In this episode of 'Dolphins: Breaking the Code,' ChangingSeasTV explores the intricate world of dolphin communication and behavior, primarily focusing on the research done by Dr. Denise Herzing and her team in the Bahamas. The documentary delves into the techniques used to study Atlantic spotted dolphins, including photo identification, sound analysis, and interactive technology like underwater computers to explore two-way communication. The challenges of such intricate research are highlighted, including environmental and technological hurdles. Dr. Herzing's dedication and innovative methods aim to bridge the gap between humans and dolphins, offering a glimpse into the potential for interspecies communication.
Highlights
Discover how Dr. Denise Herzing dedicates her life to understanding dolphin communication. 🐬
Learn about the innovative tools like underwater computers used to interact with dolphins. 💻
Dolphins exhibit complex behaviors and a rich array of vocalizations. 📣
Explore how environmental factors affect dolphin movement and study. 🌍
Witness the exciting possibilities of bridging communication between humans and dolphins. 🌟
Key Takeaways
Dr. Denise Herzing has spent decades studying dolphins, aiming to decode their communication. 📚
The research includes understanding dolphin society, language, and using technology to interact with them. 🤖
Dolphins have complex vocalizations which the research team is attempting to decode and understand. 🐬
Innovative tools such as underwater computers are being used to facilitate two-way communication with dolphins. 💻
Environmental changes can impact dolphin behavior and migration, complicating long-term studies. 🌊
Overview
Dive into the clear waters of the Bahamas with the ChangingSeasTV episode 'Dolphins: Breaking the Code,' where science meets the intriguing domain of dolphin communication. At the helm of this exploration is Dr. Denise Herzing, whose life's work revolves around understanding the social structure and communication of wild dolphins. Her work is not just about observation but involves engaging dolphins in two-way dialogues, utilizing advanced technology including the interactive CHAT system.
The documentary beautifully showcases the intricacies and challenges of studying dolphins in their natural habitat. Dolphins, renowned for their intelligence, present a unique case for studying non-human communication. The research involves identifying individual dolphins, documenting their behavior, and critically, their vocalizations, which can offer insights into possible dolphin 'language.' Innovative technologies combined with years of patient observation aim to understand these mysteries.
Environmental changes and technological advancements play a crucial role in dolphin research. The film highlights how shifts in the dolphins' habitat can influence where and how they can be studied. Meanwhile, advancements in technology, such as those used in the CHAT project, are inching researchers closer to breaching the communication barrier between species. Dr. Herzing's ambition to decode the language of dolphins promises new understanding and appreciation of these magnificent creatures.
Chapters
00:00 - 01:00: Introduction to Dolphin Research The chapter introduces the unique setting of the Bahamas, where the clear, shallow waters offer an exceptional opportunity for human interaction with dolphins in their natural habitat. It highlights the importance of this location as a research epicenter for understanding the life and behaviors of wild dolphins. The Bahamas is distinguished not only for its beauty but for the crucial insights it provides into dolphin life, making it a significant area for aficionados of marine life, including sport fishermen and scuba divers.
01:00 - 02:30: Understanding Dolphin Society and Communication The chapter highlights the dedication of Dr. Denise Herzing, Research Director and Founder of The Wild Dolphin Project, in studying dolphin society and communication. Herzing has spent her career immersed in the dolphins’ world, facing numerous challenges such as unpredictable weather, the vast ocean, and tracking dolphins that can move 20-30 miles in a day. The chapter emphasizes the importance of consistent interaction with individual dolphins to truly understand their society and communication patterns.
02:30 - 04:30: Technological Advancements in Dolphin Research Challenging aspects of interacting with dolphins are highlighted, emphasizing the privilege researchers feel when dolphins allow human interaction. This chapter details Denise's commitment to documenting dolphin behavior through long-term observation and photo identification. The focus is on Atlantic spotted dolphins and includes insights into their behavior across generations.
