Transcript of journalist and senior media executive Richard Sergay's interview with Dr. Denise Herzing for the "Stories of Impact" series.
Watch the video version of this conversation.
RS = Richard Sergay (interviewer)
DH = Dr. Denise Herzing (interviewee)
DH: I’m Dr. Denise Herzing, Research Director of the Wild Dolphin Project and Affiliate Assistant Professor at Florida Atlantic University in biological sciences.
RS: The genesis of your project and how it came to be?
DH: I created the Wild Dolphin Project in 1985 with the vision of trying to find a group of wild dolphins that I could hang out with for 20 years or more and observe their behavior underwater. The express purpose was to study their communication system and see how complex that system was or if it represented some kind of language.
RS: Why dolphins in particular?
DH: I chose dolphins because they’re a social mammal but they’re aquatic, so they represent a real diversion from primates and terrestrial species, which we know a lot about and we can relate to a lot as humans. And when I was, really I guess a nerdy 12 year old, I used to look through the Encyclopedia Britannica and I would always stop on the whale and dolphin page and wonder what was going on in their minds, these minds that had evolved for twenty five million years in the water. So how does communication intelligence evolve in that kind of social mammal setting?
RS: How do you define diverse intelligence, why is it important to your study of dolphins?
DH: There are many of us in the scientific community that have often wondered and pursued the question of what is intelligence, first of all. Still debatable, still measured by human standards for the most part, but the idea of looking at diverse intelligence gives us a sense of, all, all the creatures that have evolved on Earth, what kind of diversity of intelligence might you find. How does it manifest in a seplipod for example, that uses light signals versus a dolphin that uses sound signals. DH: My personal interest also is in, are there any universals in communication across species. Is it possible that some kind of signal or aspect of a signal would cross species so that they can understand each other to a certain point. Or humans could understand them to a certain point. I mean that’s kind of the big question. But that’s like the diversity of human cultures, right. We know a lot about that, we know how different they can be, yet how parallel they can be in some aspects. So really taking on non-human cultures and diversity is a big challenge but I think it will tell us a lot about the natural world.
RS: Can studying dolphins help us understand us as humans?
DH: Studying dolphin communication can probably give us some insight into human communication. I mean we’re pretty good at studying ourselves to a certain extent because we can reflect and give feedback and-- but I think looking at the diversity and the parallels or non-parallels of another social mammal can probably tell us a lot about ourselves, for example how do we interact with each other, is that similar or different than how dolphins might interact. Are there ways of interacting with your neighbors that we might learn from, from non-human species that might help us out as humans. Those are I guess kind of the questions I would think about.
RS: There’s no evidence of language or structures. Your perspective?
DH: I think we need to remember that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And in my viewpoint we simply have not had the tools to look at non-human communication adequately until now. It’s analogous to looking for planets outside of our solar system. Until the Kepler mission was designed and sent out there, we said there were no planets, that we were unique. All of a sudden there are planets everywhere because we have the tools to get the data to look at what was going on. So for me, the evolution of artificial intelligence, neural nets, deep learning, all these tools that are exponentially growing and available to us now, will finally give us a chance to look in powerful ways that we as humans haven’t been able to look at with previous scientific tools. I mean the reality is, science evolves with tools, right or the tools evolve the science, depending on how you look at it. So here we are, now we have these tools, let’s apply them. Let’s look at all these great data sets that researchers have from different species and let’s see what we find.
RS: Tell me how AI, machine learning, big data, helps you understand dolphin communication?
DH: Well AI is a broad term for a lot of different kinds of software algorithm approaches. For our particular use, with our dolphin data, what it’s letting us do right now is, take a semi-objective look at how dolphin sounds cluster in categories. For example, dolphin research has a pretty good history of looking at dolphin whistles, right. We’ve measured them ad nauseum for decades. We know what they are, we know they have contours, they’re easily measured by the human eye as well as parametrically. But what Big Data AI does for us, is it lets us look at other types of sounds that are more difficult for humans to categorize.And it throws it out to us as this sound type is one cluster, this sound type is another cluster. And then what we can start doing with AI and some of these tools, is we can look at, is there order, is there structure, is there grammar to their sequences of sound types. Are there rules, because language has rules, right? So looking at non-human communication, we want to know if there is some structure to their communication signals, and then how do we interpret it. That’s actually the biggest challenge, really. But AI will get us most of the way there and then we still have to use a bit of human ingenuity and metadata and context to try to interpret meaning.
RS: What inspired you? Your hero?
DH: I guess I was initially inspired by number one, the scientists that were out studying primates when I was in school. Jane Goodall planted herself with the chimpanzees, Dian Fossey with the gorillas. Cynthia Moss with elephants. You know all these researchers found a place where they could observe relatively non-invasively, and just see what the society would show them and tell them about the species. Kind of simultaneously at that time, Jacques Cousteau showed up on the TV, so I was like ok, there is an underwater world, I want to be there. Hey, there are dolphins, smart mammals, that to me was the combination. So I really took inspiration from the technique from Jane Goodall and others of just planting yourself out in the wild somewhere and trying to observe. Now, finding a place for dolphins is a whole other dance, right. Because they’re mobile species in the water, I had to really focus on finding a place in the wild that I could plant myself long-term with access to some species of dolphin.
RS: Why in the wild?
DH: I did work for graduate work...
I did some work in captivity for my graduate studies and I learned a lot, I correlated sound and behavior with bottlenose dolphins in the San Francisco Bay Area at a facility. But I really wanted a natural setting. You know, there’s limitations to what kind of signals dolphins can and will produce when they’re in a small tank swimming in a circle. So I wanted to see them fighting and mating and feeding and playing and being wild dolphins. I chose the Bahamas because you could see underwater. So most dolphin studies in the world really are from the surface, if they’re in the wild, primarily because you just can’t see under the water in many places. So I really wanted to look at their signals underwater because that’s where they behave primarily is under the water. The Bahamas became available after some hunting for a site. And when I went out there in 1985, I realized this was a place where it could happen. And so I basically planted myself there, at least in summer months, to study these dolphins.
RS: Research trips, how many, how long?
So since 1985, I’ve done probably an average of ten, ten day trips a year, and it’s about 35 years now, so it’s a lot of, a lot of trips, a lot of hours in the water, certainly.
RS: The biggest challenges studying dolphins?
DH: Our biggest challenge with studying dolphins in the wild and underwater are uh-- usually weather is the biggest issue, we have to get where they live and we have to be able to spend time with them. Number two I would say, just access to their lives. So in the Bahamas the dolphin group that I started to study, they were residents because they had food all year round, so we had access to them in a certain square kilometer area. So that helped a lot. Of course like any studies, financial. You know, we have a 62 foot catamaran, that costs a lot of money, it’s half of our budget. But it lets us be out at sea for long periods of time where the dolphins are, away from land and we live there and work there and sleep there and study there. So those three elements I think are the biggest.
