack often
kills the infants of the less powerful wolf females to give
her offspring a better chance at life. If a wolf mother
wants to make sure her daughter has a "date to the prom,"
she can ensure this much better than human mothers can - by
wiping out any other young female that might someday pose
competition.
Even the need to reproduce can lead to killing babies.
In the "sexual selection hypothesis." I'm not sure where
the selection part comes in, but "sexual" refers to males
who want to have sex, and are willing to kill to get it.
When a group of male lions takes over a pride by running
21
The Dark Side of Dolphins
out or killing the previous males, they don't stop there.
Like the Bible's King Herod, the ruling males' next step is
to kill all the nursing cubs. As a result, scientists
calculate, cubs are born to the usurping males eight months
sooner than otherwise. This means that lionesses whose
young have just been killed soon mate with the males that
just killed them. What? Why? Evolutionary theorists are
quick to point out that, for a female, mating with the male
that just killed your baby is more likely to lead to the
survival of the next child. Unlike humans, female lions
don't appear to have issues about what sort of father such
a lion would be, or that by encouraging this bad behavior
they're contributing to lawlessness in society . . .
Could any of these hypotheses explain dolphin
infanticide? If dolphins were the baby killers, was it a
one-time thing, or something that occurs in dolphins
throughout the world? Scientists have been assiduously
studying bottlenose dolphins since the late 1950s; why did
it take them until 1998 to discover what the dolphins were
really up to? Perhaps this episode of baby-killing a one
time thing, brought on by strange circumstances. If so,
what could have triggered it?
Barco has a pet theory about why dolphins might have
suddenly started killing. In 1995, several years before the
22
The Dark Side of Dolphins
small corpse showed up on the Virginia shore, a virus
killed or weakened many dolphins in the local population.
Susan speculates infection by the virus - morbillivirus--
may have caused currently pregnant females to lose their
babies, and that nursing dolphins were also vulnerable to
the virus. All of a sudden the local dolphin females were
single and available: they were all fertile at the same
time. The following year, all the females would have been
pregnant. The following summer, during mating season, it
would have been slim pickings for the males.
Perhaps these sexually frustrated males were the
source of the killings - unless they killed a few babies,
there was no one to mate with. That's not entirely true -
there were plenty of females to mate with, but no fertile
females. Perhaps it's not enough for the dolphin males to
mate - they may have an overwhelming drive to mate
specifically with females with whom the mating could lead
to offspring. An event-triggered case of the sexual
selection hypothesis (see above) could explain these
infanticides.
If epidemic-inspired infanticide were the case, Barco
reasoned, there would be a pattern to the dolphin deaths.
Babies with apparently dolphin-caused injuries washed up
almost exclusively during the summer months: June, July,
23
The Dark Side of Dolphins
and August. What were the ages of the ones that died, she
wondered. From their body lengths, the animals that wash up
during the summer indicate that they're about three months
of age. If the virus was the trigger that started sexually-
deprived male dolphins killing babies, then the number of
deceased baby dolphins should decrease over time. The
numbers sometimes decrease year to year, but also show
spikes - perhaps coinciding with other epidemics?
Although Barco's research on this point is not
conclusive, it is heartening to think that perhaps the
dolphin infanticides were indeed an aberration, a result of
a disease that caused an unusual change to the dolphin's
social environment. Maybe fewer and fewer dolphin babies
will wash ashore, until dolphin infanticide is just a faint
memory. Until it happens again, however, it is nearly
impossible to get any closer to the truth about the cause
behind the infants' deaths.
Why did it take so long for the scientists to realize
that dolphins were the killers they sought? Even dolphin
biologists have trouble believing that dolphins could do
anything so despised by human standards, or at least by
Western Civilization standards. It's not just dolphin
biologists either. Many of the biologists who study a
particular mammal, after having been confronted with the
24
The Dark Side of Dolphins
evidence of infanticide, still find ways to avoid believing
such a thing about the animals with which they've spent
their lives, and want to tell the public about it even
less . *
When it was first reported in the 1960s that langurs
had been seen to kill their young, scientists hypothesized
that the death of lemur babies had been brought on by
stresses from human occupation of langurs' habitat by man.
It was not seen as a "natural" behavior, but pathological.
Jane Goodall saw infanticide in the chimps she studied, but
again explained it away as an atypical behavior, brought on
by stress.
Are infanticidal dolphins overly stressed, or guilty
of murder? Guilt would imply that dolphins could be held to
* "The founding fathers of classical ethology --
Nikolas Tinbergen, Karl Ritter von Frisch, and Konrad
Lorenz — did not offend the public with gory stories about
a brute natural world. Non-human animals, if anything, were
the better humans : they acted for the good of the group and
did not kill each other with the ease that humans
exhibit."from Schaik, C.v., C.H. Janson, and ebrary Inc.,
Infanticide by males and its implications. 2000, Cambridge
University Press: Cambridge, UK ; New York. p. xiv, 569 p.
25
The Dark Side of Dolphins
a code of conduct that tells them that killing babies is
"bad," a code of conduct that dolphin researchers have yet
to uncover. In court, guilt requires not only the
perpetrator's awareness that society had judged an act to
be wrong.
Putting aside that we don't know what dolphin
society's code of conduct is, are dolphins "aware" of what
they do? That is, are they conscious? Scientists as well
as philosophers differ on what abilities would demonstrate
consciousness in an animal (or in humans, for that matter).
One such test for awareness that dolphins have passed is
known as the "mirror test." In the mirror test, an animal
is anesthetized and while asleep, a mark is applied to its
head or body that can't be seen directly by the animal, but
only by looking in the mirror. For example, for a human, a
good place to apply the mark would be on the forehead,
since you can't directly see your own forehead. On waking
up near a mirror, an animal that is self-aware will not
only look at the mark on the animal in the mirror, but will
try to touch the mark on itself. In early studies, only
great apes appeared able to recognize themselves in the
mirror.
Dolphin researchers didn't want to follow the protocol
exactly. First, they didn't want to put dolphins to sleep
26
The Dark Side of Dolphins
while they marked them, since dolphins are voluntary
breathers: if you put a dolphin to sleep, it stops
breathing and dies of suffocation. Instead, dolphins were
trained to come to a position in their tank and wait until
they got the signal that they could go. While a dolphin was
at their station, they were marked with an "X" - either
with a black (non-toxic) marker or with a marker filled
with water. This was so changes in behavior of the dolphins
with black X's could be sure to be due only to the dolphin
seeing the X in the mirror, not to feeling the marks as
they were put on. After the dolphins got their X's, they
were released back to the part of the tank that contained
an underwater mirror.
Faced (so to speak) with marks on their bodies in the
mirrors, dolphins couldn't reach out a hand to touch the
mark like gorillas or chimps could. Instead, the dolphins
appeared to carefully examine their bodies, turning this
way and that to more closely examine the exact spot where
the X had been applied. It appeared they were orienting
their bodies just to get a better view of the X in the
mirror - which would seem, as much as touching your hand to
a mark, to require knowing that what one is looking at in
the mirror is indeed one's self. For primates, simply
orienting themselves to look at a mark in their forehead in
27
The Dark Side of Dolphins
the mirror would be considered a failing grade in self-
awareness, but dolphin researchers concluded (as do I) that
the amount of time dolphins spent looking at the mark on
their bodies, and the way they turned themselves back and
forth while looking, means that dolphins do indeed
"recognize" themselves in the mirror. Still, it’s a long
jump from that to concluding that dolphins are capable of
more complex forms of self-awareness, such as
introspection, thinking about one's self and one's actions.
Without more extensive research, it's difficult to support
the idea that an adult dolphin understands the pain it
inflicts when attacking a baby dolphin.
For many, it's difficult to believe that the peaceful,
playful dolphin would ever hurt anything, let alone one of
its own. But, because some dolphins don't appear to have
the same values as those of Western society, does it mean
dolphins should be considered less than human? Maybe. Dr.
Thomas White, author of In Defense of Dolphins, used his
book to make an argument that philosophically dolphins are
as much persons as we are, and should legally be considered
persons by the law. But in the light of dolphin
infanticide. White undermines his own argument: "The most
basic sign that we recognize someone else as a person is
that we treat that individual as 'some one, ' not 'some
28
The Dark Side of Dolphins
thing.' We appreciate their intrinsic worth, and act
accordingly." It's hard to imagine that infanticidal adult
dolphins could qualify for personhood under this criteria -
they are certainly treating the babies they attack as "some
things" not "some ones."
So, dolphins aren't persons by the "treat persons as
some one" criteria. Do humans qualify as persons either?
Certainly some people (by definition sociopaths) treat
other people simply as means to an end. And when it comes
to infanticide, we'd like to think it never happens in
human society, but a quick Google search uncovers countless
articles on infanticide going on in today's world - in
rural parts of India and China babies, usually girl babies,
are still left out to die. If we deny personhood to
dolphins because some individuals treat other individuals
as a means to an end, wouldn't we deny personhood to humans
as well. The dolphins' reasons behind infanticide remain a
mystery, but infanticidal behavior has now been witnessed
in two different species, the bottlenose and the Tucuxi, a
dolphin found in the Amazon river. The video footage,
described in the introduction of this book, is hard to
watch - it seems to reflect the type of behavior seen in
human mob violence. Forty minutes of a crowd of adults
pummelling and suffocating an infant dolphin, half their
29
The Dark Side of Dolphins
size. How can anyone explain it? Researchers continue to
try. The leading theory continues to be that it's really
about sex.
30
The Dark Side of Dolphins
References
1. Hausfater, G. and S.B. Hrdy, Infanticide : comparative
and evolutionary perspectives. 1984, New York: Aldine
Pub. Co. xxxix, 598 p.
2. West, R., The strange necessity : essays and reviews.
1931, London: Jonathan Cape. 344 p.
3. Stick, D., Graveyard of the Atlantic, shipwrecks of
the North Carolina coast. 1952, Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, ix, 276 p.
4. Dunn, D.G., et al.. Evidence for infanticide in
bottlenose dolphins of the Western North Atlantic.
Journal of Wildlife Diseases, 2002. 3 8 ( 3 ): p. 505-510.
5. Aquarium Stranding Response Team Volunteer
Requirements. [cited 2010 November 26]; Available
from: http://www.virginiaaquarium.com/get-
involved/Documents/StrandingTeamVolunteerReqs.pdf.
6. Booth, G., The Dolphin Murders. 2004, Tigress
Productions: UK.
7. Broad, W.J., Evidence puts dolphins in new light — as
killers, in New York Times (online version). 1999: New
York City.
8. Harden, T., The dolphin's friendly image takes a
battering., in The Daily Telegraph. 1995: London.
9. Schaik, C.v., C.H. Janson, and ebrary Inc.,
Infanticide by males and its implications. 2000,
Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK ; New York,
p. xiv, 569 p.
31
2. Sex in the Sea
I don't want to belong to any club that will accept people
like me as a member.
- Groucho Marx [1]
[When trying to have sex underwater] . . . it helps to have a
third person around to push them at the right times with
the proper vectors. Just like dolphins.
- G. Harry Stine, author & NASA consultant[2]
When NASA needed to train people to work in low
gravity situations, they used the earthbound environment
closest to outer space - a swimming pool, aka the Neutral
Buoyancy Lab.[3] It was here, wearing weight belts that
rendered them virtually weightless underwater, that randy
astronauts in training are rumored to have done their
unauthorized initial research on the physics of sex in zero
gravity. These pioneering "scientists" found that, at least
scuba-clad in a pool, Newton's third law - for every action
there is an equal and opposite reaction - made weightless
sex between humans tricky. They tended to "fly apart"
without the aid of another person — a facilitator. This
third person, they thought would be an essential factor for
successful sex in outer space.
Thus was born the Three Dolphin Club, so-named by the
late Harry Stine, author and former NASA consultant,
because, he said, that's how dolphins do it -- "a third
The Dark Side of Dolphins
dolphin is always present during the mating process."[4] By
1996, Stine claimed to have heard from at least seven
fully-qualified members, space shuttle astronauts. Not a
single dolphin was among them.
According to NASA, Stine was wrong, at least about
their astronauts: no U.S. astronauts, they said, had ever
joined this outer space Mile High Club - these men and
women were too conscious of their duties to the American
people to have sex "on the job." Mary Roach researched the
Three Dolphin Club eagerly for her book Packing for Mars,
only to find a lack of evidence and much grounds for
reasonable doubt, including the fact that dolphins don’t
need a third dolphin at all - they’re quite capable of
having sex as a twosome, thank you very much. More on this
later.
So, despite the fact that millions of moviegoers saw
James Bond accomplish zero-G sex in Moonraker, such outer
space shenanigans by U.S. astronauts seem unlikely. On the
con side. Roach argues that 1) having sex in outer space
would put an astronaut’s job in jeopardy; 2) even
practicing in the Neutral Buoyancy lab, as Stine reported,
would risk one's job; and 3) as pointed out to her by
astronaut Roger Crouch, arms, legs, and, when all else
33
The Dark Side of Dolphins
fails, even duct tape could easily be used to counteract
Newton's third law.
So, Mary Roach says the evidence isn't there, Snopes
says no one has had sex in space, and Cecil Adams of the
Straight Dope can't find any evidence for it either. Just
when one might start to despair. Roach brings up some
strong points on the opposite side. Not only have co-ed
teams of astronauts been in space together, married U.S.
astronauts have been in space together. And refused to
comment on their sex lives while in space. And know even
less (if that's possible) about the spacebound sex lives of
Russian cosmonauts - as Roach points out, Mir and the
International Space Station both have modularized, slightly
more private spaces in them than the space shuttle.
So, to summarize, Stine says he talked to several
astronauts who reported having sex in space. No one will
admit to having sex in space. But they probably wouldn't,
even if they had, for fear of losing their jobs. NASA may
avoid the question of sex in space altogether by having
astronauts freeze their eggs and sperm before long,
colonizing space flights - while no one knows if humans can
get pregnant in space, a fetus would potentially be exposed
to radiation. The levels of radiation experienced by
34
The Dark Side of Dolphins
astronauts are dangerous to adults over long periods, but
would likely be fatal to a developing fetus.
Dolphins don't need a third dolphin. Perhaps NASA
should launch a study of their sexual techniques to see
which might be transferable for humans in zero-G. Because
duct tape can be quite painful when it's time to take it
off.
In reality, there's probably little to transfer.
Dolphins have, well, anatomical adaptations, that humans
would find impossible to mimic (never say never). And the
way dolphins actually have sex would not qualify, for most
humans, as an optimal approach. Details on dolphin anatomy
and sexual behavior are definitely in order.
Unlike astronauts, dolphins don't float and bounce
about in the water - dolphins use their tails and flippers
to gain an amazing amount of traction in the water. During
my time working with two Pacific White-Sided dolphins at
the Steinhart Aquarium, I learned firsthand about dolphins
and their strength in water.
In the research we did, dolphins could push a "button"
to indicate their interest in getting touched - "receiving
tactile stimulation" was the way it got recorded in our
behavior logs. One of the dolphins' favorite games to play
35
The Dark Side of Dolphins
while getting "tactile stimulation" was tug-of-war. There
was no rope involved; a dolphin interested in tug-of-war
would swim to where you were on the side of the tank, then
turn 180 degrees and present its tail.* You, the human,
were expected to grab the tail, then pull as though you
were going to drag the dolphin out of the water. Fat chance
of that happening! With adults ranging in size from five to
eight feet. Pacific white-sided dolphins are relatively
small dolphins. At most, they weigh in at 400 pound or so.