04:30 - 06:00: Challenges in Dolphin Research and Observation The chapter discusses the intricacies and challenges involved in researching and observing dolphins. The group focuses on a small population of about a hundred individual dolphins, which allows for repeated and consistent observations. The main goal is to gain a better understanding of dolphin society and their communication methods, both individually and as a group. The chapter highlights the complexity of dolphin intelligence, noting that while factors such as future planning, problem-solving, and abstract thinking are considered characteristics of higher intelligence, language often appears as a final and critical aspect to explore.
06:00 - 08:30: Innovative Efforts in Dolphin Communication This chapter delves into the intriguing field of dolphin communication and the efforts to understand their potential linguistic capabilities. It emphasizes that while dolphins can grasp concepts like word order and understanding within an artificial language, it isn't certain they possess a similar system in their natural communication. The narrative not only highlights the scientific pursuit involved but also touches upon the personal, affectionate bonds formed between the researcher and dolphins, comparing them to a family dynamic where the creatures are likened to children—albeit without the responsibilities of higher education.
08:30 - 10:00: Future of Dolphin Communication and Research This chapter explores the potential advances in dolphin communication and research, discussing both the economic benefits and the scientific insights that can be gained from studying wild dolphins. It raises the question of whether humans can bridge the gap of understanding between our species and dolphins, potentially unlocking new realms of interspecies communication.
Dolphins: Breaking the Code - Full Episode Transcription
00:00 - 00:30 The shallow, gin-clear waters of the Bahamas
are a tropical paradise - a favorite spot for sport fishermen and scuba divers alike. These waters are also one of the few areas
in the world where humans can regularly spend time with dolphins underwater. This is where we get the information about
what the life of a wild dolphin is really
00:30 - 01:00 about. The Wild Dolphin Project’s Research Director
and Founder Dr. Denise Herzing has dedicated her career to immersing herself in the dolphins’
world. In the wild, we deal with all sorts of challenges. Number one is weather, if we can't get to
where they live, we can't see them. Number two is finding them, because they might
move 20-30 miles in a day, and it's a big ocean. And then spending regular time with individuals
if you really want to get a sense of their
01:00 - 01:30 society, that's also challenging. We're definitely at the mercy of the dolphins. They’ve got interesting lives without us. They don’t really need to be around us and
interact with us. So, when they allow us in the water to spend
a little time with them, it’s always a great privilege. Through decades of patient observation and
meticulous photo identification, Denise has documented the lives and behaviors of multiple
generations of Atlantic spotted dolphins.
01:30 - 02:00 The group is small, we are dealing with a
hundred animals. So, we can get repeatability in different
observations. I wanted to understand their society, how
they communicate with each other, individually and as a group. We tend to think of higher intelligence involving
things like thinking about the future, planning, problem solving, abstract concepts. Probably the one last thing on the list is
language.
02:00 - 02:30 Dolphins have shown that they can comprehend
in an artificial language, things like word order and understanding. It doesn't mean they have it in their own
system. That still has to be shown - if it exists. This is a story about scientific exploration
–but it is also a story about friendship. The dolphins are like my kids except I don’t
have to send them to college.
02:30 - 03:00 It's cheaper that way. What can mankind learn from wild dolphins? Can we bridge the gap of understanding between
us?
03:00 - 03:30 Major funding for this program was provided
by the Batchelor Foundation, encouraging people to preserve and protect America’s underwater
resources. And by: Diver’s Direct and Ocean Divers;
The Do Unto Others Trust; The Charles N. and Eleanor Knight Leigh Foundation.
03:30 - 04:00 And by the following. A typical summer day on the research vessel
Stenella begins early in the morning, with researchers taking turns searching for dolphins
throughout the day. It's an expensive operation to spend four
months at sea with twelve people trying to
04:00 - 04:30 look for animals. Finding the dolphins can be a challenge, but
when they appear the excitement is tangible. The researchers take photographs of the animals
for identification purposes, and when the conditions are right, they enter the water
to observe and film the dolphins’ sounds and behavior.