RS: What makes dolphins unique in your mind in terms of studying another creature?
Dolphins are unique because they’ve evolved in the water and they have sensory systems that are parallel but have specializations for the water. For example dolphins have high frequency sounds they produce and that they can hear. Some terrestrial mammals certainly have high frequency sounds and hearing. But dolphins are really acoustic masters in the water. We still are learning a lot about how they passively listen to sounds, how they encode projecting their own sounds and how they learn these things.DH: So they’re unique in that sense, I mean every species has a primary sense, right. So primates are visual and smell is important on land, not so much in the water, they don’t even have a smell. They have taste, they have touch, they um, dolphins are also or are in a scenario where their sound can be felt in their body. So they have some remote abilities to tickle each other or hurt each other or whatever they’re doing with their sound. So in some ways they’re very parallel to primates, just with unique sensory adaptations.
RS: Do dolphins have a language?
DH: We don’t know if dolphins have a language. Language is a kind of a hot button for a lot of scientists. There are human definitions of language that many scientists refer to when they’re looking at how to equate whether non-humans have language. We tend to call it more of a communication system. Part of what we’re trying to do is look for language-like structures or language-like rules, that might give us an indication how much, if any, language abilities they have. Now we do know from captive studies that they have the ability to comprehend human-type languages. So we know they have the ability and the behavioral flexibility to do that. The big question is, do they do that in their own system, or is it just because they’re exposed to humans in training scenarios, like primates do, that’s actually been an issue. Are you enculturating a species in captivity and then testing them for these abilities? Or is it something that could be useful in the wild and they have it anyway? That’s really a big question.
RS: Example?
Sure. Some of the best dolphin cognitive work was done in Hawaii at a marine mammal lab in Oahu. And they basically presented the dolphins with sign language as a visual language and they also presented the dolphins with an acoustic language. And they tested the animals and the animals could understand syntax and semantics. So changing order of words and meaning, both in their acoustic and visual languages. So they could tell the difference between taking the hoop to the swimmer versus taking the swimmer to the hoop. And there was rigorous testing. So that’s really the best example of their comprehension of order and structure of an artificial language.
RS: And in the wild?
DH: You know, in the wild it’s really hard to do cognitive work, you don’t have control over the environment. So most researchers are doing what we do, they collect sounds, behavioral data. We try to correlate it. Cognitively, I mean we do have some observations, for example, of mothers teaching a calf by the strict definition of teaching in the science world. And other researchers have seen tool use, for example, in the wild. Which, of course, a lot of species measure up to now, as we know. So, strict cognitive experimental work is hard. You just don’t have control. So all we can do is observe and try to interpret what the possible cognitive aspects of these angles are.
RS: Tool use?
So probably the best example of tool use comes from Australia. They have an example of bottlenose dolphins, Indian Ocean bottlenose dolphins, going down to the bottom digging up a sponge that they put on their rostrum or beak, and then they use that as a tool to go dig out fish under the rocks, fish that are poisonous, that would sting them for example. So, and apparently it’s passed down from mother to calves. It’s a cultural issue. That’s our best observation of tool use with dolphins in the wild, so far.
RS: Dolphin self-awareness?
DH: We know dolphins have passed the test for self-awareness, that’s been done in captivity in a parallel manner to primate tests. For example they would have a dolphin, they would put zinc oxide on their body somewhere then they would look at the animal's response in a mirror, so are they checking out where that spot is or do they think it’s another animal, you know, in the mirror. So they seem to have passed that test. Now interestingly, many people might debate that a visual test for a dolphin is not even the best test for self-awareness. It might be better to give them an acoustic test of self-awareness. But again, we often follow the primate science just because that’s where most of the work is done. So ironically, it might be more important to a species specific test when we’re doing these things with other species. Dolphins can understand abstract concepts. That again was done in Hawaii at the lab where they tested dolphins actually observing their sign language on a TV screen, which makes it a two dimensional situation. So it’s an abstraction of what they would normally see. So we are pretty sure dolphins understand these abstract concepts. So they have tool use, they have self-awareness, they can understand abstract concepts, and they can comprehend artificial languages in different sensory modalities. So those are pretty big things when you’re looking at social mammal intelligence so at least.
RS: Self-awareness?
DH: Well I guess self-awareness is used as a measure of, of do you comprehend who you are relative to other animals, and will you show behavior for example, you and I look in the mirror and we, you know, adjust this and adjust that and we’re, we’re aware of our body and we’re checking it out. That’s one of the measures that they use for self-awareness. You know I don’t know if it really leads to, you know, are you reflective about yourself and your society because you have self-awareness. I mean I tend to think a lot of animals are self-aware of course of their bodies. You know, they use them all the time in sensory systems. But I guess it’s just considered a higher level of consciousness to a certain extent. I mean these terms are difficult, right? They have all sorts of definitions and definitions of measures and humans debate them all the time.
RS: Planning for the future?
DH: Well again, something like planning for the future is a bit hard to detect in wild animals. There have been, again, tests both in the Hawaii lab and at the Epcot Center actually here in Orlando, Florida, years ago, where they would give the dolphin a task and they would have to plan to get to the task and be successful by gathering objects along the way, for example. I can give you one example of something we did observe in the wild that was pretty amazing. If you want that story.
So, the spotted dolphins we work with primarily, also share habitat with bottlenose dolphins, so they have interspecies interactions on a regular basis and we observe them quite often. And so one day we ran across a dolphin named Stubby, who I think is actually behind me with the dorsal fin, and he is a male in a male coalition. But the day we observed him he was hanging out with some mothers and calves as they do sometimes, helping to babysit and tend the group. And a bottlenose dolphin, big male bottlenose dolphin, he was a fairly aggressive dolphin as they are sometimes, and his, his bottlenose group came up and they really started harassing Stubby, which basically involves, you know, they bully them a bit, they can physically try to harass them to a certain extent, and they all try to copulate with them as a measure of dominance we think. So this kind of happened and Stubby was just kind of there and there was not much for him to do, it’s hard to defend yourself if you’re a smaller spotted dolphin. So the day after that, we were out looking for our dolphins and we ran to, ran into this ruckus on the water and so of course we get in to find out what’s going on. And there was Stubby with his now very large, not only his normal coalition of males, but a super coalition of other males. And he was chasing the dolphin that had harassed him the day before, because now he has power in numbers and that’s kind of the dance. So what was really interesting about that is like, ok, how did he tell or express to his friends, his male friends, that this is the guy that beat me up the other day we have to go find him, you know I mean there’s, it’s hard to run into these sequences in the wild. I mean we were really lucky to see that because it was very telling, but then it leads to all these questions about, how does a dolphin communicate if they do such a thing or does the dolphin just kind of say well follow me. And he goes to find this bottlenose. But to me that suggests that they have some kind of planning, like over time, and that they might have the ability to communicate in detail what they’re doing, where they’re going, and who they’re going after. But it’s very hard to observe in the wild and try to make sense of and you never really know the true story, I guess. But they're interesting observations.