The dolphins at Steinhart were small - females - in human
terms. Hulk Hogan-sized, about six and half-feet long and
weighing about 300 pounds. Sheer weight along would have
made it impossible for me to haul the dolphin (or Hulk
Hogan) from the tank. But it was more than that, in this
game, when I tried to move the dolphin’s tail toward me, it
not only wouldn’t come further toward me, it was pulling
strongly in the opposite direction! Even with its tail out
of the water, the forward pull generated the fins of one of
*Sticklers would feel compelled to point out that
dolphins don't have tails - that thing at the end of their
body is more properly known as a "caudal peduncle." (Try
and say that five times fast!)
36
The Dark Side of Dolphins
these "small" dolphins was amazing. Pulling on the
dolphins' tale was a bit like yanking on a rope attached to
an intractable Clydesdale - you could pull all you want,
the horse wasn't going nowhere, no-how, unless it wanted
to. In the next step of the game, the dolphin would pull
away harder and harder. At the last second, when I knew I
couldn't hold it any longer. I'd stop pulling and push the
dolphin's tale up and away, and the dolphin would flip over
backwards, its tail smacking the water and making a big
splash. The dolphin would then resurface and swim over
smiling that permanent dolphin smile. I swear they were
someone grinning bigger after winning the tug-of-war! That
was enough to convince me that in the water dolphins need
nothing more than their finely honed physiques to push,
pull and move whatever and wherever they so please.
It's easy to tell a boy dolphin from a girl dolphin
once they roll over, but you've got to know what to look
for. It's not as easy as sorting out puppies; the smooth
underside of both male and female dolphins might throw the
untrained observer for a loop. But it's easy to tell the
belly of a female dolphin from that of a male, if you get a
good look. In both sexes, you'll see a long slit in the
37
The Dark Side of Dolphins
center of the lower "belly" of the dolphin. This is where
the genitals are hidden away. Females have two extra,
smaller slits, one on each side of the longer slit. That's
where the female dolphin keeps its nipples. Keeping their
sexual organs tucked away not only keeps the organs warm in
cold water, but by eliminating drag allows the dolphin to
swim faster than it could if it weren't so streamlined.
The most interesting changes in the female anatomy are
probably in the nipples, which have the ability to squirt
milk under pressure into a baby's mouth. It's the dolphin
male's sexual organ that usually surprises those of our
species most. Not because it's particularly big, but
because it's under the dolphin's voluntary muscle control,
and because it's prehensile.
Prehensile? Like a monkey's tail? Well, not quite. The
Oxford English Dictionary defines prehensile as meaning
"capable of prehension; (Zool., of a tail, limb, etc.)
capable of grasping or holding."[5] A dolphin's penis can
be extended at will and used to carry things around. Not
heavy things - things like a rope or a piece of sea weed.
Perhaps even to wrap around and pull on a human swimmer's
leg. Some have pointed out that lacking hands, a male
dolphin using his penis to carry items may just be using
38
The Dark Side of Dolphins
the most hand-like (well, finger-like) appendage he has
available.
If you're not sure you've ever seen a dolphin penis,
then you haven't seen one - they're early impossible to
miss. The average bottlenose dolphin penis is pink, pointed
with a slight "S" curve, and 10" long. It shows up quite
starkly against the grey of the bottlenose skin. As though
the dolphin has acquired a pink worm as an abdominal
parasite.
Male dolphins aren't subtle. When a male wants to have
sex he rolls over, pulls out big pink and swims next to her
pointing it toward the sky. "Want some of this, baby?" his
behavior seems to say. If the female doesn't swim away
immediately, the male swim in a circle, then, like a WWI
fighter plane he comes up behind and under her, flips
upside down again and glides toward her belly. If she's
interested, she keeps swimming upright, straight ahead, and
he inserts his penis quickly into her genital slit. There
is little repeated thrusting like you might see in some
mammals - sometimes just a one-time insertion and
(presumably) ejaculation of sperm. For this reason alone,
dolphins probably wouldn't have logistical problems mating
39
The Dark Side of Dolphins
in space, presuming they could get up there and get close
enough to give mating a try.
Continuing our previous saga of courtship, if the
female isn't ready to have sex with a particular male, she
rolls over on her back as he approaches. The message seems
clear, but a persistent dolphin male won't take this as a
"no," but more as a maybe later. It turns out that dolphin
males might be able to tell if a "no" really means "yes."
Dolphin researchers have long speculated that dolphins may
use their ability to see with sound to sense physiological
changes inside the body of another dolphin. A male dolphin
might be able to use his own version of a sonagram to tell
if a female dolphin is excited or actually disgusted by his
amorous approaches.
While dolphins don't take their time with the
intercourse part of sex - dolphin foreplay may occur over
hours. The time two dolphin bodies are linked together in
sex per se ranges from two to thirty seconds.[6] Not
minutes - seconds! As Tim Cahill joked regarding the short
duration of dolphin sex, male dolphins might easily be
called "the most inconsiderate mammal."[3] Did I mention
the dolphin penis is tapered on the end - almost pointy?
Makes sense when you think they have to find an opening and
40
The Dark Side of Dolphins
slide in even as the female continues swimming. And get
done in a second or two.
If bottlenose dolphins, when it comes to the duration
of sex, fall far behind humans, they make up for "lack of
quality" with quantity: male dolphins have been observed to
have sex eight times an hour. Bottlenose dolphins are
described as highly sexual animals - so are spinner
dolphins.
At the end of a long day, hundreds of spinner dolphins
may meet up together whistling, leaping into the air, and,
most of all, having sex. Not just a hundred-dolphin orgy -
the technical term is a "wuzzle."* [7]
Dolphins have sex. A lot. "Around here almost every
time we see socializing we also see what appears to be
sexual behavior," blogged Adrian, a graduate student
observing behavior of dolphins off the coast of Texas. "In
our behavior log we don't distinguish between just plain
socializing and sexual play." She went on to say, "[Today
w]e saw a group of 12 or so having what can only be called
*The word "wuzzle' is attributed to the late dolphin
researcher W.E. Schevill who, when asked to describe this
behavior, said "It looks like a wuzzle to me."
41
The Dark Side of Dolphins
a dolphin orgy. Want to talk about one track minds. It did
not matter what was going on around them (big boats drove
by, small boat nearly drove over them) they jusL kepL at
it." [8]
If dolphins are so interested in sex, then why don't
they spend more time with it? It turns out that the speed
with which they complete the sex act is strikingly similar
to that of their land-bound evolutionary "cousins." Both
fossil and molecular studies have led to the same
conclusion - dolphins are part of the same evolutionary
group that includes camels, cows, and hippopotami. In this
group of animals, known as artiodactyls, males don't have
to "warm up" to get an erection - they can erect their
fibro-elastic penises on demand.[9]
As discussed in Chapter X, Murder on the High Seas,
dolphins are not monogamous. In contrast to many other
mammals' situations, it's more advantageous for female
dolphins to mate with any male dolphin they see in hopes of
persuading him he might be the father of their current or
next baby. Lest one think of dolphins as totally
unromantic, it should be noted that the time leading up to
sex can be long and involve lots of touching of fins, tails
and pretty much everything else. Indeed, the pink Amazon
42
The Dark Side of Dolphins
river dolphin takes romance even further - in this species,
the male often carries an object in its mouth -- a clump of
weeds, a stick, or (most romantic of all!) a lump of clay -
as part of courting a female.[10] Researchers Tony Martin
and Vera da Silva concluded dolphins were carrying things
in the interest of romance when they noticed that males
carried them only in the presence of females - and that
object-laden males were 40 times more likely to get in
fights with other males. Forty times! "It’s like a guy
showing off," Martin told National Geographic. "The
equivalent of having a Ferrari." The other way male river
dolphins have of impressing a female? By being pink. In the
Amazon river dolphin, pinkness appears to correlate with
scar tissue - more fights survived. And apparently female
Amazon river dolphins find bad boy dolphins most
attractive.
Dolphins don't only practice heterosexual mating. In
fact, their anatomy makes male-to-male sex almost
indistinguishable, for the outside observer, from male-to-
female sex. The situation of the male's penis within a
"pouch" means that male-to-male intromission can be
genital-to-genital sex ("My god, they're the perfect gays!"
one of my friends exclaimed upon hearing this.) It turns
43
The Dark Side of Dolphins
out that in bottlenose dolphins, male dolphins have
lifetime relationships with one or two other male dolphins.
These are known as male alliances.
Does the fact that male dolphins mate with other males
and have long-term relationships with them mean that
dolphins are homosexual? Some think so, although to my mind
while the behavior might be termed homosexual, it seems the
more proper term would be "bisexual" - since they have sex
with both genders apparently indiscriminately. Is this
unusual among animals? Apparently not -- researcher Bruce
Bagemihl, author of Biological Exuberance, a study of
homosexual behavior in animals, says same-sex sexual
behavior has been seen in 1500 species. [11] Homosexuality,
says Bagemihl, is well documented in 500 species; the
bottlenose dolphin is just one of the many.
Perhaps, particularly with an intelligent species like
the dolphin that lives in a complex social structure, we
should expect to observe homosexuality. In her book.
Evolution's Rainbow, biologist Joan Roughgarden concludes
"the more complex and sophisticated a social system is, the
more likely it is to have homosexuality intermixed with
heterosexuality. Any animal in a complex society has to
manage both within- and between-sex relationships. Both
44
The Dark Side of Dolphins
types of relationships are mediated through physical
contact, including embracing grooming, and genital contact,
as well as through vocalizations, bodily symbolism, and
behaviors like food-sharing and warning calls."
Although a third dolphin is not required for either
heterosexual or homosexual dolphin sex, there just might be
an another dolphin around when two dolphins have sex. From
behavior observed in a group of bottlenose dolphins that
live in Shark Bay, Australia, male-male lifelong
associations have a practical value - a dolphin's "best
friend" will fight by his side against other dolphins to
kidnap and coerce a fertile female dolphin. Indeed, a group
of two or three male dolphins will often ally with other
group(s) to fight against a similar "gang" of dolphins (one
side has been seen to have up to 14 allied individuals) to
win the "favors" of a female.
These male dolphins aren't gentle with the object of
their desire. In a 1992 scientific paper, males were described
as "...chasing, hitting with the tail, head-jerks (sharp
lateral or vertical movements of the head) , charging, biting,
or slamming bodily into the female."[12] Biologist Rachel
Smolker, in her book. To Touch a Wild dolphin,
euphemistically calls this behavior "herding."[13] Two
45
The Dark Side of Dolphins
males have to work together to get an otherwise unwilling
female. "Among dolphins," Smolker points out, "a lone male
would be hard-pressed to mate with an unwilling female."
After about two weeks the female dolphin manages to escape
and return to her podmates. It wouldn't work for just one
male - as soon as he tried to feed, the female would
escape, and he'd be alone once again.
"Despicable, yes, but not inexplicable," was the title
of a review by primatologist Craig Stanford for a book
about sexual coercion in humans and primates - it could
also be a fitting comment regarding the coercive behavior
seen in bottlenose dolphins.[14]
Smolker describes the coercive behavior of male
bottlenose in perhaps the mildest terms possible: "Female
dolphins, as in most mammals species, probably have some
opinions about whom they would prefer to mate with." She
concludes, "Faced with at least two or more males working
together, however, a female dolphin probably has little
opportunity to put her preferences into practice. Male
dolphins can be so aggressive in their herding of a female
that she can even be forced to mate against her will."
Smolker writes as objectively and avoids the use of
the negative-connotation-loaded phrase "rape" when
46
The Dark Side of Dolphins
describing the coercive behavior of male dolphins. In her
book she does, however, lament the lack of defensive
teamwork among female dolphins - " . . . there is no denying it.
Although it seems they could benefit from helping each
other, female dolphins just don't do it. I want to stand up
and yell out 'Get together, sisters, and take a standi'"*
Even dolphin scientists can find the aggressive behavior of
dolphin males and the passive response of dolphin females
both surprising and upsetting.
The phrase "Three dolphins" crops up often in
descriptions of the herding behavior of Shark Bay Dolphins.
Many times three male dolphins will hang out together more
than with other dolphins. Two male dolphins often work
together to capture a single female dolphin, making a group
of three. In this respect, it could be said that Shark Bay
bottlenose dolphins could lay a better claim than humans to
a bona fide Three Dolphin Club.
*It may be comforting to know that females do team up
to defend themselves against male sexual coercion in at
lesat one mammal species - female alliances against
coercion have been observed in the bonobo, also known as
the pygmy chimpanzee.
47
The Dark Side of Dolphins
References
1. Marx, G., Groucho and me. 1995, Originally published:
New York, B. Geis Associates, 1959.: 1st Da Capo Press
Edition. 352 p.
2. Stine, G.H., The Three Dolphin Club. Analog Science
Fiction/Science Fact, 1990. 110(5): p. 106.
3. Roach, M ., Packing for Mars : the curious science of
life in the void. 1st ed. 2010, New York: W.W. Norton.
334 .
4. Stine, G.H., Living in space : a handbook for work &
exploration beyond the earth's atmosphere. 1st ed.
1997, New York: M. Evans and Co. 248 p.
5. OED Online, Second Edition. 2009, Oxford University
Press.
6. Norris, K.S. and American Institute of Biological
Sciences., Whales, dolphins, and porpoises :
[proceedings]. 1966, Berkeley,: University of
California Press, xv, 789 p.
7. Norris, K.S., et al.. The Hawaiian Spinner Dolphin.
1994, Berkeley: University of California Press, xxiii,
408 p.
8. Adrian. A Dolphin Tale. 2001 [cited 2010 November 7,
2010]; Course blog by student]. Available from:
http ://courses.Washington.edu/biol22 0/DolphinTales.htm
1.
9. Perrin, W.F., B.C. Würsig, and J.G.M. Thewissen,
Encyclopedia of marine mammals. 2002, San Diego:
Academic Press, xxxviii, 1414 p.
10. Jenkins, M., River Spirits, in National Geographic.
2009.
11. Bagemihl, B., Biological exuberance : animal
homosexuality and natural diversity. 1st ed. 1999, New
York: St. Martin's Press, xiii, 751 p.
12. Connor, R.C., R.A. Smolker, and A.F. Richards, Two
Levels of Alliance Formation Among Male Bottlenose
Dolphins (Tursiops sp.). Proceedings of the National
Academy of Science, 1992. 89(3): p. 987-990.
13. Smolker, R., To touch a wild dolphin. 1st ed. 2001,
New York: Nan A. Talese, Doubleday. 274 p.
48
The Dark Side of Dolphins
14. Stanford, C., Despicable, Yes, but Not
Inexplicable. (Sexual Coercion in Primates and Humans:
An Evolutionary Perspective on Male Aggression Against
Females) (Book review). American Scientist, 2009.
97(6): p. 498 (3) .