04:30 - 05:00 Denise started her research on the little
Bahama Bank in 1985, after having seen footage of the Atlantic spotted dolphins that live
there. And I thought, "wow, I could plant myself
here for twenty years and try to observe these animals underwater." I had seen the primate work and it seemed
to take about 20 years to get a sense of development issues, to watch multiple generations, and
I really wanted to get a sense of the society
05:00 - 05:30 and the culture. For the first five years we anchored the boat
pretty much in an area where the dolphins went through, and we let them come and investigate
us. And we'd slip in the water, take identification
shots with our cameras, try to get a sense of their dolphin etiquette. Then once they got comfortable with us, we
started moving the boat around and following them into areas where they were feeding or
fighting, so we started seeing a lot more behavior once we moved the boat. But, we really wanted to invest in their trust
of us.
05:30 - 06:00 Denise’s patience and non-invasive approach
paid off. By interacting with the animals in their world
and on their terms, the dolphins got comfortable enough around the researchers to display their
natural behaviors. We take video in the water with sound to correlate
sound and behavior. We track individuals with their spot patterns
and typical nicks and cuts on their body.
06:00 - 06:30 So, every season it's really important to
try to get a picture of each individual. Spotted dolphins are actually nice to study,
turns out, because they get spots with age. Spotted dolphins are born without spots and
we call that coloration “two-tone,” because they're kind of grey on the top and white
on the bottom. Then they get all sorts of dark spots on their
belly and we call them speckled. So now they're about four years old. Then at about age nine they start getting
white spots on the top in addition to more
06:30 - 07:00 black spots, we call that "mottled," so that's
a young adult phase. That's about the age the females get pregnant
so they can start having their first calf at about ten. The males develop later, at about 15 they'll
become sexually mature, and now they're really black and white spotted, the spots coalesce,
we call them "fused." They reach physical maturity about 25. But we've had a few individuals that've lived
into their 50s so that's probably the top end of their lifespan.
07:00 - 07:30 It's neat to see their whole history and their
relationships over the decades. In the mid-1990s the researchers also began
collecting fecal samples to better understand how different animals are related, which is
essential in understanding dolphin society. We can extract DNA, and that's the only way
we can really get paternity. Sound and video recordings of the in-water
encounters with the dolphins gives researchers
07:30 - 08:00 an opportunity to put their noises and behaviors
into context. The dolphins make basically three types of
sounds. For example, dolphins make frequency modulated
whistles. Sometimes they are unique to an individual,
and we call those signature whistles, they're like names. But they make little chirps and other little
kinds of upsweeps and down sweeps that probably mean different things to them. And they are not unique to individuals. Then, clicks, those are basically their sonar
that they might use for navigation and hunting,
08:00 - 08:30 for example. Burst pulses are clumps of clicks, those are
very social sounds, very unsteady, they're very broadband. So, there's a lot of high frequency information. Humans are unable to hear the high frequency
sounds, but modern underwater microphones, known as hydrophones, can record and display
them as waveforms on a computer. Each evening on the boat, the science team
logs footage from the day identifying individual
08:30 - 09:00 animals and documenting their behavior. One of the big challenges the scientists face
when analyzing sound and behavior is figuring out which animal made what noise, since humans
have difficulty telling the direction of where sound is coming from underwater. When you're recording dolphins you're just
getting the sounds from a group of dolphins behaving. You cannot always tell who's making a sound.
09:00 - 09:30 To get the real data about how dolphins are
sending signals to each other, you need a localization device. This is where Dr. Matthias Hoffmann-Kuhnt
from the Acoustic Research Laboratory of the Tropical Marine Science Institute at the University
of Singapore comes in. Together with colleagues he developed a special
high frequency video and audio recorder called an “Acoustic Source Position Overlay Device.”