RS: The types of dolphins you study?
DH: We primarily study Atlantic spotted dolphins. And there are bottlenose dolphins also in the same area in the Bahamas. The bottlenose dolphins are a little less tolerant of us in the water and they’re also other larger species, so they’re always traveling or eating, that’s, that’s our sense of it. It’s very hard to observe their underwater social behavior because they don’t seem to do it very often, or at least don’t let us see it very often. So our primary work is with The Atlantic spotted dolphins.
RS: Describe the spotted dolphins?
DH: So Atlantic spotted dolphins, it turned out they were a really great species to observe underwater, because they get spots with age. So when they’re first born they’re about 90 centimeters and they have no spots, they kind of look like little bottlenose dolphins actually. Then after about three years they get spots on their belly area. Then when they’re 9 or 10, which is sexual maturity for a female, they start getting spots on the top of their body. And then when they’re fully grown at about 15 for the males, which is sexual maturity, they get all sorts of black and white spots they kind of coalesce on their body. So they’re, they’re nice to study because we can look at their development periods, we can look at a group and go oh that’s a group of juveniles. I mean we usually know the individuals anyway, but if, as happens sometimes, we get a little immigrant dolphins from somewhere, we don’t know them, we can at least know how old they are. So when we’re doing our Behavioral Sampling we know we’re capturing behavior of a juvenile group of dolphins. So they are pretty convenient to study just for that reason, which has been great. And they have a lot of identification features because of their spots. So we’re really able to track the individuals, we can sex them underwater so we know who’s male and female, because they’re hydrodynamically streamlined, right, you can’t tell at all unless you see underneath where the mammary slits are for the females. So we know their age, their sex, their I.D. We track their relationships, moms and calves. And over time their siblings and offspring. So the big picture is, who are they in their society, how do they interact with each other. What are the signals they use? And that’s the framework we use for everything we do.
RS: Their lifespan?
DH: So Atlantic spotted dolphin lifespan, as we know it in our area, can go up to about 55 years. The average life of spotted dolphins is probably more like 25, but the extreme end can be into their 50s.
RS: They would be a target of what other creature?
Dolphins are both predator and prey. So they can be preyed upon by sharks, for example, maybe when they’re sick or weaker inexperienced. Orcas, killer whales, will also eat dolphins, false killer whales would eat and chase dolphins. And of course humans in certain areas of the world could be a predator on a dolphin. But mostly sharks and other large dolphin species.
RS: How did you build trust with dolphins?
DH: So the first five years of my work out in the Bahamas, I literally anchored the boat in one area and stayed there. And it was an area where I knew the Dolphins went through, we call it the dolphin highway. And it’s 40 miles offshore, there was no reason to be there other than to watch dolphins. So there weren’t, there wasn’t a lot of activity there, fishing boats that sort of thing. And I just reasoned that they would be curious and come by and check us out. So we would be anchored, the dolphins would sure enough come by, and we’d slip in the water. And we of course have our little cameras and data stuff. And we would just work on being quiet, calm, letting us just float with them and letting them check us out. You know, in the process we would take an I.D. shot with our camera or our, I always had a video with sound on it as well. But we were really careful about not pushing them, not chasing them, not harassing them. And we worked really hard on learning dolphin etiquette, which for us meant what are the signals they use with each other, which are the wrong signals for us to use. For example, I can remember one of my earliest faux pas was, I was trying to photograph, you know, there were like three dolphins. And they’re around the boat, it we’re still anchored but I’m photographing them and I wanted to sex them, right, because sexing them is really important, who’s male and who’s female. So I would turn upside down underneath them to look at their genital area for mammary slits. Well that is a solicitation for mating. If you’re a dolphin. So immediately, you know, another dolphin would come in and interrupt it and gently kind of say you know move off. So there were things we had to learn about how we could be with them in the water. And it really was an investment in their relationship because I really wanted them to trust us, ignore us most of the time if that was possible, and interact with us knowing we weren’t gonna grab them or chase them or harass them in that sense. And it was well worth it. Finally when they got comfortable enough, we started seeing their natural behavior just around the boat. They would come in and play and fight and mate and then we started moving the boat around and we would follow them to different areas to find out, oh, that’s where they feed or that’s where they go off the deep water edge. So it was a patience game, but it was building, you know, for us we were building our identification catalogue, we were learning who’s who. And it was well worth it really.
RS: That feeling of trust?
You know it’s a real privilege to be able to be around dolphins who are behaving naturally and probably one of the most powerful feelings is when a mother dolphin brings her new little calf over and shows them to you and you’re like, I mean that’s so vulnerable for the calf, right. But the mothers know, you know, we don’t touch and we don’t reach out we don’t, you know, we’re just going to say hi and videotape them and... so, you know, there’s nothing as powerful as having another species really look you in the eye and interact with you in that way. I mean it makes you want-- it makes me want to know what they’re thinking even more like, what goes on you know when that happens between species.
(WATER)
RS: What are you looking for and doing in the water?