49
3. Swim At Your Own Risk
He’s Opo the friendy dolphin
He’s friendly as can be
If you should want to learn to swim
You couldn't do better than learn from him
He'll very soon get you into trim
And he's giving instruction free
Down at good old Opononi by the sea
- lyrics from "Opo the Friendly Dolphin" (Crombie
Murdoch, 1956)[1]
In the mid-1970s, hippie drug-guru Timothy Leary
scored an invite for Susan Sarandon to swim with dolphins.
It all started innocently, Amy Reiter of Salon.com
reported, with Sarandon taking a dip with two of John
Lilly's dolphins, Joe and Rosie.[2]
"First, they had the dolphin just swim past my feet in
the wading area," Sarandon said, "and then 1 went into the
deeper area, and 1 stroked the dolphin they called Joe each
time it went by. After he trusted me more than 1 took hold
of Joe's fin and we glided around the tank together."
Sounds like just about every captive swim with the dolphin
"experience" you've heard before. Then Joe got a little
more intense. " . . . Joe stopped swimming horizontally and
pushed up against me," said Sarandon, "l thought the whole
experience was just groovy until 1 felt this horrible pain
The Dark Side of Dolphins
on my wrist, which was holding Joe's fin." Sarandon had
been bitten by a dolphin.
Researchers jumped into the pool and rushed to
Sarandon's aid. "I could hear them shouting, 'No, Rosie!
Don't!' I looked over and Joe's mate, this huge dolphin I
hadn't even noticed before, was virtually standing up right
out of the water, towering over me on its rear fins," said
Sarandon. "She seemed to be 12 feet tall, emitting this
loud, high-pitched noise. The attendants were screaming,
'We've got to get you out!' 1 was afraid 1 was going to get
my other arm broken." If Rosie had attacked her seriously,
Sarandon later said, "1 would have been killed instantly,
as surely as if Rosie had been a shark. Apparently an
enraged dolphin is incredibly dangerous." (Sarandon sounds
reasonably afraid of swimming with dolphins.) Sarandon
might have been able to give Jessica Alba a bit of helpful
advice before she got a starring role in the Flipper movie.
But Jessica figured things out for herself.
"1 don't know if anybody knows this, but dolphins get
excited, even when you are a human being," explained
Jessica Alba, describing her experiences with dolphins on
the 1996 Flipper movie. [3] "I didn't know this until I was
being poked by a few of them, which was very rude." These
dolphins weren't just poking her with their "noses." Alba
51
The Dark Side of Dolphins
asked to have all male dolphins removed from the cast of
Flipper - because she didn't like being "poked" as only a
male dolphin could do.
Some have commented, perhaps joking, that the male
dolphins' visible attraction to Alba simply demonstrates
the strength of Alba's sexiness - so intense that it
transcends species boundaries, in the way Captain Kirk was
drawn to the creepy/sexy salt monster on Star Trek (an
episode appropriately entitled "The Man Trap"!) despite the
fact the alien was green and had suckers (Wired magazine
called the alien "a cross between a lamprey and troll
doll.") . [4] Regarding hormones crossing species, there is
possibly some truth to the idea — some hormones that play
a part in sexual attractiveness can be found in more than
one mammalian species. So, Alba could, indeed, be that
sexy. Maybe actress Jennifer Garner, too?
More recently, on The Late Show with David
Letterman,[5] Garner recounted a less traumatic, but more
graphic experience than Alba's. Garner was researching her
role for a 1998 role for TV's Fantasy Island, in which she
played a dolphin who turned into a girl. "I spent the day
with that very dolphin [from the show]," Garner paused to
clear her throat here, "who was a he, it turned out." As
Garner sat on the side of the tank chatting with the
52
The Dark Side of Dolphins
dolphin's trainer, the dolphin swam close to her. She
reached out to feel its skin. "I had my feet dangling in
the water," she continued, "and the dolphin came and swam
right over my foot. I thought that was so cool!" The
dolphin started swimming faster and faster around her foot.
"I thought, this dolphins is really into me," said Garner.
"Then," she clapped her hands together for emphasis, "the
dolphin does something. And I said to the trainer, oh, I
think the dolphin just peed." "No, ma'am, no," the trainer
replied. "The dolphin did something," insisted Garner. "He
was just saying "Mahalo," the trainer replied. "Mahalo,"
Garner explained to Letterman, means "Thank you" in
Hawaiian.
There is an alternative to the "so-sexy females bring
out the animal in dolphins" theory. Which is too bad,
because then, if you weren't a human femme fatale, the
hormone theory would seem to make it safe for you to swim
with dolphins. And human males would definitely be safe
from the attentions of male dolphins. But it's not that
clear cut. Another possible reason that dolphins "come on"
to humans is that dolphins are not all that discriminating
when it comes to who or what they have sex with. If you've
seen the King of the Hill episode in which Hank Hill has a
close encounter with a dolphin,[6] you probably haved the
53
The Dark Side of Dolphins
impression that dolphins, at least cartoon dolphins, use
slightly different criteria than humans do in assessing the
sexual attractiveness of partners.
The behavior of dolphins in swim-with-the-dolphin
programs is unpredictable at best. Some places appear to be
much safer than others, however. Until I met Dr. Amy
Samuels, it had never occurred to that swimming with a
dolphin could be hazardous to your health. Maybe they
should come with a warning label. When Samuels, a Woods
Hole Oceanographic Institute research, told me about the
1995 study on the safety of swim-with-the-dolphins programs
in the U.S., I found the list of behaviors she and Trevor
Spradlin had used in the study particularly worrisome . . .
along with the more expected "kiss," the list included
aggressive behaviors such as "body-slam" and "ram," then
progressed to the more suggestive "erection," "mount," and
"beak-to-genital propulsion" (please tell me this only
happened between dolphins!).[7]
The safety study of five swim-with-the-dolphin
programs found that while little "risky" behavior was seen
between dolphins and swimmers at the three more highly
structured swim programs, the other two, where dolphins
could improvise what they did during their social time, had
quite different results. At one program, almost ten percent
54
The Dark Side of Dolphins
of the time dolphins interacted with humans, they were
being submissive - that is, dolphins were flinching or
fleeing in response to the approach of humans. This is
risky, because a scared animal can quickly become an
aggressive animal. The fifth swim-with-the-dolphins
program, however, had the most frightening statistics. In
this program, 60 percent of the social interactions were
classified as risky. Eight percent of the time humans were
in the water, dolphins were exhibiting aggressive behavior.
Aggressive behaviors, as defined in the research, included
bite, body-slam, and dolphin-initiated rams. Dolphins in
that same program were seen to exhibited sexual behaviors
toward other dolphins or human swimmers, 50 percent of the
time.
Don't think you're safe from dolphin attentions
because you're a man. Male dolphins are not selectively
heterosexual in their interests. For example, in 1999 a
male surfer reported a too-friendly dolphin had tried to
"rape" him.[8] Apparently, he survived the aggressive
friendliness with his honor intact. The victim now strongly
recommends surfers wear a wetsuit while surfing.
Did the dolphin realize the surfer was male? Rest
assured, not only can dolphins detect physical differences
using sonar. (Some swim-with-the-dolphin programs
55
The Dark Side of Dolphins
discourage pregnant women from swimming with dolphins,
probably because the dolphins often become fascinated with
the woman's distended abdomen, gathering and echolocating
on her stomach, executing their own version of a fetal
sonagram.)
Wild dolphins are often the friendly, benign marine
mammals we read about, but too often, the dolphins that
hang out with humans become trouble.
In March 2008, Moko, a solitary dolphin seen regularly
off the coast of New Zealand, piloted two stranded pygmy
sperm whales away from the beach and out to sea. He
received nothing but kudos from his adoring public. If a
dolphin is thoughtful enough to do something like that,
you'd think it would be safe for you to swim with it. It
was, until a year later, Moko started kidnapping people.
Things would seem fine, a woman (usually) would be swimming
with Moko, next thing she knew he'd start pushing her out
to sea. Moko stranded one woman on a buoy a mile from
shore, and she had to be rescued from hypothermia.[9]
Similar stories abound: Jotsa, a female dolphin in
then Yugoslavia attacked women who tried in her
interactions with men. Donald (aka Beaky) liked to take
swimmers for tows on his dorsal fin. Unfortunately, he
usually took them out to sea. Georges, a dolphin seen
56
The Dark Side of Dolphins
anywhere from the coast of Ireland to the coast of Holland,
is incredibly amorous toward women, and has earned the
nickname "Randy."[10] The World Society for the Protection
of Animals wanted to relocate Randy to France - not because
of his skill with 1 'amour, but because French law prohibits
swimming with wild dolphins.[11]
There's a progression to the ways lone, sociable
dolphins behave. They start out like the dolphins in books
and stories, but once they get used to humans, they become
the dolphins of news flashes and scary movies.
1. All Alone. First a dolphin starts "hanging out" by
itself in a new area; this in itself is unusual for
dolphins who are highly social and rarely sighted far
from their pod. In this stage, the lone dolphin may
follow boats from time to time, but will not directly
approach humans.
2. Curious About Humans. Next, the dolphin starts
following boats regularly. Although people begin to
approach the dolphin, the dolphin keeps its distance.
The dolphin appears curious about humans and their
associated objects.
3. Fun for Humans. In the third stage, a dolphin begins
to associate closely with a few humans in the area.
57
The Dark Side of Dolphins
allowing these humans to touch it, sometimes even
towing them in the water.
4. Danger to Humans. If the dolphin becomes famous - at
least among humans the fourth and most dangerous stage
will likely ensue: a number of strange humans start
approaching the dolphin; rather than the "friendly"
ways it interacted with people before, it now
interacts in aggressive, dominant, or even sexual
ways. It may bump, bite, or even try to have sex with
swimmers. It should be noted that some solitary
dolphins never get to this stage.(Summarized from
"Managing Human Interactions with Solitary
Dolphins" [12])
Are these dolphins attracted to humans because they're
so smart? This would be a difficult proposition to support.
Male bottlenose dolphins, in particular, are highly sexual
and have few boundaries when it comes to sex with animals
other than dolphins -- having been seen to try to mate not
only with humans, but with smaller dolphins of either
gender, boats and turtles. Yes, turtles. Not giant turtles
- and not the right end of the turtle either. Imagine the
poor turtle pulling his head back into his shell, only to
find a part of the dolphin following him in!
58
The Dark Side of Dolphins
Interspecies sexual activity is initiated by
bottlenose dolphins not only in captivity, but in the wild.
Male bottlenose have been seen to "gang up" on juvenile
spinner males and attempt to have sex with them. The
smaller, put-upon dolphin doesn't appear to be a willing
participant.
In addition, wild dolphins that appear to prefer human
companionship to that of their dolphin cohorts, often
become not just sexually affectionate, but sexually
aggressive with humans.
If one still finds it difficult to believe that
Flipper would force unwanted attentions on a woman. YouTube
can show you otherwise. No, not the joke video of a dolphin
out of the water, looking for all the world like a dog
humping someone's leg: this video begins with a pastoral
scene, a shapely 20-something bathing beauty giggling as a
dolphin swims nearby.[13] At first, the woman laughs with
embarassment as the dolphin moves its beak toward her
crotch, the way one might when a dog tries to get too
friendly with your leg. Her embarassment quickly turns to
anxiety when she can't get the dolphin to stop.
Despite her frantic efforts to ward him off, the
dolphin continues to nose and rub up against the woman. She
turns her body back and forth, trying to avoid its touch. A
59
The Dark Side of Dolphins
nearby man, noticing her distress, swims to her aid. He
gathers her up in his arms, and uses his body to block the
dolphin. The dolphin, of course, can swim much faster than
the man can turn. The video ends as man and the woman work
together trying to thwart the dolphin's repeated attempts.
One assumes that nothing worse happened.
Can you be sure you'll be safe if you swim with
dolphins? One 1996 survey found that 96% of swim-with-the-
dolphin tourists "enjoyed the program."[14] The survey
supplied no information as to why the other 4% didn't have
a good time. It seems that the odds are pretty good that
you'll have safe. Is there a way you can improve the
chances of a good experience?
There are a few questions to ask about any swim-with-
the-dolphin program:
1. How many participants are in each session? Fewer is
better.
2. How much dolphin/human contact is offered? What kind
of contact is involved?
3. Is there a free, unscripted social session (according
to Samuels' research, these sessions are the most
dangerous). Or will there be a professional animal
trainer present and actively involved in all
interactive sessions? (better)
60
The Dark Side of Dolphins
4. Will there be an orientation before the program
starts?
5. Have you spoken to anyone else who's experienced a
swim at this program? Can the program provide you
with references?
Finding a program that sets up a safer environment for
human-dolphin interaction will greatly increase your
chances of a safe swimming experience. No person or
institution can guarantee that you'll be 100% safe while
swimming with a dolphin. It's a wild animal. Perhaps like
the thrill of petting a lion or skydiving, the inherent
danger in swimming with dolphins should be considered an
integral part of the pleasure.
61
The Dark Side of Dolphins
References
1. Murdoch, C., Opo the Friendly Dolphin. 1956, BMG,
1996: Auckland, NZ.
2. Reiter, A., When Dolphins Attack, in Salon.com. 2002.
3. Wenn, Alba Turns on Dolphins. 2 006.
4. Sjdberg, L., Star Trek's 10 Cheesiest Classic
Creatures, in Wired.com. 2007.
5. Season 17, Episode 88, in Late Show with David
Letterman. 2010, NBC: USA.
6. Return to La Grunta, in King of the Hill. 1999.
7. Samuels, A.M.Y. and T.R. Spradlin, Quantitative
behavioral study of bottlenose dolphins in swim-with-
the-dolphin programs in the United States. Marine
Mammal Science, 1995. 11(4): p. 520-544.
8. Reuters, Man accuses dolphin of attempted rape, in
Independent Online (www.iola.co.za). 1999: Cape Town,
South Africa.
9. McCafferty, C., Woman rescued from playful Moko, in
The Gisborne Herald. 2009: Gisborne, New Zealand.
10. Goodwin, L. and M. Dodds, Lone Rangers. 2008, Marine
Connection: London.
11. Amorous dolphin targeting swimmers. 2 0 02, CNN.com.
12. Wilke, M ., M. Bossley, and W. Doak, Managing Human
Interactions with Solitary Dolphins. Aquatic Mammals,
2005. 31(4): p. 427.
13. Zyonasan2002. Dolphin attempts copulation. YouTube.
Accessed on 30 November 2010 [Online video clip] 2009
May 24 [cited.
14. Amante-Helweg, V., Ecotourists' beliefs and knowledge
about dolphins and the development of cetacean
ecotourism. Aquatic Mammals, 1996. 22(2): p. 10.
62
4. Why Dolphins Don’t Speak English
She was young and beautiful, he was intelligent and athletic. It
wasn’t until a month after they’d moved in together that things
started to change. Sound familiar? Nothing had prepared Margaret
for the way Peter stopped listening to her. Then Peter quit
talking altogether. Should Margaret pack her bags and move on?
After all, they weren’t married... Margaret didn’t see that as an
option -- she took commitments seriously. She had decided to
live with Peter of her own free will; she wouldn’t leave him
just because things had gotten tough. It wasn’t just another
case of men are from Mars, however : women are from Venus, but
Peter was a dolphin.
