Dolphin Diaries: My 25 Years with Spotted Dolphins in the Bahamas - Softcover

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First Contact with Dolphins:
Establishing the Relationship

If you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore.
—APSLEY CHERRY-GARRARD, THE WORST JOURNEY IN THE WORLD

Pre-1985—Beginnings

If you could ask a dolphin one question, what would it be? And what do you think a dolphin might ask you? These questions occurred to me when I first met a spotted dolphin in the wild early one humid summer morning in 1985. I swam slowly away from the boat that was anchored in the gin-clear waters of a shallow sandbank in the Bahamas. It was calm and peaceful out in the middle of the warm amniotic salt water with no land in sight. Two dolphins approached and swam around me, looking directly into my eyes. There is nothing comparable to making eye contact with a wild creature; it is like a sharp splash of ice-cold water on the face. I sensed a keen and mutually exploratory awareness; I sensed another “being” behind those eyes. Ten years later, after experiencing strong currents and large sharks, I would have a different type of respect for the ocean, one that probably wouldn’t allow me to swim out so far alone in these waters with such a calmness. But this experience was different; it was my first encounter with a wild dolphin.
In all my years of work with marine mammals, nothing had prepared me for this. I found myself deeply regretting never taking an anthropology class. What is it like to meet and experience a new culture for the first time, a nonhuman culture? What do you do if they are curious and want to observe you? I was a biologist, a cetologist, who studied whales and dolphins. What brought me to the Bahamas was curiosity about the lives of wild dolphins, but the experiential part was not something I was trained for as a scientist. But this experience seemed perfectly natural. My ancestors evolved with plants, animals, and the Earth itself. Well before that, dolphins, as early mammals, returned to the ocean from their land ancestors twenty-five million years ago. This world of a highly evolved mammal was a window into the dolphins’ unique aquatic world, not separate and estranged as the land and sea seem in the open ocean, but intertwined like a shoreline: mutually curious species carefully considering each other.
In the field of animal behavior the philosophy of “to know a goose, become a goose” was first formulated by Konrad Lorenz, considered the father of modern animal behavior. This level of participation has been productive for the study of many social species, including chimpanzees by Jane Goodall, mountain gorillas by Dian Fossey, and African elephants by Cynthia Moss. These pioneering women researchers provided solid examples of a productive way of illuminating the lives of wild animal societies. That is the approach and methodology I decided to use for studying free-ranging dolphins.
For years scientists had attempted to teach nonhuman animal species, including dolphins, the English language, without first learning about the dolphins’ natural communication system. I was always fascinated by the idea that dolphin minds evolved in the aquatic environment, parallel, but potentially dissimilar to our own. What would that mind be like and how would it express itself? Could we understand their type of consciousness by studying their communication system and cross over that interspecies boundary? Could we really build a bridge? I decided to focus my work first on understanding how dolphins communicated with each other, using sound, vision, touch, and second to use those same natural channels of communication to explore the possibility of interspecies communication between humans and dolphins.
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I grew up in the Midwest far away from any ocean, with the exception of the world of Jacques Cousteau that flowed from our living-room TV. I became both fascinated with and committed to the exploration of dolphins, potentially one of the most advanced nonhuman intelligence on the planet. My passion for this work began when I was twelve years old. I entered an essay contest for a scholarship in my hometown in Minnesota. One of the questions was, “What would you do for the world if you could do one thing?” My answer? “I would develop a human-animal translator so that we could understand other minds on the planet.” As I continued to grow up and observe the natural world around me I became more and more fascinated by the idea of complex minds like ours evolving in the water. What could dolphins possibly be doing with all that brainpower if they didn’t have hands? I knew then my lifework had been chosen. Simple questions often have the most important repercussions. Where did I see myself in five years, what kind of environment did I want to be in, what kind of people did I want to be around? I wanted to work at sea, in the environment where the animals lived. I wanted to be doing research—to be observing and documenting the lives of wild dolphins. And I wanted to be around stimulating people who could use a variety of talents to explore this unknown territory. These simple answers guided my decisions for the next ten years through graduate school and during the formation of my own research project and nonprofit organization, the Wild Dolphin Project, which became the support structure for my research with the Atlantic spotted dolphins.