DH: So we leave from Florida, go to the Bahamas, clear customs. And then our days are long and hot, usually in the summer. We get up early at sunrise, we drink our coffee. We try to be, at least I try to be awake and ready before sunrise, because sometimes the dolphins can show up at your boat early in the morning. But nowadays typically we’re anchored, we pull up anchor, we go look for the animals, either by transact or some other survey pattern. We know where they hang out for the most part to access them. So we go out and try to find usually spotted dolphins. If we run into bottlenose dolphins will take photo ID’s from the surface. Just to get their dorsal fins, which is how most researchers identify bottlenose dolphins including us. If we run into the spotted dolphins and it looks like they’re not traveling fast somewhere, we try to get in the water with them, so we would gear up on our boat in a small group. I would take a video camera in with a hydrophone typically, sometimes that’s a high frequency recorder with a GoPro for example. We also put in a couple of people with just cameras to take photo ID shots. So every year we have to keep up on what new spots they have and scars and that sort of thing. So every year we update our identification catalog, because it’s really critical for us to track individuals. So we get in the water and we try to assess pretty quickly what’s going on. So if they seem to be traveling or not interested and they’re taking off with Butch get back out of the water and either follow them, maybe put up a drone to follow them, or we might try to get back in the water if they got to a certain place and start behaving again. So if we’re in the water and they’re hanging out with us, usually they’re doing their own thing, they’re digging in the sand in the bottom pulling out little fish which are their snacks during the day or they’re playing with each other like juveniles might drag a piece of seaweed around just for a game with each other. Or there’s some courtship going on. And so all of this we’re recording on our video, so we’re doing, trying to track behavioral events. So we look at what’s going on and try to follow, you know, like if a male is chasing a female for courtship or if a group is fighting we would focus on that group. So we’re doing that as long as they let us, really. It’s pretty rare we have to get out of the water to change equipment. You know we have pretty long battery life and we try to have redundant systems in the water and then when they take off we get back out of the water and we mostly take notes out of the water, it’s very hard to take notes underwater. I actually tried that in my early years, it was pretty hilarious. So you can have a little writing pad. And the problem is by the time you look and write something on your pad like the Dolphins have come and gone and done something else so it’s like you have to have video. I mean that is the only way to capture what’s going on. So we get out of the water, we take quick little notes in a wet notebook just in case we have to get back in quickly, or if we have time before the next time we get in the water we have a data sheet we fill out about that specific encounter. That encounter might include you know, who is there, what sex they were, what behaviors going on, environmental variables all that stuff. And then we write just kind of notes about what we observed. And then we have a video log. So we would log what video was shot, the sound, etc. And then at night, all that information gets transferred into a database on the computer basically. So it’s searchable. So we do that throughout the day. I mean we might take a snorkel break if it’s hot, you know, we’ll anchor usually before sunset, unless we’re doing a night drift. They also feed off shore in the deep water at night. So sometimes we’ll go out off the deep-water edge and watch them hunt squid and flying fish.So it’s, it’s that over and over again, collecting data. You know, most of our data collection is observational. We’re getting underwater video, we’re getting high frequency sounds, we’re getting drone footage. We have been playing a little bit with passive acoustic monitoring, which is basically putting down a computer with a long battery life underwater for a month or two months or three months, wherever you are, and letting it collect sound 24/7. And then you can pick up that, download the data, and then you can tell what species are in the area at certain times and dates. So that’s a very powerful tool. It’s not our main tool because we really focus on getting behavior with sound. So we want the video to try to interpret who’s who. The other thing we do is we collect genetic material by collecting their fecal material in the water. So if an animal defecates in front of us and we know who it is, we collect that fecal sample and then we can extract DNA and that gives us paternity. So now we can start figuring out who the fathers are, or the grandfathers, and that’s the only way to get that information really. So...
RS: The geographic area?
So we work primarily in the northern Bahamas. So the Bahamas, you know, is this massive archipelago. We work on little Bahama bank which is the northernmost sandbank and then on great Bahama bank which is south of that, off Miami, for example. But they’re big areas. I mean there are a lot of submerged sandbanks. I mean the beauty of the Bahamas is clear water and it’s shallow, so it’s relatively safe from predators for researchers in the water, that’s, that’s a big thing. [10:47:11.11] There’s a little island mass but a lot of the landmass is just simply submerged. And so we can be 40 miles away from land and 20 feet of water doing our observations.
RS: Do you name your dolphins?
DH: We do name our dolphins, at least after we see them a few times. In the early years at least and we still try to use mnemonic names, so that it triggers the memory of who it is. So for example we have Big Scar and Stubby, you know who has a cut off dorsal fin. So they might um, so we might be able to remember who’s who in the water more rapidly, because when, when at least when I get the water, in my group, my team, you know if you can assess who’s there quickly, if you want to focus on an individual cause he’s a maturing male or a pregnant female, you know who you’re looking at, you know, oh, it’s a Little Gash or Big Gash or-- I mean you kind of run out of names at a certain point it’s true, but it helps to trigger your memory of who’s who. So you can actually now sample them with the video easier too.
RS: Analysis and tools? How are you capturing sound?
DH: Our tools have evolved for decades. In the early years I had a Nikon? camera, where you had 36 slides, you came back to land it took two weeks to process it and get it back. So in the early years there was a lot of manual sketching out of the Dolphins marks before you would get the feedback from slides. And of course video cameras have changed. You know we originally had big VHS C cameras and Hi-8 and DV and now of course we have digital. So going from analog to digital was a big change because with analog video and slides, there was a lot of processing time after the fact. Now with digital, digital cameras, digital video, we can get a lot of our analysis done during the day while we’re looking for dolphins or at night. So processing the information has sped up. The sound equipment also has evolved. It was very hard to record high frequency with the dolphins for years, because those tools were big tape recorders literally. It was hard to take that underwater with a video camera. Now we have a little zoom recorder. We have customized equipment from colleagues that have built systems for us that sync video with high frequency computer in a box, for example. So it’s really all changed now. It’s a lot of data and it’s a lot of storage now, that’s more the issue. But the point is, it’s now you can process it more easily too, in real time.
RS: Sound and behavior?
DH: So one of our main focuses really is to correlate sound and behavior. And what that means for us is, when we jump in the water and we see we’re with a group of mothers and calves, we can correlate mothers and calves interacting or nursing or foraging or calling back to each other, right? So there are certain types of sounds, for example, whistles, signature whistles we might see in that kind of context. Another time we might jump in the water and we see a big group of males fighting. So for us that’s an aggressive fighting context. Now we have a group of sounds, burst pulse sounds and other kinds of squeaks and squeals that are correlated with that kind of activity. So we have the basics down. We know kind of what groups of sounds they make during gross activities. The trick with dolphin communication still, both in captivity and in the wild, is knowing who’s making the sound. So if you really want to look at dolphin-to-dolphin exchanges, you have to be able to localize the individual, right. So in terrestrial research you could set up a series of microphones and you could zoom in on who’s making the sound by localizing that. It’s the same issue in the water. You have to have a hydrophone array, three or four hydrophones, that receive the sound at different times, so it can correlate really who’s making the sound, when. So, or you could have a hydrophone array set up in a bay for example, and you would know the dolphins over there just made some sounds and the dolphins over there made sounds. For us, we need it in the water, with our video. So just in the last three or four years we’ve been developing this tool with a colleague of ours in Singapore, Matthias Hoffman Khunt, who’s an acquisition and he’s designed a nice little array we can push in the water, we can get video and sound recordings, and then his software will post-production put a little mark on who’s making the sound, like a red square on a click and a yellow triangle on a whistle and you can see, oh, mom’s made a whistle, oh, the calf just made a whistle back. So you now you start getting into the dynamic of a conversation with the dolphins. So that’s been long in coming, much needed, and on its way. So that’s great.
RS: The three different types of sounds dolphins make?