09:30 - 10:00 What we were trying to do is to build a device
that allowed us to have synchronized high frequency audio recording with video, and
then overlay that so that afterwards we could tell this animal was vocalizing, this dolphin
was just clicking or whistling and then this one responded, which is something that for
behavioral studies would be very, very important. There's a lot of different behavioral situations
where you might want to ask the question, "does the mother make a whistle to get the
calf back over to her -- or does the calf
10:00 - 10:30 make the whistle and the mother comes over?" I mean there’s a thousand questions you
could ask with that level of data. And up to now, that wasn't really possible. And so we came up with this device over here
and normally it sits in a pressurized housing, which you see in the back here, so you can
take that snorkeling. You've got three underwater microphones here,
they're high frequency, they’re very, very sensitive, then we have also a camera in here. Having three hydrophones instead of just one
allows a specialized software to triangulate
10:30 - 11:00 the source of the sound in post-processing. The camera and hydrophones are connected to
a computer that can capture all the data and save it on an external hard drive for easy
download later. During dolphin encounters, Matthias joins
Denise in the water with the device to record synchronized video and sound that can later
be compared to her recordings.
11:00 - 11:30 What the program does is for clicks it makes
red squares, and for whistles it makes yellow stars. When the animal clicks and whistles it puts
dots on that particular animal, so we know that this animal was whistling, that's, that's
clear there. So you can go through and score… …the same way. You know, Animal A made this whistle, animal
B…that would be data analysis. I mean, that’s a tool I wanted 30 years
ago, but nobody could build it and it wasn't possible really. Now it's possible.
11:30 - 12:00 From the beginning, Denise had been studying
three groups of dolphins on the Little Bahama Bank each year. These are specific clusters that were related
genetically. So we had a northern, a central, and a southern
cluster. But in 2013 something strange happened… We went out to our field site in May and we
noticed that 50% of our animals were just not around.
12:00 - 12:30 Now, I'd been out here for 28 years, and the
same individuals were resident in this area. So, after about a month of looking we finally
went to the closest adjacent parallel type of sand bank...and there they were. All together --it was like what are you guys
all doing down here? It's like a hundred miles away? The animals had crossed over 30 miles of potentially
dangerous, deep water to re-settle on the Great Bahama Bank near the island of Bimini. So, we had most of the central group and a
few individuals from the north and south,
12:30 - 13:00 move. So, we had kind of anecdotally noticed that
the fish and the squid were kind of not around a lot anymore. So, after thinking about it, we finally got
some oceanographic data. And sure enough, after looking at temperature,
wind, and chlorophyll- which is a proxy for plankton production- in these different areas,
we saw pretty statistically significant drop
13:00 - 13:30 in chlorophyll production on little Bahama
Bank where the dolphins were. Which amounts to probably a big change in
nutrition and the whole cycle of fish. Nowhere else did it drop, just right there. So, our best guess is they moved because the
fish had crashed basically. Now, whether it will change back or not, I
don't know. In 2016, we saw four animals came back and
we were all excited, was like oh! maybe they'll come back if the food comes back!
13:30 - 14:00 That hasn't panned out yet, but we're monitoring
it, and we'll monitor the oceanographic data too. And would be an interesting predictor of-
if the system comes back. This is our southern group--- have you guys
been studying your IDs? Denise has been interested in exploring the
non-human mind since childhood. When I was about 12 years old I used to page
through the Encyclopedia Britannica. And I would always stop at the dolphin and
whale page and wonder what was going on in
14:00 - 14:30 their minds? As time progressed, she was curious about
taking her communication research from passive observation to a more interactive approach. So, in the late nineties, I got pretty interested
in attempting some two-way work with the dolphins, primarily because, the dolphins were showing
us signs that they kind of wanted to go further.
14:30 - 15:00 They would mimic our behavior, they tried
to mimic our sounds in the water. And I thought, wow, wouldn't it be interesting
to give them a tool to see where it could go. But you know, I was pretty cautious, it's
a pretty whacky thing to a lot of people, I think. I queried a lot of colleagues to see could
we do it? And all except one of them said "well you
got a situation where they're curious about you in the wild, you know you could potentially
develop something." So, I actually recruited Adam Pack who came
out from one of the premiere cognitive labs
15:00 - 15:30 for dolphins. Because he had really great ideas, and his
lab had done a lot of neat experiments. In 1997, I was the associate director of the
Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory in Honolulu. And there we were studying dolphin intelligence,
dolphin cognition and all of its facets. One of the things that we were able to show
is that dolphins could appreciate the core attributes of any language that humans have,
and what are those core attributes?