When dolphin researcher John Lilly offered Margaret Howe
the chance to live in a (water-filled!) house with a dolphin, it
must have sounded too good to be true - want to live with a
dolphin and teach it to talk? Dr. John Lilly studied physics and
biology at the genius-magnet California Institute of Technology,
received his medical degree from University of Pennsylvania,
then later trained there in psychoanalysis.[1] At UPenn, Lilly
pioneered technology that, via an electrode inserted into the
brain of a living animal, allowed scientists to see brain
electrical activity on a monitor for the first time ever. Sounds
cool, unless you're the one with electrodes in your brain and
wires sticking out of your head.
In 1954, following the brâin-electrode work, Lilly turned
his attention to isolation tanks, also known as sensory
deprivation tanks.[2] Isolation tanks are essentially large.
The Dark Side of Dolphins
unlit boxes filled with body-temperature water. Once you're
floating in the water in the isolation tank, and the door
closes, you're surrounded by darkness and silence; after
floating in the water for some time, even your body seems to
drop away. Extended stays in isolation tanks lead to
hallucinations, which Lilly found fascinating; Lilly didn't just
research the effects of isolation tanks on others - he was his
own subject for many of the experiments. It was the time he
spent in isolation tanks that spurred Lilly's interested in
dolphins - mammals who floated in water all the time.
In 1955, Lilly turned his attention to exploring the brains
of dolphins and was funded by the National Institute of Mental
Health. His research was initially delayed, because it required
surgery on the dolphins: the first several dolphins died as soon
as they were anesthetized. It took several tries before Lilly
came to the realization that the dolphins were dying because
dolphins are voluntary breathers. When a human is knocked
unconscious, he continues breathing, even if he's underwater and
this causes him to drown; an unconscious dolphin stops breathing
altogether. This might seem counterintuitive, but if you spend
your life in water, taking an unplanned breath could easily end
your life. So how do dolphins breathe when they're asleep? It
turns out they've evolved the ability to sleep with only half of
their brain at a time. Dolphins sleep with one eye open! An
64
The Dark Side of Dolphins
undisturbed dolphin (in the wild) never becomes totally
unconscious. Having found this out, Lilly introduced an
artificial respiration component and was able to continue his
work on dolphin's brains.[3]
In an extension of his work at UPenn, Lilly's initial
experiments with dolphins entailed inserting electrodes into
their brains. He had to develop a methodology for getting the
electrode through the skull of the dolphin. To do this, he
hammered something like an icepick to make a hole through their
skulls using a carpenter's hammer (you know, the kind you have
at home for hitting nails into the wall). A description of this
process by Dr. Giorgio Pilleri, director of the Brain Anatomy
Institute of Berne, seemed to imply it was a little inhumane:
"the dolphin was held down but tried to jump up at every blow -
not because of the pain, but because of the unbearable noise
produced by the hammering."[4] Remember, no one suspected at
this time that dolphins were highly intelligent - even Lilly
himself. They saw dolphins as simply another lab animal.
The U.S. military took a great interest in Lilly's research
- it later became apparent that their idea was to use electrode
stimulation of the dolphin's pleasure center to control it. A
viable connection to an animal's pleasure center would allow the
military to control an animal with a deadly payload on its back
to whatever destination they desired.[I]
65
The Dark Side of Dolphins
Lilly had continued his isolation tank experiments, and in
1964 added a new element to them - Lysergic acid diethylamide,
commonly known as LSD. In contrast to today, it was legal for
him, or anyone else, to use the hallucinogen as he or she saw
fit: LSD wasn’t listed by the U.S. as a controlled substance
until two years later. At the time Lilly started using it, LSD
was under heavy investigation by psychiatrists as a possible
psychotherapeutic drug. Lilly even tried LSD as a therapeutic
for Pam, a dolphin who avoided contact with humans since being
shot (three times!) with a spear gun as part of her
participation in the Flipper TV series.[5]
When Lilly discovered that the a defense contractor,
Sandia, had already done "mind control" experiments with a mule
controlled by electrodes, he saw why the military had been so
interested in his dolphin work.[1] He closed down his brain
research and went independent, opening a dolphin communication
research lab in St. Thomas, the Virgin Islands. It was at this
lab that he would propose 10 weeks of dolphin-human cohabitation
to see if this would let a dolphin learn English.
* * *
What caused Lilly to suddenly think that dolphins could
learn English? Because he heard a dolphin speaking English. To
be more precise, when he and a friend listened at half speed to
recordings of a dolphin with an electrode in its brain, they
66
The Dark Side of Dolphins
heard what sounded like English words and phrases. From this
tape, Lilly was convinced that dolphins, with the right
approach, could be taught to learn English. Immediately he and
an assistant started testing dolphins on their ability to
imitate human syllables. But the dolphin wasn't learning quickly
enough.[5]
Lilly proposed a human-animal living situation, probably
because there had been limited success in teaching English to
chimpanzees when they were "raised" in a human household. When
Winthrop and Luella Kellogg raised a seven-and-a-half month old
chimp, Gua, along with their own ten month old, Gua had trouble
speaking, but their son, Donald reportedly started behaving in a
more chimp-like manner.[6] I imagine Luella Kellogg had
something to do with termination of the Gua experiment after
only nine months, with no words learned. (Donald was able to
speak normally when he grew up.) In a 1947 experiment, Keith and
Cathy Hayes had a smidge more success: a home-raised chimp named
Viki was able to learn the words mama, papa, cup and up.[7]
Lilly's "flooded house" for the cohabitation experiment was
not really a house, but several rooms of a laboratory, he had
constructed for dolphin research in the Virgin Islands, with the
unusual feature of a dolphin elevator.[8] Although there were no
buttons inside for a dolphin to push (it did require a human
67
The Dark Side of Dolphins
operator), it was the only one of its kind, allowing a dolphin
in water to be moved easily to the second floor of the lab.
Howe was invited to be part of the experiment. Not as a
dolphin expert, but as a dolphin non-expert. "Up to that time
she'd seen dolphins briefly, in a Florida dolphin circus," Lilly
wrote later of Howe. Before the experiment, Howe had worked as
a restaurant hostess, where she met famed astronomer and
extraterrestrial intelligence proponent Carl Sagan. In the
course of their conversation, she had confessed that she wanted
to work with dolphins. Sagan was taken with her, and though the
romance he desired didn't take place (according to Sagan-
biographer William Poundstone[9]), Sagan recommended Howe to
Lilly's lab manager for a job. Lilly hypothesized that a person
from outside the scientific community might succeed better than
one formally trained in science, because he or she would have
fewer preconceptions. In addition, he thought women in
particular might have better luck than men in breaking the
communication barrier, because he felt it would more closely
mimic the context in which a human baby learns English. "We have
several dedicated women at our laboratory who give 'tender
loving care' to the dolphins under all sorts of conditions,"
Lilly wrote. "I have rather an ideal 'mother' over at St. Thomas
who is quite willing to live with them [the dolphins] and to
give them very close attention." [10]
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The Dark Side of Dolphins
Lilly's experiments in dolphin cohabitation are described
in great detail in Lilly's book. Mind of the Dolphin. Howe spent
the next eight months working with Lilly's research dolphins -
Peter, Pam and Sissy — before she embarked on this unique
experiment. An area of Lilly's lab had been modified with the
idea that three areas were needed for a dolphin and human to
live together: a deep water area where the dolphin could relax,
a dry area for the human to relax, and a shallow water area
where the two could both navigate. To walk from room to room one
had to wade through deep water. The channel depth was a
compromise - while humans found it easier walking in 16 inches
of water, a pilot study found this depth was not quite deep
enough to keep the dolphin's skin from drying out. For the final
experiment, the water depth was increased to 18 inches. For
Howe, this made the water in the passages knee-deep, and an
effort to walk in.
69
The Dark Side of Dolphins
DAILY SCHEDULE
Following is an outline of the daily schedule to be followed,
subject to later changes by Miss Howe.
7:30 Miss Howe gets up, washes, eats.
8:00 to 8:30 Recorded lesson with Peter, five pounds of fish.
9.00 Miss Howe daily cleaning, vacuum, etc.
9:30 Miss Howe does feeding, notes, protocol, check workmen.
10:00 to 10:30 Miss Howe and Peter play . . . involves some
lessons.
11:00 Miss Howe and Peter outside . . . together but relaxed.
11:30 Miss Howe gets lunch.
12:00 to 12:30 Recorded lesson with Peter, five pounds of
fish.
1:00 to 2.30 Miss Howe sleeps, fun, write, read, relax.
3.00 to 3::30 Recorded lesson with Peter, five pounds of fish
4:00 to 4:30 Time spent working with Peter.
5:00 to 5:30 Miss Howe works on notes, bills, tomorrow's
schedule.
6.00 Miss Howe has dinner.
6 30 Games with Peter, visitors, reading . . . always with
awareness of living with Peter.
End of day and work is over, the two are still together.
10:00 Bed.
Above schedule to be followed Sunday through Friday.
Saturday is a free day for Miss Howe; Saturday night sleep with
Peter.
From The Mind of the Dolphin[8]
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The Dark Side of Dolphins
For the pilot experiment, from March 20-27, 1965, Howe
lived with a dolphin named Pam. At this point, Howe had been
working at Lilly's lab for a year and two months. She had been
placed in charge of the lab by Lilly in October of the previous
year. Pam was a shy dolphin - shy because she had been
traumatized. While playing a stunt dolphin for the TV series
Flipper, Pam had been harpooned three times, so that the main
Flipper dolphins wouldn't get harpooned. Surprisngly, after the
Flipper segment, Pam avoided people so strongly that she wasn't
useful for TV any more, and had been donated to Lilly. By the
end of the week of living together, Pam's behavior had changed:
Margaret felt the experiment was showing signs of success, and
reported "Toward the end of the week, we were both loosened up
to the point of Pam demanding attention of me."(p.224)
For the 10 week experiment, Peter, who had also played TV's
Flipper, was the subject.
Peter was best described as willful. "Peter is his
energetic self and a bit nippy on the toes." Howe says that she
used a broom to keep the thousand pound dolphin's teeth away
from her body.
Howe's goal for the five categories of words for Peter to
learn were:
• Numbers (one to five)
• Personal names & pronouns (Peter, Margaret, me, you)
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The Dark Side of Dolphins
• Greetings (hello, bye-bye)
• Objects (ball, toy fish, bucket, bobo clown^, kinipopo,
baby block)
• Verbs (speak, listen, go, come, give me, etc.)
"Lessons have gone fairly well," Howe wrote in her journal,
. I start with counting and shapes. I am stopping, however.
^ "Bobo clown" and "kinipopo." Were these words picked as
part of the training because Lilly and Howe thought they'd be
easy words/phrases to learn, or because they were fun to say?
Kinipopo, as you might suspect, is not strictly English - it's
the Hawaiian word for "ball." The label "kinipopo" was probably
chosen to have a second word for a different ball, since they
already called one simply "ball." But couldn't someone have
chosen a word that might be easier to say than "kinipopo?" And
why did they have a bobo clown toy in the house? This was
probably the ubiquitous blow up toy of the 60s, about three feet
high, that, due to weight at the bottom, had the single property
of popping back up after it had been knocked down. Four years
before this experiment, a famous Stanford study used bobo clown
toys to study of the impacts on children of watching bobo clown
dolls get "beat up." The flawed experiment asked whether
children who saw adults punch the bobo clown were more likely to
become abusive themselves.
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The Dark Side of Dolphins
for the moment . . .[to] go back and get Peter into the habit of
listening. Speaking. He seems to have lost his sense of
conversation. He often overrides me. One thing at a time. I
cannot teach him if he is going to yell every time I open my
mouth. He has said, for the tape . . . one clear word, "BALL."
Peter also learned to say "one" and "wa" by the end of week two.
The language learning was going relatively well; Howe, however,
suffered from bouts of cabin fever, depression and fatigue, most
likely from her enforced isolation. She consoled herself with
the thought that Peter's education was proceeding successfully.
It wasn't until the fourth date, er, I mean - the fourth
week that there is any mention of a significant change in
Peter's relationship to Howe. Howe wrote, "Peter has become
sexually aroused several times during the week, and I have
thoughts and questions on this In a separate summary she
wrote, "When you expose yourself to a dolphin twenty-four hours
a day, you are becoming the 'other dolphin' in their life.... You
^ Was Peter the dolphin "in love" with Howe? If so, he
eventually got over her - he later "propositioned" Carl Sagan,
or at least that's how Sagan, in Carl Sagan: A Life in the
Cosmos, described what happened in a later swim he took with
Peter.
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The Dark Side of Dolphins
are a constant companion and must make your peace with the
dolphin as such."
In the fifth week, it became clear that it was time for
Howe to make her peace. "I find that his [Peter's] desires are
hindering our relationship," she wrote. "I can play with him for
just so long now and then he gets an erection and the
play/lesson is broken." Did she discuss this "sex problem" with
Lilly? It seems inevitable, since they spoke by phone nearly
every day of the experiment.
How committed to the project was Howe? "One basic project
is expressed," wrote Lilly, "by the 'mother' involved as 'no
matter how long it takes, no matter how much work, this dolphin
is going to learn to speak English.' " Quitting did not appear
to be an option.
Did Lilly have any suggestions to Howe's regarding the
problem? No response is recorded, but elsewhere in The Mind of
the Dolphin Lilly hints at what his advice might have been: "We
must be able to face the sex life of the dolphins as we face any
other aspect of the dolphin's lives.... We must also realize that
this interest of theirs can be turned to interspecies
communication advantage even as it is turned to advantage in
interhuman communications." See the dolphin's interest in sex
not as a problem, but as a teaching opportunity . . .
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The Dark Side of Dolphins
Howe's concern about Peter's erections turns out not to be
how to, well, touch him in such a way as to "satisfy his needs."
Apparently this had been part of their interactions previously
in the deeper main pool below. But in the shallower "flooded
house," Howe had no way to brace herself against Peter's
strongest movements involved in him relieving himself against
her hand or foot. She describes the method objectively:
After a week or so of failure in involving Howe in his
reproductive intentions, Peter intelligently modified his
approach, and calmed his ardor. "Peter's sexual excitement
usually begins with the biting business, and my stroking him,"
Howe wrote in her research journal. "Now, however, when his
penis becomes erect, he no longer tries to run me down and knock
me off my feet, rather he slides very smoothly along my legs,
and I can very easily rub his penis with either my hand or my
foot. Peter accepts either and again seems to reach some sort of
orgasm and relaxes." It's possible that Howe was intimidated by
the older, more educated Lilly, into this method of continuing
the research. It seems unlikely, however, considering the
strength of opinion expressed by Howe in a conversation with
Lilly: "'Look, John, I am devoting my time, my energy, my love
and my life to working with Peter, Sissy, and Pam. I want no
interference with my aims for that work. If you want to do your
experiments on solitude and LSD, please keep them in the
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The Dark Side of Dolphins
isolation room. The rest of the laboratory is devoted to the
dolphins and to my work with them.