DH: So dolphins make three main types of sounds. They make frequency modulated-- they make frequency modulated whistles...
DH: Dolphins make basically three types of sounds. They make frequency modulated whistles and a special type of frequency modulated whistle is called a signature whistle and that really is an individual name to a dolphin. We’ve known this for decades, this is actually old work that’s been verified across multiple species. So this is a tonal whistle. It’s often within human hearing and which is great for recording and it’s frequency modulated and tonal. So it’s relatively easy for us when we look at our spectrogram, the visual representation of that sound, we can pretty much equate what contours look like each other. That’s actually been a primary tool for signature whistle research. Now these are social sounds, whistles seem to be social sounds, and there are a variety of other whistles that aren’t signature whistles. And they’re used in long distance communication, so they travel far. Dolphins also make clicks which are echolocation or sonar clicks. These are fairly close proximity sounds, maybe a half-a-mile distant, and they’re primarily used for navigation and hunting. So this is like we would use sonar on our boat. They’re broadband so they have a high frequency component but they’re really used for navigation and hunting, for example. Then we have the third sound called burst pulse sounds. And these are packets of clicks just like the sonar clicks, only they’re packets of information and they have different repetition rates. So if you can imagine a buzz is a tight packet of clicks. So they are also close proximity sounds because they’re basically clicks. And these are social sounds that you would hear during fighting, mating, that sort of thing. Now, we’ve studied whistles for decades, burst pulse sounds are the most frequently used sounds in dolphin communication but the least studied. Because they’re hard to categorize. And this is why the computer technology now is so critical for us because that technology can help us start categorizing those sounds and looking at some of their social interactions in a way we haven’t been able to do.
RS: Long distance?
DH: So whistles can travel, at least in our study area, three to five miles, for example. So you could hear your friends calling your name that far away. This is not true of the other signals. They’re more of a half a mile.
RS: Traveling through water is a reason you can hear it?
DH: Correct, yes. It’s-- it doesn’t-- so a whistle doesn’t dissipate as easily as a click or a burst pulse sound, so a frequency modulated sound just carries more energy. In addition, any whistle has harmonics which are high frequency mathematical generations from the base whistle. (NOISE) And those harmonics-- and those harmonics actually, we think, give localization information to the dolphins. So when a dolphin is making a sound, they make very directional sounds. So if you’re head on with a dolphin you’re getting the whole signal. And you’re getting all these little harmonics above the whistle. As soon as that dolphin turns, if you’re behind them you’re going to lose some of those higher frequency harmonics. So it gives information to the group what that dolphin in the lead for example, where he, he or she is going. So it becomes kind of a passive listening localization skill that they can use like an acoustic beacon, it’s called, in theory. So they can adjust where they’re going relative to the group.
RS: How do you know the purpose of the sounds?
DH: So a whistle is a frequency modulated sound, like you would hear me whistle like, (WHISTLE), right. So it travels far, it’s modulated, that’s why it travels far. And it’s correlated with social behaviors, specifically moms and calves and individual recognition. So you can actually hear that if you were in the water, for example, with the dolphins, you’d hear a lot of that. The other sounds are broadband and they’re short in time, so whistle could be a second long, a broadband click is short and time like you know milliseconds, if that. And it spans a high frequency so you wouldn’t hear all the high frequency stuff, only your high, your high frequency recording would capture that on the computer. You would hear the bottom part of it, for example, and it would sound like, you know, you would hear that click, it would be repetition of clicks, like little pings basically. And that can be at different speeds, right. And then a burst pulse sound there’s also a broadband sound, can span up to over 10 times our hearing, for example. It’s also short in time, like a regular click, only it’s a packet of clicks. So it takes on a different aural sound for us to hear, but it’s basically a packaged of clicks, you would hear it, it would, it takes on names like squawks and squeaks. It’s just the way humans describe it, but if you measure it, it’s a bunch of these tiny little clicks packaged together. And you know, they’re, again, the burst pulses are a mystery, we don’t know how information is encoded in a burst pulse sound. This is part of the mystery of their communication system. Like whistles we know that the contour or the numbers of loops of whistles determines the individual, for example, like a signature whistle. You know, one dolphin might be two loops with a certain frequency range. Another dolphin might have three loops in a certain frequency range. The burst pulses, again, we don’t know how the information is encoded and what the dolphins are detecting from it to a certain extent, yet we know they use it for social purposes. So, you know, like the Navy or any group would use underwater transmission information, you can encode things on a carrier wave, you know secret signals, all that stuff. So again, we just don’t know what the dolphins are doing with all that sound. So that is really part of the mystery.
RS: Social refers to what?
DH: A social interaction is you know, interaction between individuals, any kind of play, fighting courtship, I mean in general versus hunting and just navigating.
RS: Ultrasonic range and technology?
DH: Yeah we’ve known for decades dolphins had ultrasounds, right. We’ve known that from a lot of work. Historically, we just haven’t been able to capture it in the water until recently with the recent equipment. So for example, you know, I look at some of my old recordings and I might be able to see all the whistles and maybe not their harmonics which are ultrasonic. But if I look at a burst pulse or a click, I see the bottom part of it within my hearing range, and I know there’s probably information up there but I couldn’t capture it with the existing technology at that time. Now when we take our high frequency stuff in the water, we still can hear it but the computer later when we analyze it will show us that that sound went way up to two hundred kilohertz, you know, ten times what we would normally see or hear. But we’re depending on the computer for that translation.
RS: Too early to understand what that high frequency means?
DH: Well, high frequency in itself isn’t really an interpretation issue. I mean like I was saying about the harmonics high frequency because it dissipates quicker than the lower frequencies, can give you directional information or give a dolphin directional information. What I was suggesting with the burst pulses is that because their sounds are so broadband and there’s so much, there’s so many places to put information in that higher area, that they could be potentially encoding information up there and we haven’t, not only had we not recorded it adequately, but interpreting is another thing. So again, yay AI technology, being able to help us categorize these types of sounds and how they’re different in those high frequencies.
RS: Do dolphins have syntax and semantics as we understand it?
DH: Syntax and semantics are things we’re trying to look at with some of our algorithms and programs. Again, we know they can comprehend semantics and syntax from captive studies, from giving them artificial languages, we are not aware that they have that in their natural system yet, although, at least our preliminary work suggests that they definitely have some structure and order to their sounds. So whether we interpret that as semantics or syntax we don’t know yet.
RS: Is there order or pattern?