15:30 - 16:00 They're called semantics and syntax. Semantics are the symbols or the words which
make up the language, the vocabular. And syntax are the rules which govern how
those symbols or words can be put together in different orders to create greater meaning. So, for example, we understand in English
that the boy bit the cat, is different than the cat bit the boy. Or a Venetian blind is different than a blind
Venetian. We could ask one of the dolphins to bring
the Frisbee on her right to the basket on
16:00 - 16:30 her left and place it in the basket, or we
could take those same words, mix them up in a different order, and now ask the dolphin
take the basket on her left and put it on top of the Frisbee, on her right. The dolphin understood those the very first
time we gave them, which showed the power of their understanding of language, something
unique in the animal kingdom. This was the first time this had ever been
done with dolphins and it really became world famous.
16:30 - 17:00 When I first met Denise and I came out to
the Wild Dolphin Project, here in the Bahamas, it was easy to see that there were many things
that we could name, that we could talk about with the dolphins, and that we could finally
move into production, and do it in a unique way. Before the late 1990s a few attempts were
made by other researchers to conduct two-way communication work with dolphins in captivity.
17:00 - 17:30 But the technology that existed at the time
limited how far the communication system could be taken. Early on, Denise and her team used a rudimentary
underwater keyboard to interact with the dolphins. After about four years we thought well, we
should probably wait till there's better technology because we're not going to go very far with
this. So, in 2010 I met a group of computer scientists
up at Georgia Tech, Thad Starner's group. And it turns out he builds wearable computers.
17:30 - 18:00 And so, it was like, well, I need a wearable
underwater computer. So he grabbed the job and put some of his
students on it. This is our CHAT box, CHAT stands for Cetacean
Hearing and Augmented Telemetry, and basically what it is, is a system of computers and amplifiers
inside this aluminum casing. The computer is programmed with a number of
artificially-created whistles for different
18:00 - 18:30 toys the dolphins might like to play with. Dolphins have a lot of natural toys, sargassum,
seagrass, sea cucumbers, so we've been trying to label as many of those natural toys as
we can. We use a scarf primarily because they like
to drag things and they're very good at it - that's what they do with sargassum. And it's something they have to ask us for
- they can't go down to the local dolphin boutique and buy a scarf. So it kind of becomes, "ohh I need the human
to get a scarf, so maybe I'll be able to communicate
18:30 - 19:00 that word." So the way it works is, we're in the water,
I can push a sound, for example: this is the whistle for scarf, this headset just said
scarf in English, so I know that's the sound I played. Now if the dolphins decide to mimic this whistle,
they'll mimic it, the computer will recognize it in pretty close to real time and I’ll
hear the word scarf in my headset. Dolphins when they greet each other use signature
whistles, so we thought it would be pretty
19:00 - 19:30 cool to give ourselves a name. So that's my name, Denise. We also have some of their signature whistles
in the computer. That's Brat he's one of the players in the
system, so we can greet him with his own name. So, we thought that would be a start to uh-
trying to communicate with the dolphins. The idea is to empower the dolphins to communicate
back. I wanted a tool where they could access us
and ask us to do things, request things from
19:30 - 20:00 us. You have a couple researchers in the water
who are both wearing these underwater computers. And you're actually modeling the communication
system for the dolphins. It really requires not only good technology,
but regular extended time with the same individual dolphins, so that they get exposed to the
system and start understanding the functionality
20:00 - 20:30 of it. I mean it's one thing to mimic a whistle,
it's another thing to understand what the whistle can get you. The team discovered that juvenile dolphins
showed the most interest in the interaction. This is an age that they're kind of away from
mom, they're not full adult, responsible dolphins yet. So, they have a lot of play time. And so we have about a four-year window with
individuals when they're in that age. Research assistants from Georgia Tech join
the scientists at sea to fine-tune and trouble-shoot
20:30 - 21:00 the CHAT boxes that are built by students
at the university. Making new interface devices that are user
friendly for marine biologists, is kind of challenging from the beginning, so all of
our hardware is custom designed. They use 3D printers much of the time, we
also have machine shops in Georgia Tech so they're able to mill the aluminum housings
and then laser cut the other plastic parts.