I'd like to say Howe's "sacrifice for the greater good"
resulted in the breaking of the code between the species. The
results, were in fact, quite disappointing. In retrospect,
perhaps the experiment should have used a female dolphin -
although there's no data on whether or not female dolphins
develop language earlier (as in humans), at least sex wouldn't
have been such a problem. With everything she did for science,
Howe was never able to get Peter to develop an English
vocabulary - while he learned to mimic intonation and syllable
count, it was hard for him to enunciate any words well enough
(beyond "ball" and "wa") to be understood out of context. This
was easily surpassed in 1967, when two professors at the
University of Nevada, Reno, raised a chimp in their home as if
she were a human child: the chimp, Washoe, learned 130 different
words.[11] But Washoe couldn't "say" any of the words - she used
American sign language.
Still, with the limited success, why didn't anyone go on
and teach the dolphins more English? Several reasons exist. It
might easily be attributed to Lilly's concern that (1) the
military might try to use language to control dolphins; and (2)
that keeping dolphins in captivity was bad (he released them
soon after this). In actuality, the reasons dolphins don't speak
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The Dark Side of Dolphins
English today may have been that Howe was too attractive. Don't
forget it was through Sagan's interest in her that she got the
job. Lilly was married, and working much of the time in Florida
and in isolation tanks. But a single man did come into Howe's
life while she was working with Peter and the other dolphins.
For, The Mind of the Dolphin, Lilly had hired a photographer to
take pictures of Howe and the dolphins; Howe and the
photographer met, fell in love, married: ipso facto, no more
dolphin-English research.
Later Lilly relented on his captivity concerns, and worked
with captive dolphins to teach them an intermediate, computer
generated language, results of which were never published.[12]
Dolphin research today focuses on sounds dolphins spontaneously
make in the wild or captivity. If anyone today is following in
Lilly's and Howe's footsteps with regard to dolphin language
research, they're not talking about it.
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The Dark Side of Dolphins
References
1. Lilly, J.C., The Scientist: A Metaphysical Autobiography.
1996, Berkeley, CA: Ronin Publishing. 232.
2. Black, D., Lie Down in Darkness, in New York Magazine.
1979. p. 60—64.
3. Lilly, J.C., Man and dolphin. [IsL ed. 1961, Garden City,
N.Y.: Doubleday. 312 p.
4. Johnson, W.M., Animals Go to War, in Rose-Tinted Menagerie,-
The. 1990, Iridescent Publishing.
5. Brown, D.J. and R.M. Novick, Mavericks of the mind :
conversations for the new millennium. 1993, Freedom, CA:
Crossing Press. 311 p.
6. Mellgren, R.L., Animal cognition and behavior. Advances in
psychology. 1983, Amsterdam ; New York
New York: North-Holland Pub. Co. ;
Sole distributors for the U.S.A. and Canada, Elsevier Science
Pub. Co. xi, 513 p.
7. Hayes, K.J. and C. Hayes, The Intellectual Development of a
Home-Raised Chimpanzee. Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Society, 1951. 95(2): p. 105-109.
8. Lilly, J.C., The mind of the dolphin; a nonhuman
intelligence. 1969, [New York]: Avon. 286 p.
9. Poundstone, W., Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos. 1999, New
York: Henry Holt, xvii, 473 p.
10. Lilly, J.C., Dolphin-Human Relation and LSD 25, in The Use
of LSD in Psychotheraphy and Alcoholism, H.A. Abramson,
Editor. 1967, Bobbs-Merrill Company: New York.
11. Carey, B., Washoe, a Chimp of Many Words, Dies at 42, in
New York Times. 2007: New York.
12. Hooper, J., John Lilly: Altered States, in Omni. 1983. p.
Retrieved from
http ://web.archive.org/web/20 030201155434/www.omnimag.com/a
rchives/interviews/Iilly.html.
5. The Dolphins of War
"Cry ' Havoc] ' and let slip the dogs of war..."
- Shakespeare in Julius Caesar
"The U.S. Navy does not now, nor has it ever, trained
dolphins or any other marine mammals to kill, harm or
injure human beings."
- Tom LaPuzza, Navy public affairs officer for the
Marine Mammal Program[1]
The swimmer slid noiselessly through the water, and hid
behind a dock piling. But he couldn't hide from what
followed. Something approached and pushed a metal apparatus
against the diver's leg. It clamped on and a bright light
began to flash. The diver could now be spotted from miles
away. Captured. The audience on the pier - scientists,
students, marine mammal aficionados - broke out in applause.
The "enemy" had been caught by a member of the U.S. Navy's
elite MK6 team - by a bottlenose dolphin.
When I had heard that dolphins were going to be
deployed in the Persian Gulf to protect U.S. ships, I felt
kind of proud. This seemed a positive role for dolphins -
keeping the U.S. warned of any enemy divers who approached
to attach limpet mines (so-called because they magnetically
stick to the side of a ship, like limpet snails stick to the
side of a rock). In Bahrain, dolphins had worked to scout
The Dark Side of Dolphins
out floating enemy mines. The dolphins seemed relatively
safe, and they helped make sailors safer.
When I been doing dolphin research in the late 1990s, I
spent several days at the Naval Oceans System Center in San
Diego where the Navy trained its dolphins. There were some
sixty or seventy dolphins there are the time, in large pens
(about 24 by 24 feet). The pens were made of mesh, and kept
the dolphins in the bay water itself, rather than off in a
concrete enclosure. It didn't seem all that bad, I thought
as I sat listening to the underwater whistles, squeaks, and
clicks made by a dolphin named "Toad." The dolphins could
see and hear dolphins in the adjoining pens. The water was
real sea water, not "canned". I watched as trainers,
followed by dolphins, took small motor boats out to sea each
morning. The staff told me that dolphins in the military
were used as "sea dogs" -- guards, pointers, and retrievers
- guarding ships in port; pointing out mines or other
debris; and helping retrieve lost items at the bottom of the
ocean. Seemed like an extension of the mythical role of
dolphins - protecting and saving sailors in distress.
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The Dark Side of Dolphins
But what if dolphins weren't just passively finding
bombs or detecting enemy swimmers? What if they had been
trained as killers?
When dolphins were swept from their enclosures by
rising water during Hurricane Katrina, The Guardian, a
British newspaper, reported that the loose dolphins were in
fact trained Navy dolphins, and might be both armed and
dangerous.[2] Leo Sheridan, the "respected accident
investigator" told the reporter the situation was quite
serious. "'My concern," Sheridan said, "is that they [the
dolphins] have learnt to shoot at divers in wetsuits who
have simulated terrorists in exercises. If divers or
windsurfers are mistaken for a spy or suicide bomber and if
equipped with special harnesses carrying toxic darts, they
could fire... .The darts are designed to put the target to
sleep so they can be interrogated later, but what happens if
the victim is not found for hours?" Sheridan was right about
one thing - if there were such a thing as killer dolphins,
and if they were loose, that would be bad.
If the Navy had trained dolphins to wear and shoot
soporific darts, would they leave unsupervised dolphins
The Dark Side of Dolphins
swimming around with live dart guns attached? While the
story caused a stir in some parts, it was mostly treated as
a joke.
MSNBC's Countdown anchor, Keith Olbermann, took it upon
himself to investigate the facts, interviewing Moby Solangi,
president of the Marine Life Oceanarium in Gulfport,
Miss.[3] The dolphins that were washed to sea by hurricane
Katrina were not, in fact. Navy dolphins but dolphins from
the aquarium supervised by Solangi. Olbermann seemed amused
by the whole idea. At one point he asked Solangi, "Make sure
I'm right on this one point here, that dolphins could not
actually fire poison dart guns, even if they are wearing
them, even if they are loose, because they don't have hands.
Am I right about this so far?" Did it take a dolphin expert
to answer that? Seems pretty clear that if hands were a
prerequisite to weapon use, then dolphins would certainly be
ruled out. Perhaps Olbermann assumption was not correct...
Sparked by former dolphin trainer Rick Trout's
assertion that dolphins were being mistreated by the
military, the July 26, 1990 episode of "CBS This Morning"
featured a segment on the use of dolphins in the
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military.[4] Trout brought along what he called a facsimile
of the weapon that dolphins were trained to wear for what
was euphemistically termed the "Swimmer Nullification"
Program. "This fits onto their snout. Out of this end can
come a .45 bullet. On impact it ejects a .45 bullet," Trout
explained. A second piece would float to the surface and act
like a buoy to mark the spot the enemy diver had been
"encountered" by the dolphin.
The device described by Trout works like a tiny that
fires on impact. It's remarkably similar to a "bang stick,"
a shark avoidance the Navy used to provided its divers. In a
2007 interview in Wired magazine, diver Douglas Peterson
described the effects of a Seaway (the brand provided by the
Navy) bang stick on sharks :
"I saw a shark, no correct that, including the
film footage, I saw dozens of sharks cut in two...
up to 12' long. The one I saw hit in the water was
struck above the gills and it literally blew the
head off the shark, he rolled over and sank with
the head barely attached by a tiny piece of skin
tissue. In fact, of the dozens I saw killed in the
test film all but a few simply stopped moving and
sank instantaneously usually in two chunks."[5]
Read that paragraph again, this time substituting the
word "diver" for shark. Gruesome thought. It wouldn't take
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The Dark Side of Dolphins
much to modify a bang stick tip — to move it from a spear
shaft to a cone that fits over a dolphin's "snout," much
like that device described by Trout. A quick Google search
of "bang stick" will find you a place you could buy one
today - when I searched, I most enjoyed the classified ad
that read "Bang stick it' always buy youe side when you need
it when your in a compromizing spot, [sic]"
The obvious problem with a snout-mounted bang stick is
dolphins' extremely sensitive hearing. Once a dolphin fired
at an enemy diver, the underwater sound could easily deafen
it; at the very least the dolphin would be traumatized and
unlikely to ever be willing to do the same thing again.
While the Navy might, as Trout alleged, have tried out this
weapon with a dolphin, it would be a very expensive anti
diver approach, with dolphins being much too expensive to
train for a single use. Using a dolphin as an underwater
gunfighter would likely be a costly one-shot deal.
This doesn't sound like a sustainable way to use
dolphins to deter enemy divers. In fact. Commander Ted
McCarley of the Navy Marine Mammal Program, told CBS they'd
never trained dolphins to use specialized firearms, or
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anything other anti-diver weapon: "The Navy is not now, and
never has been engaged in training the dolphins to kill or
attack anything in the water."[4] He did, however, mention
in passing that military dolphins had been deployed to the
Persian Gulf and to Vietnam. Vietnam? There were dolphins in
Vietnam?
According to Frontline, Dolphins have indeed been
deployed to Vietnam "to perform underwater surveillance and
guard military boats from enemy swimmers."[6] There had been
rumors of a "swimmer nullification" program, but the Navy
denied it. Rumors? I looked hard, but the article had no
details on this program. In The Rose-Tinted Menagerie, I
found specific information about dolphins being trained to
attack: "after detecting an intruding diver, the animals
were trained to pull off his face mask and flippers, tear
the air-supply tubes, and finally 'capture him for
interrogation.' "[7] This book, however, was published by a
publishing house that specialized in animal welfare-related
books, making it suspect as to whether the description of
military dolphin behavior was factual or exaggerated for
effect. Another passage from Menagerie described " . . . dolphins
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The Dark Side of Dolphins
were equipped with large hypodermic syringes loaded with
pressurized carbon dioxide. As the dolphin rammed an enemy
frogman with the needle, the rapidly expanding gas would
cause the victim to literally explode."
Could military dolphins at one time have been trained
to "explode" divers? When Harris B. Stone, then director of
research and development plans for the Chief of Naval
Operations, was confronted by National Geographic with this
allegation, he unhesitatingly replied "Nonsense!"[8]
National Geographic, in the same article supplied more
details regarding the methods of swimmer nullification -
dolphins, rumors said, had been sent to Vietnam to kill
enemy frogmen. Dolphins were trained to wear a hollow lance
on their beaks that they then rammed into an enemy swimmer.
On impact, the swimmer was inflated by the attached gas
cartridge and then a corpse, instead of a buoy, marked the
spot the enemy swimmer had been encountered.
Stone admitted they did use dolphins in the military:
"We have deployed porpoises in open-ocean work. We are
making use of their remarkable sensory capabilities. But we
are not about to telegraph how and where and what they're
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The Dark Side of Dolphins
used for." I'm surprised he felt safe talking about the CO2-
syringe-exploding diver concept at all. Wouldn't the Soviets
want to know?
Why would someone make up such a crazy story? A CO2
inflating syringe? Stone had the answer - he pulled out what
the National Geographic article described as "a diver's
knife in a black plastic sheath. In place of a blade a keen
arrowlike point tipped a hollow metal shaft; the hand grip
held a carbon dioxide cartridge." Stone explained "I think I
can show you what started it. It's a dart the Navy developed
to protect divers against sharks. You can now buy it in dive
shops. But somebody had to make a James Bond thriller out of
it !" Another anti-shark weapon on a dolphin? Does the
logical basis for the rumors make them seem more likely to
contain a grain of truth? Stone finished by echoing the
party line: "The Navy has never used porpoises for anything
that would harm either the animals or any human being."
What was the original source of these attack dolphin
"rumors?" Had more than one person asserted that dolphins
were running around with C02 cartridges? Who had interviewed
them? The National Geographic article mentioned these
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The Dark Side of Dolphins
rumors, but not where they came from. Each story mentioned
rumors of dolphins with syringes, but failed to cite the
original reference.
The Rose-Tinted Menagerie chapter mentioned several
sources, one of them Dr. James Fitzgerald, who had worked
with dolphins for the CIA and the Navy.[7] A Google search
of the combined keywords "Fitzgerald" and "Dolphins" turned
up, as the last item on the first page, the summary of a
court case:
James W. FITZGERALD, Appellant,
V .
PENTHOUSE INTERNATIONAL, LTD. and Meredith Printing
Corporation and Meredith Corporation and Bob
Guccione and Steve Chappie, Appellees.
It turned out that one source of the rumors - the
article I'd been looking for that had the original
information about "killer" dolphins, the one that Menagerie
merely alluded to - was an article in the June 1977 issue of
Penthouse magazine.[9]
"The Pentagon's Dangerous Pets," written by Steve
Chappie, opened with dawn over Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam, as
dolphins scanned the water for enemy frogmen. It describes
the dolphin pens, the setup in great detail. Then it
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The Dark Side of Dolphins
describes what happens when a dolphin spots an enemy diver:
"one dolphin pokes its Coke bottle nose into a cone
conveniently placed in a water-level weapons rack. The
lancelike cone is tipped with a heavy gauge, hollow needle
that is connected to a high-powered CO2 cartridge similar to
those that are used to blow up rubber rafts." Chappie quotes
"the military" as to what happens when the diver is pierced
as "after ripping the muscle planes of the tissue apart,"
the "continuing expansion of the gas brings about the
prolapse of the colon through the rectal orifice, while the
stomach in turn is caused to balloon out through the mouth."
Basically the inside of the diver inflates.
The effects of this weapon sounded disturbing likely
those of the Farallon Shark Dart, a deterrent device the
Navy had provide its divers for use while retrieving
astronauts from water landings. From a forum post by a diver
had personally seen its effects - "This had two effects, the
first was a change in buoyancy that floated the shark out of
the immediate vicinity and rendered it unable to maneuver,
the second effect took advantage of the fact that sharks
have no fascia holding their organs in place so the gas (if
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The Dark Side of Dolphins
injected in the belly aft of the fin) would turn the shark
"inside out" and leave it chomping on the guts that were
blown out of it's mouth."[10] The similarity of the two
descriptions, the Penthouse article describing inflation
effects on a human and the forum description describing
effects on a shark, could make you wonder if the dart had
ever been used on a human, or just imagined. (But still
pretty grisly either way!)