DH: We are exploring if there’s order or pattern in their sound. We definitely know they have sound types for certain behaviors. What we want to know is when they’re eating fish on the bottom and they’re making sounds, are those sounds just for hunting the fish or are they talking about what they had for dinner last night. This is the big thing with language, right. You’re not just making a sound that represents hunting a fish or come on over here there’s good fish. It’s about talking with time displacement like, what did you have for dinner last night. It’d be like someone recording us at the dinner table. Are we’re talking about the super eating. Are we talking about what we learned at school. You know, big difference, right. One is real time context, the other is time displacement of information and that’s a key component of language.
RS: Mimicking sounds?
DH: Dolphins are masters at mimicry, especially acoustic, and some postural mimicry. And the reason why mimicry is important, because not many species do vocal mimicry and very few species have the ability to learn vocally. And when you’re mimicking a sound, it’s a way of saying I’m aware of what you just did acoustically. It’s kind of a way in, I think, for a lot of species. But it’s a way a lot of dolphins learn sounds it looks like, and maybe some other species as well.
RS: Toys, why are they important?
DH: So dolphins have a lot of natural toys in the ocean and because they have these long developmental periods as juveniles, part of the process for them is learning how to play, learning how to play by the rules, and being reprimanded if they’re not playing by the rules, right. This is part of social learning and any social mammal. So dolphins will play games with sargassum, which is a toy, you know, seaweed in the water. They’ll drop it to each other and they have an etiquette. If a dolphin is dragging a piece of sargassum on its fluke, another dolphin better not pull it off. It needs to be dropped off by the dolphin. Otherwise that’s bad etiquette. That’s one thing we’ve learned too. So when the dolphins invite us into their game, which they do sometimes and we have a sargassum exchange, you know, we try to play by their rules. Of course we’re less adept at it and they kind of laugh at us, probably, is my guess. But, you know, it’s a way of social bonding, really. It’s about spending time, you know, hanging out with another species and goofing off really. I mean the idea that they invite you into a game. I mean does any other wild animal do that? You know, I don’t know. It’s pretty interesting. You know, sometimes we take in our own toys.
RS: Dolphins ask humans to engage in their play?
DH: Dolphins actually solicit us to engage in their play. You know, they like to have fun. They’re probably curious about us. Again, they probably-- we’re probably like little ignorant little calves to them, like we don’t know how to do the game, we’re not that good at it because we can’t swim that fast. I mean they’ll do-- it’s really funny. They’ll do things like, they’ll drop a piece of sargassum, and then the game is who can get it first, right. So the awkward human will dive down you know 10 feet and just as you’re about to grab it they’ll zoom in and grab it in front of you, like that’s just what they do, right. So they’re, I guess they like to show off their prowess in the water or something, but, I think they just have fun doing it.
RS: What does that feel like for you?
DH: Well it’s fun. And again, like you, sometimes you just kind of shed the species barrier and you’re like OK we’re all just playing a game. Actually, there was one really funny, oh my gosh, a really funny event that happened with my colleague, Adam Pack, from the Hawaii lab, who’s worked with me extensively. We were out with the dolphins one time and it was really deep for us. Although we’re pretty good free divers. And the dolphins were on the bottom with a sea cucumber which is a kind of a gelatinous organism. And they were pushing it around like a little rugby ball or something. And so Adam and I decided let’s just go down and get in the game. So we dove down and we could grab the thing where the Dolphins can’t, well they could grab it with their mouth but they didn’t. So we would bring it up to the water column and drop it and bounce it and it was, and then we’d be at the bottom and we just, normally we don’t touch the animals, but we just said we’re gonna just get in there and tussle with them and bump them and to get the toy. And it was really like this amazing moment of, we’re in the game, they let us in the game and we’re just trying to be a dolphin and trying to get the sea cucumber. It was really funny. It was a-- you know, yeah, to be let in by a species it’s, you know, it’s pretty cool.
RS: Interspecies play?
DH: Yeah, it’s a way in, right.
RS: Similar to a movie?
DH: Well, you know, the idea of looking at non-human communication as an analog for ET is, you know, probably one way to go. I mean we have this natural lab on the planet here. We have all these species that are communicating not only with each other but might have the potential to communicate with us. You know, it’s pretty interesting, I think it’s very interesting scientifically, like, what would it take to break through a species barrier. You know, is there enough similarity or some overlap where you could communicate with another species and really interact. I mean you know, it’s hard enough with a human culture, right. I mean anthropologists have had this issue for decades and decades of how do you translate another human culture that’s perhaps a little different and you don’t know the language and you don’t know the rituals. So it’s not so far-fetched to think that we’ll learn a lot through looking at other species.
RS: How do you interpret the signals without saying it’s a language?
DH: Our first step for the dolphin communication work, is, again, we use the framework of here’s the culture, here’s the society, this is what we know about the individuals. Then we have the data, we have acoustic data, we have body postures, we have a sense of their signals. We’re hoping with the new technology, the AI and algorithm work that we do with the Georgia Tech group and our colleague Daniel in Germany, will help us categorize the sounds enough to start looking at if there’s order and structure. Now, if we find some order and structure and rules which it looks like we are already finding some, then the question becomes how do you then really call it a language. I mean animals and humans could still have order to their communication, but it might not be what we call language. So the next level is to add metadata to it and by metadata, I mean things like the context. So, say I have a stream of sound and on the video I have a mother chasing a calf, because a calf is out of control, she’s disciplining him or her. So I have a stream of sound that goes with that. Now I have another stream of sound that’s similar, but the video and the data shows me that this is a male chasing a female for courtship, not a mother chasing a calf for discipline. So now I have an overlay of the behavioral context of what’s going on. So that is a starting point for overlaying and trying to interpret, you know, a male chasing a female makes this kind of sound with this rule, you know, rules of certain sound types and sequence. The ultimate, I mean the biggest challenge really is the next level, which is really interpreting the meaning and you might only be able to do that with playback and asking the animals themselves. That’s the bigger challenge. So we might, all our data might suggest oh there’s rules and there’s order and everything’s different, and we see they’re exchanging signals in certain complicated ways that suggest language just from structure. But the interpretation, the meaning, like an anthropologist might go in and interact with the human culture to really suss out what the real interpretation is, right. That’s going to be the real holy grail if we can do that. And that could either be done with maybe playing back sounds or maybe the way we already interact with them in certain technologies that might, we might be able to test what those sounds mean. So yeah, that’s in the future.
RS: Are you able to interpret these sounds in real time?