21:00 - 21:30 On a software side, dolphins present a very
interesting challenge because their range of vocalizations is so large in terms of frequency. So you have to sample at a very high rate
in terms of audio on the computer so it requires very fast processing and efficient software
on battery power with something that has no internet or external connectivity to the outside
world. So all of your processing is onboard whereas
you know, typical voice recognition things
21:30 - 22:00 like Google Now or Siri are doing some processing
on the phone or the platform and then sending it off to the internet to be analyzed on a
much more powerful computer. We have to do everything on the system. To my knowledge there's no other project in
the world attempting this. Over the course of three field seasons, the
researchers recorded some solid data on the ways the dolphins were trying to mimic the
whistles played for them by the scientists.
22:00 - 22:30 One of the first things they started doing
was just producing their signature whistle after we would make a whistle. Then they started doing things like we would
make a computer whistle and they would just take the end of that last computer whistle
and tag on another whistle. Sometimes they would jump up in frequency
and mimic the whistle. Sometimes they would just do it over a longer
period of time. So it was kind of like they were experimenting
to see you know how they could mimic. They're showing us their preferred method
of producing those sounds, so that's interesting
22:30 - 23:00 in and of itself. And also, it's one of the precursors that
are really required of a language-like communication system - is the ability to imitate in various
forms. The computer didn’t immediately recognize
the mimicked whistles the dolphins were producing during the in-water interaction, so the team
is working on an updated CHAT system that can recognize those mimics in real time. So it will give the researcher in the water
real time information about dolphins that
23:00 - 23:30 have requested a toy and we can respond more
correctly and quickly. That's the idea. In addition to the CHAT project, Denise is
also collaborating with Georgia Tech on software that can help her decode her 30 plus year
catalogue of dolphin sounds. What the programs basically do is we throw
in a bunch of sound files, and the computer
23:30 - 24:00 uses some pretty cutting-edge algorithms and
pattern recognition tools and basically clusters the sounds into categories, some of which
are easy for humans to cluster, others are not so easy. So, here's A-L-E, so that's a pattern that
the computer can now label. So now when I look at that stream of sound,
I can see oh, A-L-E and there’s another A-L-E. And now we're getting into is there order
and structure to their sounds?
24:00 - 24:30 Which language, you would think, would have
some kind of order and patterns. Do certain sounds always cluster together? Does that mean they mean something? So, that's really the power of what this program
does. The time it takes for a human to do that is
ridiculous. So, you can mine your data differently and
get these patterns and then you can start looking at it from a biological point of view. Does the A-L-E cluster always show up when
a mother and calf are together, or a certain mother and calf. Or when they're fighting, or you know whatever,
so. And the other big point is that, do they recombine?
24:30 - 25:00 So, like we've always, always measured a whistle
as a unit of information, but is that true for dolphins? Maybe they have an upsweep and a down sweep
and another flat kind of whistle, and maybe they recombine them to mean different things. That's what human words are basically. That's how you get the power of languages,
you recombine segments of sound and you get different clusters so we don't know if dolphins
do. No one's ever looked at it before, no one's
ever had a computer tool to do that really. See look at that throat mark—that’s a
good ID mark.
25:00 - 25:30 Denise has spent decades of dedicated research
to learn all she can about this group of Atlantic spotted dolphins, and she is determined to
crack the code of dolphin communication – bridging the gap between our world and theirs. Denise has done an amazing job, and this is
hard work too. To form this collaborative unit to work together
to answer one of the most important questions,
25:30 - 26:00 I think, about animal behavior and communication
which is you know can we communicate with another species in their world and on their
terms.
26:00 - 26:30 Major funding for this program was provided
by the Batchelor Foundation, encouraging people to preserve and protect America’s underwater
resources. And by: Diver’s Direct and Ocean Divers;
The Do Unto Others Trust; The Charles N. and Eleanor Knight Leigh Foundation.