A video showing the effects of something very like the
Farallon Shark dart is available on the internet. It's for a
knife tht has a hole in the tip and is attached to a CO2
cartridge - the WASP injection knife. If you go to YouTube
and type "WASP Injection Knife vs. Watermelon" you can see
what happens when a watermelon is stabbed with a Wasp
Knife.[11] It's surprising that such knives are legal in any
country. And horrifying to think of an unexpected underwater
attack from such a weapon.
The Penthouse article outlined several key details of
the swimmer nullification program:
• Dolphins had been deployed for fifteen months in
Vietnam, during which time there were no successful
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The Dark Side of Dolphins
attacks. (Successful, one might assume, in view of
the swimmer...)
• The Navy had started with the idea of a switchblade
mounted on a dolphin's nose, graduated to a the idea
of a toxic dart, before settling on the C02
inflation needle.
• Two U.S. swimmers in Cam Ranh Bay had accidentally
been "nullified" when dolphins mistook them for
enemy combatants.
Dr. James W. Fitzgerald, of Fitzgerald vs. Penhouse
lawsuit fame, makes his appearance in the story as the man
who was asked by the CIA to train the dolphins to be
killers. Which he did. He had a training facility in Key
West, and, after the CIA was done training dolphins,
allegedly made overtures to Latin American to see if they
wanted to buy their own killer dolphins. Alleged, because
this was the subject of Fitzgerald's lawsuit against Chappie
and Bob Guccione, publisher of Penthouse.[12] Fitzgerald
alleged that Chappie had libeled him - by unjustly accusing
him of espionage. In the "Pentagon's Dangerous Pets,"
Chappie stated that Fitzgerald wasn't prevented from trying
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The Dark Side of Dolphins
to sell the dolphins, not because it was sanctioned by the
government, but because "The Pentagon couldn't possibly
object for fear of exposing its whole operation." In the
lawsuit, this was equated to accusing Fitzgerald of
espionage against the United States.
Two sources were cited for the Penthouse article -
Fitzgerald and Michael Greenwood, former Navy dolphin
scientist. Not long before this article was published.
Greenwood had testified before the Senate in a special
hearing on dolphins in the military.
Two people said dolphins had been trained to kill enemy
divers. Two out of the hundreds, maybe thousands, who knew
the truth firsthand (except any dead enemy divers). Of
course, they'd all been sworn to secrecy. Can it be believed
that dolphins are capable of doing such terrible things,
even unknowingly?
Unless the Navy confesses, it is nearly impossible to
say what the U.S was doing with dolphins; it appears we can
be much more certain what was going on in the Soviet Navy.
Some U.S. personnel believe the spark to the Soviet Navy's
development of a dolphin program was the translation of
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Lilly's book, Man and Dolphin,[13] into Russian. Lilly
mentioned not only how smart dolphins were, but also that
part of his research had been funded by the U.S. Navy.
Whatever the inspiration, once the Russians started, the CIA
watched closely to see what they'd do. A document analyzing
their capabilities was recently declassified; strangely,
though, there is no mention in this document of training
dolphins to attack enemy divers. Perhaps any text that might
refer to this is hidden beneath the still-classified,
blacked-out portions of the document. Fortunately for us,
there are former Soviet dolphins trainers who are happy to
"tell all."
In 2003, keeping the U.S. Navy dolphin program afloat
cost taxpayers $15 million per year; with the fall of the
Soviet Union, Soviet military dolphins became an expensive
luxury. In January of 2001, CNBC interviewed a former Soviet
dolphin trainer and found out that Soviet dolphins had, in
the past, been used to search out mines, to plant
explosives, and to attack enemy divers.[14] The country of
Ukraine inherited one of the Soviet's secret dolphin
centers, and after the fall, some of the dolphins starved
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The Dark Side of Dolphins
because to death, said Captain Valery Kushev. As a result,
Kushev says the dolphin center has had to focus on creating
its own income. "Behind every task we ask of the dolphins
now is money," he said.
In the Russian dolphin center, dolphins not only
perform for money; they help heal. Lynsenko, a former
medical officer, says that dolphin's sonar stimulates
hearing in humans, and he may be right. Katya, the eleven-
year-old deaf girl interviewed by CNBC asserts — "I can
hear the dolphin's voice." Lynsenko claims that not only can
deaf children "hear" the dolphins, but that in 70% of
children, exposure to dolphin sonar actually improves their
hearing. And people are willing to pay, to the tune of $10
per child per therapy session.
The CNBC interview, unfortunately, didn't mention any
details of what methods the dolphins might have been trained
to use on enemy divers. A 1998 article in the London
Independent, reported that Doug Cartlidge, a UK-based
dolphin consultant, saw the setup firsthand when he was
called in as a consultant to the Ukraine dolphin center.[15]
Did the dolphins carry a syringe to attack enemy divers? No,
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The Dark Side of Dolphins
Cartlidge said, they carried a clamp, much like the one I
saw demonstrated in use by the U.S. Navy dolphins, but with
a lethal twist . . . dolphins carried a clamp which "...was
designed to attach itself to the diver when the dolphin
bumped him in a way that it could not be removed, and in it
was a device about the size of a table tennis ball capable
of injecting the high-pressure charge of C02 into the
diver's body." This should sound very familiar. Cartlidge
added "This [injection of the C02] was not done immediately,
however, because the preference was to take any intruders
alive. Only if a search failed to locate the enemy, or force
him to the surface, was the device activated remotely." Once
the C02 was injected, Cartlidge went on, the diver would be
brought to the surface, "But it would be with his guts
spewing out both ends."
Following Cartlidge's statements, it seems safe to
conclude that dolphins have indeed been used, at least by
the Soviets, to kill enemy divers. The description of the
Soviet C02 inflation attack sounds eerily like the Penthouse
article. Did Soviet generals read Penthouse ? The appearance
of truth in the article may have indeed created the truth of
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The Dark Side of Dolphins
dolphins being armed to attack enemy divers, not, as
written, in the U.S., but in the Soviet Union.
* * *
Over and over again. Navy personnel have denied that
the U.S. Navy ever trained dolphins to kill enemy divers.
After reading this for the tenth time, I started seeing a
pattern. Almost always, the spokesman followed the text,
"The U.S. Navy has never . . . " But wasn't it the CIA that
Fitzgerald said hired him? Could it be that the U.S. Navy
feels comfortable denying killer dolphins because in fact it
was the CIA that trained the Swimmer Nullification dolphins
used in Cam Ranh?
Under the Freedom of Information Act, I requested
documents regarding dolphins used in the Vietnam War from
both the CIA and the U.S. Navy. Both groups reported they
have no records matching this description.
But they admit the existence of dolphins in Vietnam. If
government organizations deny that dolphins were trained to
swimmers, where else could one find the truth? The briefings
given to Creighton W. Abrams, senior commander of the U.S.
Army in Vietnam during the Vietnam War (aka police action)
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The Dark Side of Dolphins
are transcribed in Lewis Sorley's the Vietnam Chronicles :
the Abrams tapes, 1968-1972. It's still not clear if
dolphins were actually killing enemy swimmers, but the
person briefing the general describes rumored attacks
possibly even more sinister:
BRIEFER: Describes several instances of swimmer-
emplaced mines and demolitions in various waterways, then
use of trained dolphins to interdict enemy swimmers. Five
U.S. Navy-trained Atlantic bottle-nosed dolphins arrive at
Cam Ranh Bay on 19 December 1970 in Project Shoretime. Shows
film clip made in Hawaii of "swimmer defense system."
Dolphin takes a "nullification device" to attack swimmer
with barb and strobe light from the rear. Tried them out in
the vicinity of the ammunition pier at Cam Ranh Bay. "The
enemy has been led to believe that the dolphin is trained to
attack a male swimmer's privates. Our latest information has
it that the enemy plans to counter this by employing female
swimmer-sappers in the future. In light of this information,
the navy has a contingency plan to respond with male
dolphins."
ABRAMS: I've seen dolphins at a park in Hawaii.
"Remarkable animals." [16]
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The Dark Side of Dolphins
References
1. Oldenburg, D. and W.P.S. Writer, The Navy’s Dolphin-
Safe Program, in Washington Post. 2003: Washington,
D.C.
2. Townsend, M., Armed and dangerous - Flipper the firing
dolphin let loose by Katrina, in The Guardian (online).
2005: London.
3. MSNBC, Dispelling a myth of dangerous navy dolphins:
^countdown' investigates
report of marine mammals armed, on the loose. 2005.
4. CBS, The use of dolphins by the military, in CBS This
Morning (CBS News Transcripts). 1990, CBS.
5. Hambling, D., SEALs v Sharks 1: Bang!, in Danger Room
from Wired.com (blog). 2007.
6. PBS Frontline, A Whale of a Business
(http ://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/whales/)
. 1997, PBS Frontline (online).
7. Johnson, W.M., Animals Co to War, in Rose-Tinted
Menagerie, The. 1990, Iridescent Publishing.
8. Linehan, E.J. and B. Curtsinger, Trouble with Dolphins,
The. National Geographic, 1979. 155(4): p. 506-541.
9. Chappie, S., Pentagon's Deadly Pets, in Penthouse.
1977 .
10. Thalassamania, Farallon Shark Dart
(http://www.scubaboard.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-
293048.html), in Scubaboard (forum). 2009.
11. Waspknife.com, Wasp Injection Knife vs. Watermelon
(online video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sa NC-
fvKs). 2008, YouTube.com.
12. James W. FITZGERALD, Appellant, v. PENTHOUSE
INTERNATIONAL, LTD.; Meredith Printing Corporation ;
Meredith Corporation ; Bob Guccione; and Steve Chappie,
Appellees. . 1982, United States Court of Appeals,
Fourth Circuit, p. 5.
13. Lilly, J.C., Man and dolphin. [1st ed. 1961, Garden
City, N.Y.: Doubleday. 312 p.
14. CNBC, Dolphins once used as secret weapons for the
Soviet Navy now teaching deaf people to hear. In Early
Today (transcript). 2001,
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The Dark Side of Dolphins
15. Davison, J., Aren't they cute? Except when they're
trying to blow you up... in The Independent (online).
1998 : London.
16. Sorley, L., Vietnam chronicles : the Abrams tapes,
1968-1972. 1st ed. Modern Southeast Asia series. 2004,
Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, xxvii, 917 p.
99
6. Dimwitted Dolphins
Perhaps, what makes them [dolphins] so intriguing to such a
broad spectrum of people is their superlative compatibility
with the ocean, an environment that is so attractive but
foreign to us, and their high level of intelligence, which
is obvious even to the non-scientist.
- Jessica Sickler, et al.[1]
Dolphins smart? Ha!
- August 17, 2006, Headline in The Globe and Mail.
In the summer of 2006 Dr. Paul Manger, a scientist
from South African, declared that he had found the real
explanation for the bottlenose dolphin's unusually large
brain : it wasn't because they were unusually intelligent,
or because they used extra neurons to process sounds to
image the sea around them, or even because dolphins need
the extra room for memories since they don't ever fully
sleep. Dolphins have large brains, this scientist proposed,
because dolphin's brains have extra cells to help them stay
warm.[2]
Newspapers grilled Manger regarding his controversial
claim. What about the seemingly intelligent behavior of
dolphins, they asked. How did he explain that? Dolphins,
he responded, are dumber than goldfish. "You put an animal
in a box, even a lab rat or gerbil, and the first thing it
wants to do is climb out of it," Manger told Reuters. "If
The Dark Side of Dolphins
you don't put a lid on top of the bowl a goldfish will
eventually jump out to enlarge the environment it is living
in, but a dolphin will never do that. In the marine parks
the dividers to keep the dolphins apart are only a foot or
two above the water between the different pools."
Stupidity, he said, is the reason that dolphins are often
unintentionally caught by tuna fisherman. "If they were
really intelligent they would just jump over the net,
because it doesn't come out of the water."
If leaping over barriers makes goldfish more
intelligent than dolphins, then the guppies I had as a kid
were geniuses! I especially enjoyed watching the male
guppies, with their huge, flowing, multicolored tails.
Every once in a while, one of my favorite guppies would
disappear. I didn't know where they'd disappear to, until
it was time to move the aquarium. Behind the aquarium
stand, I found the tiny shriveled bodies of several of
these brilliant fish.
Manger's area of expertise is neurobiology. This was
his third scientific paper on the anatomy of the dolphin
brain. The two previous papers were co-published with Dr.
Sam Ridgway, a veterinarian with the Navy's dolphin program
- a man who has been working with dolphins and studying
their brains and behavior for more than forty years. So
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The Dark Side of Dolphins
perhaps, I thought, he had plausible reasons to make such
an outrageous claim.
The paper Manger wrote that caused all the hullabaloo
was entitled "An examination of cetacean brain structure
with a novel hypothesis correlating thermogenesis to the
evolution of a big brain."[2] Thermo - meaning "heat" and
genesis - meaning "creating," so thermogenesis means
"creating heat." Just what the newspapers had said -
Manger's theory was that dolphin brains got big to keep
warm. Thirty million years ago, he pointed out, the oceans
cooled; around the same time, fossils show that the brains
of dolphin's ancestors showed a significant jump in size.
Coincidence? Manger didn't think so. In addition, his
anatomical studies found that the dolphin brain, while big,
didn't show the cells he associated with complex thinking.
Instead it was overloaded with glial cells, known as the
"glue" of the nervous system. Glial cells are found in the
brain, but are not neurons themselves. They're critical to
brain function because they keep neurons going - holding
them in place, providing nutrients, repairing structural
problem. So, he reasoned, the overabundance of glial cells
shows that dolphin brains are full of fluff- insulation -
not full of neurons . . . or intelligence.
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The Dark Side of Dolphins
Although his premises appear rational, his paper's
conclusions still seem a bit extreme. I couldn't help
feeling I had stepped into the middle of an ongoing
argument. This wouldn't be the first time the subject of
dolphin intelligence had provoked feuds between scientists:
during the 70s and 80s, Dr. Ronald Schusterman, University
of California, Santa Cruz, and Dr. Louis Herman, University
of Hawaii, had a legendary intellectual feud. Whenever
Herman, who studied dolphin cognition, published a new
experiment showing that dolphins had superior cognitive
abilities, Schusterman would duplicate the experiment and
its results - but using sea lions. This provoked many a
heated debate at marine mammal meetings, and a talk by
either of them was guaranteed to be well attended, not only
by cognitive scientists, but by anyone who enjoyed watching
a good fight.
Was this paper, I wondered, the beginning or middle of
a feud? Did Manger really believe dolphins were relatively
unintelligent, or was he promoting an outlandish view in
his newspaper interviews to get attention? If so, he got
it. An immediate response by Paul Watson of Sea Shepherd,
an ocean conservation group, was entitled: "Dolphins Dumb?
