Dolphins: Breaking the Code - Full Episode

Summary

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

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.
• 26:30 - 27:00 And by the following.