Ep. 11 – Diana Reiss on recognizing the dolphins in the mirror

“[T]here are places in the world where the spoken word doesn’t travel very far,” Dr. Diana Reiss says. “In these areas, there are people who convert their spoken words into whistle languages. They whistle the prosody, or the intonation, of the spoken language… You can look at a whistle sequence that looks like a dolphin whistle or a bird whistle, and it’s actually a human sentence that is communicating enough that another could decode it. When we look at whistles of birds or dolphins, they look simple and we don’t think about what kind of information might be in there.”

For thousands of years, humans have been enthralled with dolphins. In Ancient Greece, dolphins were considered closer to the gods than any other creature, viewed as half divine messengers between men and gods. To kill a dolphin was an offense punishable by death. The second century Greco-Roman poet Oppian wrote, “Diviner than the Dolphin is nothing yet created for indeed they were aforetime men and lived in cities along with mortals.” Reverence for these creatures was not limited to the Greeks. There are caves in the French Pyrenees with Ice Age era dolphin engravings. Stories about dolphins are part of the Australian Aborigines’ understanding of the world known as “Dreamtime.” To the Maori of New Zealand, dolphins have long been seen as water spirits who can carry messages from island to island in times of need.

“I always felt that just putting yourself aside for a moment and just seeing what you can see, hearing what you can hear, you’ll see patterns or hear patterns emerge,” Reiss says. “And that can inform what you do and the kind of questions you ask. In that way, I think we can partner with animals. My best ideas about animals come from the animals themselves.”

We are separated by 95 million years of evolution, and yet we intuitively feel a striking kinship and admiration for these intelligent creatures. Of course, mythologies like these, as our guest has pointed out, are not verified or scientific truths. “But,” she writes, “mythologies reach a different, deeper kind of truth, one that relies on resonance, not on demonstrable evidence. Mythologies do not account for the origin of people or dolphins in the way that scientific theories do, but mythologies tell us something about who we believe ourselves to be, our values and our place in the world in relation to all the other creatures of nature.”

Dr. Diana Reiss has spent decades in search of truths about dolphin intelligence and human-dolphin relations. She is a Professor of Psychology at Hunter College in New York City and an internationally renowned marine mammal researcher. With colleagues, she was the first to demonstrate that dolphins can recognize themselves in mirrors, a capability once thought to be unique to humans. She taught dolphins how to use underwater interactive keyboards, has observed dolphins creating their own toys, and has studied their vocal behavior and repertoires.

Dr. Reiss is also an advocate for protecting the animals she studies. She has worked to rehabilitate and rescue stranded marine mammals, including the famous Humphrey the Whale who got stuck in San Francisco Bay, was one of the key scientists involved in the campaign to protect dolphins from being killed by tuna nets that resulted in the labelling of “dolphin safe” tuna, and worked as scientific advisor to the 2010 Academy Award-winning documentary film, “The Cove,”which portrays mass dolphin kills and hunting  practices in Japan. Dr. Reiss’ work has published in many scientific journals and featured on prominent television programs including National Geographic, the BBC and the Today Show. She is also the author of a book, The Dolphin in the Mirror: Exploring Dolphin Minds and Saving Dolphin Lives.

Recommendations:

“The Cove” – a documentary film directed by Louie Psihoyos

Stories of Your Life by Ted Chiang and the scientific fiction drama “Arrival,” which is based on Chiang’s work

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