Scientist is Dumber."[3] Watson, a bit miffed by Manger's
assault on dolphin's mental abilities, noted sarcastically
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The Dark Side of Dolphins
"I guess all the world's great cetologists [scientists who
study whales and dolphins] just have no idea what they are
talking about. At least according to Manger, who claims to
know a thing or two about brains, but apparently knows very
little about dolphins." A more studied response appeared
two months later in the New York Times.[4] Franz de Waal,
an Emory University professor who has extensively studied
primate behavior, who offered guess that the motivation
behind Manger's claims might be insecurity, "Could it be
that the huge size of the dolphin brain, which exceeds ours
by 15 percent or more, threatens the human ego?"
Manger baited his hook and hoped to pull in 10-pounder
- it wasn't nine months later he must have realized he'd
hooked a whole school of fish - 1^ different whale and
dolphin researchers banded together to write their
opposition to his assertions. The final sentence of the
paper seemed to contain a bit more of a personal attack
than is usually seen in scientific writing. "Rightfully
oblivious to Manger's contentions," the group concluded
their argument, "cetaceans [whales and dolphins] continue to
provide an enormous body of empirical evidence for complex
behavior, learning, sociality, and culture." Manger didn't
seem chastened by this jibe; before the month was out he
had penned his rebuttal entitled "Conflicted Reasoning by
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Cetologists." Manger: "The last sentence [of their paper]
transcends the mystical, cetaceans being "rightfully
oblivious" to my theory. Do the authors believe cetaceans
heed their claims?"
How can scientists, who are supposed to be objective,
have such radically opposed views? How can scientists
looking at the same evidence come to such different
conclusions ? To be objective, one must try to put aside
one's assumptions, or at least re-examine them in the light
of new facts. But it's clear, right? Dolphins are
intelligent, so Manger must be wrong. But how do you know
that dolphins are intelligent? Is it possible that you've
been misled?
Most people in America today believe that dolphins are
intelligent, perhaps the most intelligent animals (other
than humans); however, that's not what Americans always
believed. Not until John Lilly started telling stories
about dolphins, telling the world how smart and amazing
they were. When he started his research in the 1950s,
little was known about dolphins. No one suspected dolphins
were highly intelligent -- Lilly's first experiments,
funded by the Navy, involved the insertion of large
electrodes directly into brains of living individuals.[5]
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The Dark Side of Dolphins
After several years of invasive research, Lilly became
convinced he'd been performing torturous experiments on
intelligent animals and gave up his previous research
methods.[5] Now an evangelist for the species he'd been
experimenting on, he waxed poetic about dolphins'
intelligence and potential to communicate with humans, even
proposing that dolphins could learn to speak English (for
more on this, see chapter 4). Lilly's books on dolphins
caught the imagination of scientist and non-scientist
alike: Man and Dolphin, Mind of the Dolphin, and
Communication between Man and Dolphin.[6-8] The TV show
Flipper contributed to the popular perception that dolphins
are highly intelligent - after all. Flipper was obviously
smart, even smarter than Lassie. Is the idea that dolphins
are intelligent a lie?
When the question of human intelligence is discussed,
the intelligence quotient (IQ) is the unit of measurement,
although not everyone agrees as to its infallibility.[9]
With IQs, bigger is always better. Many people with
relatively high IQs don't realize that the IQ score itself
is a ratio - your IQ is a ratio of your intelligence
against the intelligence of an "average" human of the same
age.[10] Unfortunately, a generic version of this test has
not yet been developed that can be used to compare human
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The Dark Side of Dolphins
and animal IQs (imagine a dolphin trying to pick up a
square peg and put it in a square hole!). How do scientists
begin to compare intelligence between different types of
animals? They observe behavior, test animals with
experiments that require different types of thinking, and,
like Manger, examine the animal's anatomy for clues to its
mental abilities.
So, is the animal with the biggest brain the smartest
animal? As far as absolute size, whales, dolphins and
elephants beat humans easily, with the sperm whale coming
out on top with a brain size of 8 kilograms,[11] about 5
times that of an average adult human. But absolute size
isn't the whole story. The size of an animal's body in some
ways drives the size of the animal's brain, since the
muscles and sensory nerves in the body need to be
represented in the brain as well. The bottlenose dolphin,
if asked, would probably prefer to have its intelligence
evaluated purely according to brain weight (size): the
average bottlenose weighs in at a hefty 4 pounds,[12]
leaving humans’ 3 pound brains in the dust.
Simple brain-body mass ratio is another way scientists
have used to infer intelligence from physical measurements.
If an animal has a body that weighs ten pounds, and a brain
that weighs half a pound, then its brain-body mass ratio
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The Dark Side of Dolphins
would be 0.05. This was the first ratio scientists used to
predict intelligence. Using this measure, the tiny shrew,
an animal hardly renowned for its intelligence, came out
with a one of the highest brain-body mass ratios with a
brain ten percent of its body mass (human's weigh in at a
meager 3%).[13] Scientists looked for more equations that
would better predict intelligence from brain and body size
(and appropriately showed humans at the top of the
predicted intelligence scale).
A more reliable way of using brain and body mass to
predict intelligence is the encephalization quotient, or
EQ. EQ equations differ from scientist to scientist. Who
has the biggest EQ? Humans, of course. As mentioned
previously, the shrew has a higher brain-body mass ratio
than ours, so researchers modified the formula - used
logarithms to account for the fact that, as bodies get
bigger, you don't need quite such a proportion of the
neurons just to take care of sensing things and moving
muscles.
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The Dark Side of Dolphins
wMte-sideddolpN#
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EQ.72
The encephalization quotient or EQ is one way scientists
try to answer the question, who's the smartest of them all?
From Marino, 1998.[14]
Lori Marino, a dolphin neurobiologist, proposed her
own formula for calculating relative EQs of primates and
dolphins.[14] Using Marino's EQ.72 equation, humans still
lead with an EQ of 2.88, with bottlenose dolphins making a
good showing at 1.58, while chimps lag behind at a dismal
0.97.[15] The bottlenose, however, was not allowed to rest
on its intellectual laurels as most intelligent among the
cetaceans. According to Marino's calculations, the
bottlenose EQ is exceed by two other dolphin species - at
an EQ of 1.89, the tucuxi (Sotalia fluviatilis), a small
dolphin native to rivers of the Amazon basin, followed
closely by the Pacific white-sided dolphin (1.82) and the
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The Dark Side of Dolphins
common dolphin (1.74) . Somebody ought to be checking out
these species instead of just the bottlenose - maybe we're
missing some dolphin geniuses there!
As Manger points out, even the EQ has loopholes.[2]
It's not just the size of the brain relative to the body,
but which parts of an animal's brain are bigger. If an
animal has an extraordinary sense of smell, for example, an
inordinate part of its brain may be devoted to smell. As a
result, a skilled "smeller" could have a relatively large
brain, but not be particularly intelligent. Manger looked
closely at the dolphin brain and found it wanting for
intelligence-related areas - wanting, he explains, because
the bottlenose brain doesn't have a true neocortex, the
seat of advanced thinking in the human brain. The "thinking
part" of the brain in humans and other primates is the part
closest to the outside, the neocortex. It's the part you
see in brain photos that looks rolled and wrinkled, as
though someone had left their brain laundry in the dryer
too long before folding. The outside layer of the brain in
dolphins. Manger asserts is not made up of thinking-type
neurons but of supportive glial cells. So he believes it's
not used for advanced thinking, but for keeping their
brains warm. He says "to-may-to," Marino says "to-mah-to."
They've both looked at the same evidence and come to
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The Dark Side of Dolphins
opposing conclusions. How can anyone know how intelligent
an animal is?
For most people, seeing is believing. What an animal
does that demonstrates intelligence is much more convincing
that its relative brain size, interesting as that may be.
Dolphin cognition researchers can list a myriad of ways
that dolphins have demonstrated intelligence, among them
language capabilities, tool use, seIf-recognition in a
mirror, grasp of difficult concepts, and the ability to
navigate complex social structures. All of these are strong
evidence of dolphins' superior intellect. None of this
research convinced me, however, of dolphins' unusual mental
capabilities as much as my own personal experiences with
two female Pacific white-sided dolphins. Amphi and Thetis.
Amphi and Thetis were part of an exhibit at the
California Academy of Science in San Francisco, where I did
my master's degree research. The research project concerned
the effects of giving captive animals, in this case
dolphins and the harbor seals with which they shared the
tank, a way to control their environment. In this case, we
provided the dolphins and seals with a large "keyboard"
that allowed them to "ask" for things - anything from fish
to play toys to music or dolphin sounds. The research in
itself was quite successful, but it wasn't the study itself
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The Dark Side of Dolphins
that surprised me. It was the way the animals turned the
project around at one point - and appeared to study the
researchers.
The "keyboard" itself looked more like a xylophone
than a keyboard. It consisted of 3^" diameter pieces of PVC
pipe that gradually increased in length. Each of the "keys"
was attached to a crosspiece so they could swing back and
forth if touched hard enough, and activate a magnetic
switch. Any of the animals could "push" a key, and would
get, depending on the key it had pressed, a fish, a ball, a
ring, tactile stimulation (a researcher would "pet" the
animal if it was a dolphin -- seals, in general, are too
likely to bite), a water jet sprayed onto the surface of
the pool, or one of three types of sounds - pop music,
classical music or Pacific white-sided dolphin sounds.
Each of the items was offered for 45 seconds. With the
objects, such as the fish, ball, or ring, removing the
object after the time limit expired was a bit more effort
than just turning something on or off. A long-handled net
was used to scoop the object from the water after 45
seconds, unless some animal pressed the button again,
extending the time. The dolphins got quite excited when the
person with the net went to remove the ball, pushing it
quickly to the opposite side of the pool, and blowing huge
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The Dark Side of Dolphins
"bubble bursts" when the net came near it. One day the
dolphins apparently thought they'd figured out our rules
for the research and decided to put them to a test.
On this day, Amphi pushed the button that corresponded
to ring. The ring was a red plastic ring that she could
easily put her beak or flipper through. Today, however, she
ignored it. She ignored the ring for 40 seconds. At 40
seconds, she threaded her flipper through the ring, swam to
the bottom of the pool (where the net couldn't reach),
rolled onto her side, and looked back at us. What, she
seemed to be saying, will they do now? As a scientist, I
noted that this, if a true interpretation, required the
dolphins to not only be able to accurately estimate of
passage of time, but also the analytical ability to
actively do experiments to test their own hypotheses. As a
normal person, I wondered if we were studying them or they
were studying us. That level of intelligence, or whatever
you call, was just eerie to see in an animal, even a
dolphin.
Goldfish intelligence is the one thing that no one in
the media addressed when Manger's said dolphins were dumber
than goldfish. Like "aging yuppie," "goldfish intelligence"
might appear to be an oxymoron, the cognitive abilities of
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The Dark Side of Dolphins
goldfish and some of their close relatives might surprise
you.
It didn't surprise me to find that scientists deemed
rats to be smarter than goldfish. What I didn't know was
that research has shown that goldfish don't at all lack
memory - in fact they can successfully learn to run
underwater mazes.[16] Has anyone shown that dolphins can
learn underwater mazes? There's no reason to think they
can't, but no one has even tried.
You might not know it, but goldfish can do tricks,
even some dolphin-type tricks. Dean Pomerleau, an animal
trainer whose training techniques have won him time on the
Today Show and BBC's Animals at Work show. The trained
goldfish can go through hoops, push a soccer ball across an
underwater field into a goal, and even swim a slalom
coursethrough posts. Pomerleau's top goldfish student,
Albert Einstein, was submitted by Pomerleau to the Guinness
Book of World Records as the world's smartest fish.
Einstein was accepted, but given the significantly less
impressive title "Fish with the Largest Repertoire of
Tricks." You can see Albert Einstein in action on YouTube
and judge for yourself if the Guinness people shortchanged
him - just search for "Albert Einstein goldfish" and go
from there. If you're really inspired, you can buy the kit
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The Dark Side of Dolphins
to train your goldfish to do crazy things for only $29.99
(plus shipping) at www.r2fishschool.com.
The most amazing fish story of fish intelligence isn't
about goldfish per se, but koi, their larger cousins. Both
goldfish and koi are domesticated from a group of fish
found in Central Europe and Asia. But koi live much longer
than most goldfish. Where goldfish can live from seven to
ten years, koi can live for centuries, with one koi
reported as surviving longer than you and I probably will -
to the ripe old age of 226. 226 years.
This is important because there's a trend in the
animal kingdom for animals that live longer to be more
intelligent. If an animal normally lives for only a few
weeks, there's no reason to bother to learn about or adapt
to your environment. If an animal normally lives for a
hundred years, the ability to learn and remember become
more advantageous to its survival.
In 1995, Ava Chase invited me to the fish research lab
at the Rowland Foundation, a Cambridge, MA-based, non
profit research organization started by Edwin Land,
inventor of the Polaroid camera. The lab was filled with
aquaria and esoteric-looking mechanical/electrical
equipment. Chase herself was a bundle of energy, brown
haired with alert dark eyes: she reminded me of a friendly
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The Dark Side of Dolphins
sparrow, and I have expected her to tilt her head to the
side from time to time as she talked about her research.
Koi, she said, have the ability to recognize people. I
saw this myself, or thought I saw it, when we walked in. As
Chase approached their tank, two 10-inch long koi swam to
the top of the tank, looked at her, and blew bubbles at the
surface. "They're happy to see me," she said. I listened
skeptically, but they did seem happy to see her. But happy
to see her in particular? Or just happy to see any person,
since people, for koi, are associated with food.
jC __________ ^
FEED
rm mm __
Researchers designed a setup so fish could click a button
to show whether they think they're hearing blues or
classical music. From Chase and Hill, 1999. [17]
Using an underwater "survey-taking" apparatus. Chase
had found out something that no one else knew -- that koi
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The Dark Side of Dolphins
could tell the difference between blues and classical
music. They were first trained to tell the difference
between John Lee Hooker and Bach, then trained to further
generalize the music types. Music was played back on an
underwater speaker (S). At one end of the kois' tank was a
button (B). When the koi pushed the button and got a
correct answer, a pellet of food was dispensed at (N). If
the koi answered a question incorrectly, it got a timeout -
a time when they weren't asked any new questions, and
couldn't get more food. Over time, the koi were able to
discriminate reliably between blues and classical music,
about XX% of the time. Chase never mentioned which type of
music the koi preferred . . .
Chase had also trained koi to examine a photograph and
decide whether it had humans in the picture.[18] These fish
could find people in pictures that seemed to require real
thinking - Chase didn't just show them portraits of people,
but photos were people were only a small part of the
picture. The fish were even able to identify the presence
of a person when that person was hiding behind a tree, with
only their face showing, or when only part of a person's
body was revealed in the picture. I'm not sure what was
going on in these fishes' brains, but it appears to be more
than just "food/not food" daydreams. Of course, during the
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The Dark Side of Dolphins
last thousand years over which koi were bred, food was most
often associated with people, so maybe they have been
selected for an ability to visually identify when humans
are around.
Despite Manger's ideas that their large brains aren't
used so much for thinking as for heating pads,[2] even
skeptical scientists would likely assert that dolphins are
smarter. But Manger's point is well taken - maybe there are
some things that goldfish do better than dolphins - in that
maybe goldfish would not get caught in tuna nets in the
same way. Each species' intelligence has evolved over time
to its particular environment(s). Compared to a dolphin, a
human placed in the ocean could come across to a dolphin as
quite stupid - not swimming properly, not avoiding sharks
properly, and refusing to eat whole raw fish.