DH: Real time processing, uh, no. The big answer is no. We can’t really interpret real time, yet. Now the chat system, which we haven’t really talked about yet, so the chat system is really designed to be an interactive system. What we've just been talking about all the decoding is really passive observation, gathering data. So the chat system is an underwater computer technology that is designed to output sounds and input sounds, a very simple system, very simple, you know, for sounds. That the computer is designed to interpret to the swimmer in the water in real time, just so that we know, did the dolphin mimic that artificially synthesized sound that we just played. So it’s really harder than you think. We’ve been working at it so hard and between computer and amplifiers and speakers, that has been a big challenge. The goal with the system really was to see if we could design a mutual language, because what are the things, so if we look at what nature does, other species. So what do they do when they interact, and they do two things. One, like different bird species might listen to each other’s alarm calls and just learn passively that when that species makes an alarm call, this predators coming and so they have the advantage of early warning, right? So they passively monitor and that’s kind of what we’re doing with the dolphins, we’re monitoring sounds and trying to figure them out. The other thing that happens in nature, at least with some species, is it might be just too complicated to learn each other’s communication systems, so they develop a mutual system of shared calls. For example, orca pods do this in the Pacific Northwest. They-- they would live in a really strict pod structure, but when they get together they have a small repertoire of shared calls that they only use when they’re together. And we know there’s another dolphin species, two dolphin species that do this too. So the idea is, can we crack their own language if they have it, the other way to go about it is to develop a mutual language, so can you talk about sargassum together in a way or can you label a toy they like to play with. I mean it’s a beginning. It’s actually what humans have done in their own cross-cultural interaction sometimes. In World War II, I think that happened. Soldiers were, you know, had gotten married or had a relationship with another culture where they didn’t speak the same language and so they, you design your own language, right. So we’ve been trying to approach it from these two different aspects. You know, one is pretty high risk and tricky and really hard with wild animals. You know, it’s hard to spend enough time with wild animals and expose them to a new language to really get work done. I mean, we're in the best situation in the world and it's still challenging. Or we do the passive recording, decoding that we do just by observing and recording. So there are two kinds of different approaches. Now the hope would be, if we crack their code as I say sometimes, and figure out what they’re doing with each other, what they’re saying, we couldn’t in some sense put their natural sequences of sounds in our, to a system where we can actually project those sequences and then test it out in the water. So that might be the next step of playing back any significant sequences of sound to test what they really mean.
RS: You are thinking about having a dialogue with a dolphin?
DH: Yes, we are thinking of having a dialogue. It’s with the dolphins. It’s really a matter of the level of dialogue, you know. And-- dialoguing to test out, maybe a question. I mean it’s going to be challenging. But I mean, think about it, if somebody recorded some of your English words and they played a sequence back to you like, hello there. I mean it would mean something to you, right. So we’re hoping maybe we can get those regular contextual coded sequences that might mean something like, hey, there’s a cool fish under the sand here. And see what the dolphins do. I mean you know you could potentially test some things that way.
RS: What if you send the wrong signal?
If we say the wrong signal then it’s a bad thing. And that’s exactly why I haven’t done playback for 35 years. In fact, one of the standard ways of testing a signal is playback, right, you play it back to see what the animal does. So in 1991, I had been out there what, six years, and I had a pretty good catalogue of their signature whistles right. All these individual dolphins. And so I did, I put it underwater speaker in the water and then I had, and I was in the water observing and I had my assistant, ok, let’s playback. Katie’s whistle I think it was. So we played Katie’s signature whistle under the water and all of a sudden some of Katie’s friends showed up at the boat. So I knew who they were and I knew we had their signature whistles on the computer, so we played her friends whistles and then more friends showed up. So then, again, Stubby, I guess he’s the star here. So Stubby shows up, he’s a male, he’s a frequent, dominant male. So I played, I had them play Stubby signature whistle. Well, apparently that was not cool. So Stubby came up to me and gave me a little open mouth, which is kind of an aggressive thing, and then he went to the speaker and he did a little open mouth with the speaker and then he swam off. And I’m like ok, that’s it. We don’t know the rules. I don’t know what, I mean I know I played his whistle, but I don’t know if it was appropriate to play his whistle, right. And I haven’t done that kind of playback since, because I think you could say the wrong thing. You know, you could, you know, upset them, you know, piss them off, you know, whatever. Why would you want to do that before you knew what the signals meant. So I am not a big believer in playback in this kind of situation.
RS: No idea of the meaning being sent back out?
DH: Exactly. Or you don’t know the etiquette, you don’t know the meaning and you don’t know the etiquette. So, you know, my plan is to maybe try to figure that out first and then carefully maybe play it back.
RS: CHAT?
DH: So CHAT is an acronym for Cetacean Hearing and Augmentation Telemetry. You’ve got to have a cool acronym, right.
RS: It’s wearable?
DH: So CHAT is an underwater wearable computer system that allows you to output sounds and these, in our case, pre-programmed sounds that we’ve created to label objects. Or we’ve given ourselves names using whistles. So Denise has a signature whistle, right. So I can play my name in dolphin whistle terms. And then we have some of the Dolphins whistles in the system. So if I’m interacting with Caro or Little Gash, I can play their whistle just to say hi, because that’s how they greet each other, right. They say their signature whistles or they call each other over. And then the original version of CHAT also has a bone conducting headset that the researcher wears and that’s where the computer gives the researcher feedback. So if I played a whistle, the computer says, tells me sargassum. So I just played the acoustic label for sargassum, sound goes out. And if anybody mimics it, the dolphins, or if I have a second researcher with a second CHAT system in the box, they could play that sound and I would hear it, in effect that someone mimicked my little whistle I just put out. And the idea with the CHAT and this is the only thing that’s worked with interspecies work in the lab, is that you for social species, you have to model what the communication system is. So one of the ways we’ve worked with CHAT in the water is to have two researchers with two chat systems and we’re just asking for toys from each other using the system. The dolphins are hanging out there watching and the idea is like, they’re seeing oh, if I make this whistle I can get this toy, for example. So it’s much easier for a species to learn the system if you model it. So we’ve learned that with bird work and the primate work. So that’s the idea. Our challenge in the wild in addition to the technology challenge is to get enough time with the same individual dolphins to expose them to the system enough to start, you know it’s one thing if they mimic a whistle, it’s another thing if they understand what the whistle gives them if they make it. So that’s the big challenge with CHAT.
RS: Dolphins feel the sound?
DH: So sound goes through water about the same way it goes through soft tissue, it has the tissue has the same acoustic impedance as water. So sound would go through like our skin or the dolphin skin until it hits air mass or bone. So it means you can feel sound. What that probably means for the Dolphins is that they can project a sound, they can tickle their friend maybe with sound. They could put out a very strong sound which we know they have really intense sounds that could hurt if they wanted to. They could potentially hurt another dolphin. So it’s another way to sort of get a signal, extra social signal in some ways. I mean I’ve felt the sound, you can feel their sound underwater as a human, if they’re pointing at you, they can buzz you, or-- so...
RS: The sound can hurt another dolphin?
