The big question out here that we’re trying to address
is one of the Rosetta Stones in animal behavior.
How do we communicate with the thousands and thousands
of species that surround our planet?
In this case, we’re focusing on wild spotted dolphins.
Dolphins have really complex relationships.
They teach their young.
They can understand abstract concepts.
They can problem-solve.
And they have complex politics.
We want to know how dolphins communicate within their own society.
And to do that, you have to go under the water, where they live.
My work was really driven by women like Jane Goodall
and Dian Fossey,
scientists who went out in the field,
and just decided to sit somewhere with a community of animals
and see what would emerge from that.
I guess I was young and naïve enough to go,
"Well, I think I'll do that with dolphins.”
Denise Herzing is a pioneer in the study of dolphin communication.
In the 1990s, we started noticing that the dolphins
were doing very specific attempts to interact with us,
by mimicking postural behaviors and, sometimes,
what we thought were sound mimics.
And because people had developed keyboards, in captivity,
to try to bridge the gap between primates and dolphins,
we thought, “Wow, could we do something like that in the wild?”
Dolphins make, basically, three types of sounds.
One are frequency-modulated whistles,
which are basically long-distance communication signals.
They make clicks, which are their sonar.
And finally, they make burst-pulse sounds,
which are clumps of clicks that are close proximity social sounds.
Our hearing range extends from about 100 hertz to 15 kilohertz.
Dolphins’ hearing range goes from 100 hertz to about 150 kilohertz.
So, 10 times the range that we have.
For us, if we’re in the water,
the sound seems to be coming from everywhere.
You hear sounds, but you don’t know where they are.
This system, for the first time, really solves that problem.
Now, you can pinpoint and say, “That animal produced that whistle.”
So that’s really exciting.
These are two animals, and both are vocalizing.
For example, you could look at mother-calf development.
I can say, “Well, here, that’s the mom,
and maybe that’s the calf imitating, or learning.”
The CHAT system that we’ve created is the only one in the world.
This is the only place in the world where this is occurring.
We have a keyboard, for the marine biologists
to queue up different sounds to play to the dolphin.
We have a 3D-printed underwater speaker,
and then we also have two underwater microphones.
It’s an acoustic keyboard.
So we play sounds,
we associate them with objects.
So if I'm in the water, and Adam is in the water with a box,
we request toys from each other using the system.
I would press the key for “scarf” if I wanted the scarf from Adam.
He would give me the scarf.
This is happening when the dolphins are around.
And the idea is to do that back and forth enough,
the dolphins get the idea,
Oh, if I make this sound, will I get a scarf?
So, if the dolphins mimic the sound,
the computer would recognize that, and tell us, real-time, in the water,
that someone has made a mimic of that sound,
and then we would take the appropriate behavior,
offer the object that was requested,
and try to build the rapport that way.
It’s a bit like “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,”
where you’re playing the sounds, and you get a response back,
and you’re going back and forth, and back and forth,
until you finally figure out what the matchup is,
and then you start really to communicate about stuff.
And you’re talking to a different species, then.
As of last season, we had spent three pretty solid years
taking the boxes in, with semi-regular individual dolphins,
and exposing them to the communication system,
so that we could look at, how are they really trying to respond,
if they are, and is our technology adequate to capture it?
Unfortunately, the answer was, our technology
isn’t adequate to capture it.
The archive is really a visual and acoustic representation
of the lives of, now, four generations of dolphins,
and all the details that go with it.
Last year, we were in one of our sessions,
and we were playing these games with the dolphins.
And nothing jumped out during the session.
But, as we looked at the sounds, after the session,
we saw that they were actually trying to mimic the sound of “sargassum.”
They were mimicking the sound in a very unique and new way
that was way up in frequency, so, in the ultrasonic,
that we couldn’t hear in the water.
And then I actually went back, in
all the old data and all the files.
And, sure enough, there they were, mimicking our sounds.
This is well within our hearing range.
Shortly after, we see all this information in the high frequencies.
So this is all above human hearing range.
So, this was actually the big discovery,
that they actually were trying, all this time,
to mimic in these unique ways.
And we’re just deaf.
We don’t hear that.
Who knows where it will lead.
It could lead to an understanding of, not only dolphins, but other species.
Look at some of the tsunamis,
where the elephants are walking up the hill
because they can sense infrasound.
I mean, wouldn’t it be cool if you could
have a communication system to get help
from species that have other sensory systems?
If we can describe the process of trying to bridge a gap
between another non-primate-like species,
who knows where that will lead?
That could be something helping us explore the galaxy.