No one can say for certain how intelligent dolphins
really are. Intelligence is quite a slippery concept. I
know what makes me believe dolphins are intelligent, though
- more than the scientific data, more than the research I
did with dolphins — the way a bow-riding wild dolphin once
looked at me. I had no question; an intelligent being was
on the other side of those eyes. And no scientist, or
goldfish, has yet managed to convince me otherwise.
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References
1. Sickler, J., et al.. Thinking About Dolphins Thinking^
WCS Working Paper No. 21. 2006, Wildlife Conservation
Society: New York.
2. Manger, P.R., An examination of cetacean brain
structure with a novel hypothesis correlating
thermogenesis to the evolution of a big brain.
Biological Reviews, 2006. 81(2): p. 293-338.
3. Watson, P., Dolphins Dumb? Scientist is Dumber. 2006.
4. de Waal, F., Looking At Flipper^ Seeing Ourselves, in
New York Times. 2006. p. A.17.
5. Lilly, J.C., The Scientist: A Metaphysical
Autobiography. 1996, Berkeley, CA: Ronin Publishing.
232.
6. Lilly, J.C., Man and dolphin. [1st ed. 1961, Garden
City, N.Y.: Doubleday. 312 p.
7. Lilly, J.C., The mind of the dolphin/ a nonhuman
intelligence. 1969, [New York]: Avon. 286 p.
8. Lilly, J.C., Communication between man and dolphin :
the possibilities of talking with other species. 1978,
New York: Crown Publishers, xviii, 269 p., [12] leaves
of plates.
9. Gould, S.J., The mismeasure of man. Rev. and expanded,
with a new introduction, ed. 2008, New York: W.W.
Norton. 432 p.
10. Kolb, B. and I.Q. Whishaw, Fundamentals of human
neuropsychology. 6th ed. 2009, New York, NY: Worth
Publishers. 1 v. (various pagings).
11. Marino, L., Cetacean brain evolution - multiplication
generates complexity. . International Journal of
Comparative Psychology, 2004. 17: p. 1-16.
12. Perrin, W.F., B.G. Würsig, and J.G.M. Thewissen,
Encyclopedia of marine mammals. 2nd ed. 2008, London:
Academic, xxxiv, 1316 p.
13. Roth, G. and U. Dicke, Evolution of the brain and
intelligence. Trends in Cognitive Science, 2005. 9(5):
p. 250-257.
14. Marino, L., A Comparison of Encephalization between
Odontocete Cetaceans and Anthropoid Primates. Brain,
Behavior and Evolution, 1998. 51: p. 230-238.
15. Marino, L., What Can Dolphins Tell Us About Primate
Evolution? Evolutionary Anthropology: p. 81-86.
16. Churchill, E.P., Jr., The learning of a maze by
goldfish Journal of Animal Behavior, 1916. 6: p. 247-
255 .
119
The Dark Side of Dolphins
17. Chase, A. and W. Hill, Reliable operant apparatus for
fish: audio stimulus generator, response button, &
pellet-dispensing nipple. Behavior Research Methods,
Instruments, & Computers^ 1999. 3 1 ( 3 ): p. 470-478.
18. Chase, A., Personal Communication. 1996: Cambridge,
MA.
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The Dark Side of Dolphins
7. Pests or People
We asked the Taiji fishermen it we could subsidize this
activity... in other words, if you leave the boats tied up
at the dock, we'11 pay you the same amount of money you
would have made killing dolphins in Taiji. They got back to
us and said "It's not about money. It's about pest control.
- Ric O'Barry in The Cove.
We affirm that all cetaceans as persons have the right to
life, liberty and wellbeing.
- Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans, Helsinki, 2010
Dolphins have disappointed us. As a group, they are
far from the angels we had hoped - rather criminals, having
committed acts that we find not only morally reprehensible
but, in some cases, personally threatening. Are the
fishermen of Taiji, as reported by Ric O'Barry in The Cove,
right in considering dolphins pests? Should any dolphin be
killed on sight, much as some fishermen, because of the
shark's general reputation as killers, kill any shark they
see?
Can we continue to esteem the dolphin — an animal
that is known to bully and kill smaller related species,
practices interspecies "bestiality," kidnaps and forces
females to mate, and kills babies of its own species? What
is it that dolphins have to offer that makes us willing to
associate with such an animal?
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The Dark Side of Dolphins
To be fair, it should be pointed out that as far as we
know, not all species of dolphin have been implicated in
the list above; the most is known about bottlenose dolphins
- and as a species they are implicated in all of the
"'criminal" behaviors above. This could mean that
bottlenose dolphins are particularly "bad," or that we
haven't studied the other dolphin species enough to have
observed these behaviors. Even so, little is known about
how often even among bottlenose dolphins these behaviors
occur. Research on any particular behavior - infanticide,
for example - is still limited to just a few populations.
No one knows for sure whether bottlenose infanticide occurs
in just a few spots around the world, or whether it's
widespread. So, it could be just a few dolphins in a few
places around the world that are giving the rest a bad
name.
Even with all the information now available about
dolphin's violent and sexually aggressive tendencies,
people clamor for their safety - indeed, some are making a
case that dolphins should be considered non-human persons,
with all the protection under the law that entails. In Msy
of 2010, a group of scientists and activitis met in
Helsinki to discuss this subject. Why do they feel dolphins
are different and worth saving? With this in mind, I set up
122
The Dark Side of Dolphins
Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans : Whales and Dolphins
Based on the principle of the equal treatment of all
persons ;
Recognizing that scientific research gives us deeper
insights into the complexities of cetacean minds,
societies and cultures;
Noting that the progressive development of international
law manifests an entitlement to life by cetaceans;
We affirm that all cetaceans as persons have the right to
life, liberty and wellbeing.
We conclude that:
1. Every individual cetacean has the right to life.
2. No cetacean should be held in captivity or servitude;
be subject to cruel treatment; or be removed from
their natural environment.
3. All cetaceans have the right to freedom of movement
and residence within their natural environment.
4. No cetacean is the property of any State, corporation,
human group or individual.
5. Cetaceans have the right to the protection of their
natural environment.
6. Cetaceans have the right not to be subject to the
disruption of their cultures.
7. The rights, freedoms and norms set forth in this
Declaration should be protected under international
and domestic law.
8. Cetaceans are entitled to an international order in
which these rights, freedoms and norms can be fully
realized.
9. No State, corporation, human group or individual
should engage in any activity that undermines these
rights, freedoms and norms.
10.Nothing in this Declaration shall prevent a State from
enacting stricter provisions for the protection of
cetacean rights.
Source: cetaceanrights.org[1]
123
The Dark Side of Dolphins
a meeting with Dr. Thomas White, a professor of philosophy
at Loyola Marymount University, and the author of In
Defense of Dolphins, a book that argues that very case.
I met White in his office, reminded of the
university's Catholic affiliation by the priest's collar
worn by the man who offered directions on the way. White, a
smiling, handsome man with a full head of beautiful white
hair that would have made Mark Twain jealous, offered me a
seat at a small round table. White then chose a seat eight
feet away - unusually far away for an interview. I wondered
if he'd chosen the farther seat because that chair was more
comfortable or if the distance between us reflected
wariness — the wariness with which one would be well-
advised to approach a strange dolphin until one is sure of
its disposition toward humans.
In his book. White argues that dolphin intelligence,
self-awareness and culture make them candidates for
personhood. Rather than start negatively with a discussion
of dolphin shortcomings, I started on a positive note.
"What would happen," I asked, "if the argument in your book
is successful? How would the world change?"
If this happened, if dolphins had the rights of non
human person. White told me, the killing of dolphins around
the world would stop: "Everybody would recognize that the
124
The Dark Side of Dolphins
deliberate killing of dolphins would be unacceptable . . . the
slaughter in Taiji would stop. The slaughter in the Faroe
Islands^ would stop." Unintentional killing, also known as
bycatch, the deaths that happen as a result of tuna boats
capturing dolphins in their nets while fishing for tuna,
would stop as well. White pointed out that bycatch alone is
responsible for the deaths of an estimate 300,000 dolphins,
whales and porpoises each year.[2]
Not just the killing of dolphins, would stop, but also
the captivity of dolphins for entertainment purposes.
"...when you look at the life of dolphins in the wild, . . . and
the conditions that they need for their personalities to
develop and to have a sort of emotional health, I don't see
any way you can provide captive dolphins with those
conditions, because you're regulating their social contacts
the entire time," said White. In light of their new rights
as non-human persons. White is clear that captivity is not
a viable option.
Would there be any other implications, I asked, of
^ According to Wikipedia, the Faroe Islands natives had
three hunts or "grinds" in 2009, resulting in the deaths of
"310 pilot whales, 174 whitebeaked dolphins, 2 bottlenose
whales and 1 bottlenose dolphin."
125
The Dark Side of Dolphins
dolphins being recognized as non-human persons? Would we
expect the dolphins to have more moral responsibility
toward humans? White laughed, "Well, they already treat us
pretty well. I mean, frankly, they treat us better than we
treat them." He implied that humans sometimes had a part in
negative dolphin interactions. And then he said it
outright: "It [dolphin aggression against humans] can
happen, but's infrequent, and I would suspect that a lot of
times it's provoked by humans who don't understand what
they're doing." Would he care to elaborate?
Have you heard of the incident of a woman escaping
from a group of pilot whales? White asked. I had heard of
it. But had I ever heard the whole story? I was sure I had
not.
It two swimmers approached a group of pilot whales,
one wanted to swim with the whales, and the other had a
video camera. What the swimmers didn't realize. White told
me, was that the whales were in the middle of having sex.
"And so," White told me "they jump in the middle of
everything, and break it up. And one of the pilot whales
grabs the leg of the woman and pulls her down and then 1ets
her go after an appropriate time, SO that she goes back to
the surface and all is well. But she of course tells it as
an escape from the pilot whales." This seems like
126
The Dark Side of Dolphins
aggressive behavior on the part of the whale, especially if
you're the woman whose leg got grabbed. White explains, " . . .
I am quite confident in saying that that's probably what
they [pilot whales] do with their young to discipline them.
. . . I have seen it in the Bahamas where a young dolphin really
messes up, and you know, this isn't just kind of average
discipline, this is they really mess up. We've seen the
mothers hold the babies down, the young on the bottom for a
while, as a way of 'You've really crossed the line, you
need to know this is not okay.' It's discipline." So, from
White's point of view, the pilot whale was not trying to
hurt the woman, just teach her a lesson. White concluded,
"So, I think there are lots of ways in which dolphins
already treat humans better than humans treat dolphins."
I'm sure former dolphin trainer Ric O'Barry of The Cove
would heartily agree.
In 1994, humans treating a dolphin particularly
"poorly" resulted in a human fatality. Tiâo, a dolphin who
had six months earlier started socializing with human
swimmers off the beaches of Brazil, was mobbed. According
to reports, some 25-30 people approached him, some simply
touched or grabbed at the dolphin's fins, others jumped on
it and hit it. Some tried to stick foreign objects,
including popsicle sticks, in its blowhole. During this
127
The Dark Side of Dolphins
time some 29 swimmers received minor injuries. It wasn't
until several swimmers, some drunk, got the idea of
carrying him ouL onto the sand that Tiâo reaiiy went wild,
seriously injuring one man, and fatally injuring
another.[3] It's hard to fault a dolphin for reacting
poorly when it's in danger of being stranded out of water -
again a situation in which people not only didn't respect
the dolphin as dangerous animal, they also weren't
apparently aware of how it might view their actions.
Did White have a potential justification for other
dolphin behaviors, such as infanticide?
White suggested that further necropsies might reveal that
the infant had a condition that might make its future
survival problematic. Could infanticide in dolphins be a
form of mercy-killing?
He couldn't have an explanation for sexual coercion -
but he did. "It could be because they're cultural beings,
and cultures don't necessarily have a rational basis,"
White said. "And one of the things I think that is
certainly possible when you're talking about beings with
such a sophisticated affective life is affective
pathology." He was suggesting that coercive dolphins might
be crazy, at least temporarily. His other suggested
explanation? Perhaps sexual coercion is "just a ritual kind
128
The Dark Side of Dolphins
of behavior . . . atypical when you look at dolphin communities
overall." White impressed me: he had really thought through
accepted some of the most humanly-judged negative behaviors
in dolphins and come up with potentially understandable
explanations for them. "Since at any time, a bunch of
females could take on the males and go equalize things, the
fact that they don't . . . show[s] that there's another
dimension to dolphin behavior." He didn't convince me his
ideas were true - he convinced me that they were possible.
But suppose the worst case -- that dolphins do indeed
have different values from us, and that some dolphins
practice these behaviors on a regular, not pathological
basis. Should dolphins as a species be decried? Lions
practice infanticide - do we now consider them a pest
species? Chimpanzee males are sometimes sexually coercive -
do we expunge them from our family tree?
Perhaps we hold dolphins to an extremely high standard
of behavior, one they can't live up to, because we feel
they are in many ways our closest soulmates on this planet:
intelligent, self-aware, and communicative. Perhaps the
real question is not whether dolphins are a "dark" species,
but whether humans are not.
If I had intercepted a recent declaration from a group
of dolphin academics, it might read thus:
129
The Dark Side of Dolphins
Humans are intriguing mammals ; many suggest they
have signs of intelligence and self-awareness.
Indeed, we suggest the low frequency sounds they
make may be part of their communication system,
rather than a primitive form of écholocation. We
have examined a number of their more inexplicable
behaviors :
• Capture and lifelong imprisonment of cetaceans
and other species, apparently for entertainment
purposes/
• Mass slaughter of cetaceans for unknown reasons
(food?) ;
• Continued injury of cetaceans by boats that
appear to be designed to capture ;
• Pollution of the world's air and ocean without
regard to other species ; and
• Infanticide by females of their own offspring ;
Despite this litany of uncivilized acts, we
wish to point out that no one has yet discovered
why or how humans continue in these clearly
maladaptive behaviors. Perhaps they are committed
by a certain subsection that has affective
pathologies. Some of us remain convinced that,
despite the above. Homo sapiens, with its large
brain, apparent self-awareness, and purported
"language" abilities has redeeming qualities and
should be preserved, even, perhaps, declared to
have the rights of personhood.
Dolphins are intriguing animals - just not exactly the
animals we want them to be. But that isn't necessarily a
bad thing - it's just what is. In judging dolphin behavior
harshly, we must also judge ourselves. I hope we're able to
live up to at least some of their expectations.
130
The Dark Side of Dolphins
References
1. Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans: Whales and
Dolphins, in Cetacean Rights (www.cetaceanrights.org).
2010: Helsinki, Finland.
2. Read, A.J., P. Drinker, and S. Northridge, By-Catches
Of Marine Mammals In U.S. Fisheries and a First
Attempt to Estimate the Magnitude of Global Marine
Mammal By-Catch. Paper SC/55/BC5 2003, presented to
the IWC Scientific Committee: Berlin, p. 12.
3. Santos, M.C.d.O., Lessons learned from a dolphin in
brazil, in Between species : Celebrating the dolphin-
human bond, T. Frohoff and B. Peterson, Editors. 2003,
Sierra Club Books.: San Francisco, p. 124-137.
131

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