DH: We’re pretty sure their sound could hurt another dolphin. It’s kind of like a weapon underwater because water is so dense, the molecules are denser than air, right. That’s why sound travels really far underwater. And if you measure a dolphin’s sound projection, I think we’ve measured it at say 180 decibels, maybe even a little louder, which is the equivalent of a blasting cap. So in some sense you could consider it a weapon when they’re head to head which is very mammalian aggressive posture, right. But potentially you’re pointing a loaded weapon at another dolphin. I mean hopefully the society doesn’t encourage hurting each other, right, but maybe it’s a way to get someone to back down or in aggression. You have signals, you know, like things that can hurt, whether it’s a slap, or in this case a sound. So it’s potentially used that way. We don’t know for sure but it has that potential.
RS: Templeton World Charity Foundation?
DH: Our grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation, under the diverse intelligence program, is really fantastic. It’s a three year grant and we’re using it to be really focused to figure out the language question. So I’m working primarily with scientists in Germany, who I work with at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, as a PhD student. And he took a certain amount of our dolphin data and analyzed it and tried to develop some programs that would help us categorize sounds and then look for these higher level patterns. So we are focused on exercising our dolphin data set with all these different programs he’s designed to try to get a real program that will show us order, structure, sequences, and rules. Then what we’re going to do and we’re pretty close to actually having that ready, we’re going to recruit some data sets from other researchers, probably primarily dolphins and whales, because the program’s kind of designed around acoustic signals, and try to exercise their data sets and see if we can pull out structure and rules from their data, so we can really create a tool for other researchers not just us. I mean of course we want to know what the dolphins are doing. But the idea is if you could really start looking at all these different species and have a pretty friendly user tool, I mean every scientist has their own data set from a species, right, that would probably be fantastic to look at, but there’s no consistent tool. I mean they’re being created now, there are some groups that have started trying to do that, but we’re going to use our dolphin data first to get categories of sounds, look for sequences, try to hone the algorithms so that they’re really good, and produce a real product that shows a structure and grammar if it exists. t’s interesting the genetic world did this in the early years, they had a program called Blast. And what really was amazing is that once this program got online for other genetic researchers to use, it changed everything, because all these creatures were now able to look at all the different amino acid patterns and structures and the rules. And that’s how you really enhance a field, is to create a big tool that is consistent across researchers. So you can start asking questions about not only your bat communication but are there any universals between how dolphins communicate and how bats communicate and even how humans communicate. So the grant is fantastic. You know it’s the diverse intelligence program that Templeton has is cutting edge, it’s high risk and high reward. And it’s really allowing work to be done that’s not considered super traditional and conservative. It’s saying let’s take a look at all these species and all these aspects of intelligence and consciousness et cetera, but really do it scientifically, right, and focus on that question. So it’s really fantastic. We’re in the early stages of it but we’re excited to be doing it.
RS: The future?
DH: I’d like to think that the tools that we’re trying to develop will in fact be utilized by other research and data sets and that it can cross some of those non-human boundaries with other species. I guess we’re focusing on acoustic species right now, but there’s no reason why you couldn’t look at other communication signals like light or touch in some way to see if they could cross the species boundaries. You know, maybe there’s some translation there that we could see down the road. So yes, we definitely hope that’s possible.
RS: Life elsewhere in the universe, this potentially helps?
DH: Well I like to think that we will find life out there and we’ll probably find the whole array of life, right, probably simple microscopic to more complicated, but it’ll probably be very important to make an assessment quickly about what’s the lifeform, how complicated is it, does it want to interact and communicate. I mean it would be very cool to have these tools, even when you’re remotely exploring an exoplanet, you know, somewhere else, to just say hey, maybe this is a species that is intelligent and we can understand it. I mean that’s kind of a remote analysis issue. Now, in a first contact situation, you know, like us with the dolphins for example. It’s a whole different dynamic because it’s real time and hopefully we will learn some things from that. So, you know, this kind of tool combined with information theory and other tools scientists are developing could really tell us quickly the whole picture of what is that species or that community of species, what’s going on there and can we interact, do we want to interact and if so, how. So I think it would be protection on our end, on their end, and gosh, you know, we’d learn a lot about biology and that process.
RS: Biggest challenges that lie ahead?
Honestly I think one of the big challenges is going to be breaking through the human paradigm of our superiority and our uniqueness in having language. You know, our plan is to try to exercise our tools, also with human language, to show that hey, you know, this shows that humans have language to a certain extent, to give it a little more structure around what’s really potential with non-humans. You know and I think continuing to, to develop the algorithms and the tools is going to be critical. I mean what we have now is fantastic and we’re excited but five years from now, gosh, I mean who knows what we’ll have. And I think continuing to apply and to be willing to reassess what you’ve done and maybe look at it in a whole new way, will be, you know, it’s always challenging to a senior scientist, right. Like we live in our own little paradigms in our work, to be able to say you know what maybe we were wrong about this approach. Let’s take a new approach. So I think that’s going to be honestly one of our biggest challenges, but hopefully we’re up for it and hopefully there are graduate students out there who will continue the journey, you know.
RS: Biggest surprises?
DH: Some of the biggest surprises biologically has been the observation of how intricate and intimate the relationship between the two dolphin species is. What does it take to live in the same area as two species and get along or adjust your behavior accordingly. I think it's also surprising to see how important the individual is in the society. How it’s really clear that the dolphin society incorporates and encourages individuality and unique roles. So for example, you could have a female who maybe she was unlucky had giving birth but boy she’s the super aunt and she’s like taking the kids on and babysitting and so there’s like a role for everybody. Which is kind of neat. And... what was the third thing...
[So the third thing that’s been really surprising is how continually curious the dolphins are about us. So sometimes there’s times when, like this old wise dolphin is just hanging out with you in the water, looking in your eyes, floating there for 10 minutes. And you just go, what can be so interesting to a wild dolphin about a human that lets them take that time to just hang out and like, what are they thinking. You know, so you kind of go, I mean that’s one reason I really wanted to try to develop some of the two way technology because like, I just sense that they’re so curious, like they want to be able to say more and do more, as we do, right. You know I think curiosity seeks curiosity and intelligence seeks intelligence and I just think there’s so much going on in there that, you know, until we have a tool where they can express that, and that’s our challenge, right. I mean they express whatever to each other. If we want to understand it we have to figure out a way in, you know whether that’s to our pets or the wild dolphins or whoever, I just think it’d be fantastic to have that tool to understand these other minds on the planet, period.
RS: What keeps your passion going?
DH: What keeps my interest and passion going is the, I guess the belief that there’s more to be discovered and that they very possibly have a language. And I just want to know what that is and what they’re saying to each other and what they’re thinking. And that keeps me going. And the idea that we could have a future where we have tools to help us do that.