So by the age of twelve I knew I wanted to study dolphin communication. After taking the advice of a wise college counselor, I left my hometown to venture forth into the world of marine biology, to get into the mud and see if I liked the field. I applied and was accepted to both the University of Washington, which had an undergraduate program in marine biology, and the University of Miami, renowned for its oceanographic work. But I decided to go to Oregon State University for two reasons. First, I thought Oregon would be a beautiful place to live with its green landscape and healthy lifestyle. Second, Oregon State had a marine mammalogist, Dr. Bruce Mate, and I wanted to study marine mammals. I jumped on boats whenever I could for oceanographic cruises off the Oregon coast or on salmon fishing boats with friends. I loved the smell of the ocean, the smell of seaweed, the roar of the waves. I discovered that I did, indeed, like the mud.
After completing four undergraduate years at the inland campus I spent my last year at the Marine Biological Station in Newport, Oregon. I observed harbor seals and sea lions at salmon hatcheries. I joined Bruce down in Baja for two winters studying gray whales; the first year with Jim Sumich, a Ph.D. student at Bruce’s lab doing work on the metabolic rates of gray whales. San Ignacio Lagoon and other lagoons in Baja California, Mexico, are home to friendly gray whales that gave researchers close access and unique opportunities for studying the species. My second winter I helped with radio-tagging and monitoring from land with receivers for previously tagged whales. One day the field team came back to shore and I excitedly told them I had heard Blanco’s radio signal, the first whale tagged. After the winter tagging season we quickly placed one of the radio receivers in a lighthouse on Yaquina Head, the Oregon headland where I had previously spent three years counting migrating whales. One night, back in Oregon, I heard Blanco’s signal—he had gone by the lighthouse! We hopped in our cars and drove, while Bruce, a skilled pilot, flew, and followed Blanco up the coast. Blanco was eventually tracked all the way up to Unimak Pass, Alaska. All of these studies were of great value to me and provided opportunities and insight, and Bruce was an invaluable mentor and teacher.
Around that time I got wind of a beautiful 134-foot wooden barquentine (a form of square-rigged sailing vessel) named the Regina Maris and her six-week student program at sea. Taking advantage of her time in the Pacific, I jumped onboard Regina Maris for a six-week adventure. We spent most of our time in Magdalena Bay, another of the gray whale breeding lagoons in Baja. I met Dr. Kenneth Norris (the father of dolphin studies and a future mentor), Kenneth Balcomb (a renowned killer whale field scientist), and other well-known marine mammal scientists. Our chores were typical of being on a vessel at sea. As students we attended classes during the daytime and did watches four hours on, four hours off, to help run the ship. We took classes in celestial navigation and basic seamanship—we handled the wheel on deck, we hoisted sails, and of course we tied knots. Bolen knots, sheepshank knots, square knots—any kind of knot. We felt nautical! The training of young marine scientists should always involve extensive fieldwork because such experiences are critical for understanding the sea itself. I was developing a deep love for the sea, for boats, and my life was now set on a course through the waves. I loved studying the ocean from the small microscopic creatures to the large marine mammals off the Oregon coast.
Then in 1981, shortly after I had finished my last year of undergraduate research on migrating gray whales, I had a nearly fatal accident. While out in the woods alone I fell off a deck of a house and down a ravine, and was subsequently smashed by the falling lumber and deck, breaking my ribs and severing the hepatic artery in my liver and nearly bleeding to death. After barely making it to my twenty-fifth birthday I realized there is nothing like a near-death experience to make you reprioritize your life. So once again I decided to join the Regina Maris, now in the Atlantic. With barely healed broken ribs, but my doctor’s approval, I boarded Regina Maris in Gloucester, Massachusetts, this time not as a student, but as the “ lowly student lab slave”—a dollar a day with room and board for six months. Our trip took us directly to Bermuda and down thr...