Could we speak the language of dolphins? | Denise Herzing

516,939 views ・ 2013-06-06

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Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

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Translator: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Morton Bast
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Well, now we're going to the Bahamas to meet
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a remarkable group of dolphins that I've been working with
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in the wild for the last 28 years.
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Now I'm interested in dolphins because of their large brains
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and what they might be doing with all that brainpower
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in the wild.
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And we know they use some of that brainpower
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for just living complicated lives,
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but what do we really know about dolphin intelligence?
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Well, we know a few things.
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We know that their brain-to-body ratio,
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which is a physical measure of intelligence,
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is second only to humans.
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Cognitively, they can understand
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artificially-created languages.
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And they pass self-awareness tests in mirrors.
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And in some parts of the world, they use tools,
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like sponges to hunt fish.
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But there's one big question left:
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do they have a language, and if so,
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what are they talking about?
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So decades ago, not years ago,
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I set out to find a place in the world
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where I could observe dolphins underwater
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to try to crack the code of their communication system.
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Now in most parts of the world, the water's pretty murky,
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so it's very hard to observe animals underwater,
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but I found a community of dolphins that live
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in these beautiful, clear, shallow sandbanks of the Bahamas
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which are just east of Florida.
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And they spend their daytime resting and socializing
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in the safety of the shallows, but at night,
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they go off the edge and hunt in deep water.
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Now, it's not a bad place to be a researcher, either.
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So we go out for about five months every summer
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in a 20-meter catamaran, and we live, sleep and work
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at sea for weeks at a time.
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My main tool is an underwater video with a hydrophone,
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which is an underwater microphone, and this is so
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I can correlate sound and behavior.
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And most of our work's pretty non-invasive.
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We try to follow dolphin etiquette while we're in the water,
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since we're actually observing them physically in the water.
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Now, Atlantic spotted dolphins are a really nice species
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to work with for a couple of reasons.
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They're born without spots, and they get spots with age,
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and they go through pretty distinct developmental phases,
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so that's fun to track their behavior.
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And by about the age of 15, they're fully spotted black and white.
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Now the mother you see here is Mugsy.
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She's 35 years old in this shot,
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but dolphins can actually live into their early 50s.
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And like all the dolphins in our community,
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we photographed Mugsy and tracked her little spots
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and nicks in her dorsal fin,
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and also the unique spot patterns
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as she matured over time.
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Now, young dolphins learn a lot as they're growing up,
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and they use their teenage years to practice social skills,
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and at about the age of nine, the females
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become sexually mature, so they can get pregnant,
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and the males mature quite a bit later,
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at around 15 years of age.
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And dolphins are very promiscuous,
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and so we have to determine who the fathers are,
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so we do paternity tests by collecting fecal material
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out of the water and extracting DNA.
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So what that means is, after 28 years,
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we are tracking three generations,
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including grandmothers and grandfathers.
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Now, dolphins are natural acousticians.
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They make sounds 10 times as high
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and hear sounds 10 times as high as we do.
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But they have other communication signals they use.
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They have good vision, so they use body postures to communicate.
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They have taste, not smell.
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And they have touch.
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And sound can actually be felt in the water,
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because the acoustic impedance of tissue and water's about the same.
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So dolphins can buzz and tickle each other at a distance.
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Now, we do know some things about how sounds are used
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with certain behaviors.
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Now, the signature whistle is a whistle
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that's specific to an individual dolphin, and it's like a name. (Dolphin whistling noises)
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And this is the best-studied sound,
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because it's easy to measure, really,
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and you'd find this whistle when mothers and calves
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are reuniting, for example.
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Another well studied sound are echolocation clicks.
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This is the dolphin's sonar. (Dolphin echolocation noises)
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And they use these clicks to hunt and feed.
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But they can also tightly pack these clicks together
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into buzzes and use them socially.
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For example, males will stimulate a female
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during a courtship chase.
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You know, I've been buzzed in the water.
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(Laughter)
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Don't tell anyone. It's a secret.
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And you can really feel the sound. That was my point with that.
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(Laughter)
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So dolphins are also political animals,
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so they have to resolve conflicts.
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(Dolphin noises)
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And they use these burst-pulsed sounds as well as
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their head-to-head behaviors when they're fighting.
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And these are very unstudied sounds
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because they're hard to measure.
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Now this is some video of a typical dolphin fight.
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(Dolphin noises)
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So you're going to see two groups,
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and you're going to see the head-to-head posturing,
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some open mouths,
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lots of squawking.
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There's a bubble.
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And basically, one of these groups will kind of back off
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and everything will resolve fine,
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and it doesn't really escalate into violence too much.
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Now, in the Bahamas, we also have resident bottlenose
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that interact socially with the spotted dolphins.
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For example, they babysit each other's calves.
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The males have dominance displays that they use
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when they're chasing each other's females.
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And the two species actually form temporary alliances
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when they're chasing sharks away.
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And one of the mechanisms they use to communicate
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their coordination is synchrony.
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They synchronize their sounds and their body postures
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to look bigger and sound stronger.
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(Dolphins noises)
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Now, these are bottlenose dolphins,
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and you'll see them starting to synchronize
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their behavior and their sounds.
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(Dolphin noises)
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You see, they're synchronizing with their partner
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as well as the other dyad.
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I wish I was that coordinated.
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Now, it's important to remember that you're only hearing
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the human-audible parts of dolphin sounds,
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and dolphins make ultrasonic sounds,
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and we use special equipment in the water
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to collect these sounds.
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Now, researchers have actually measured whistle complexity
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using information theory,
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and whistles rate very high relative to even human languages.
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But burst-pulsed sounds is a bit of a mystery.
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Now, these are three spectragrams.
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Two are human words, and one is a dolphin vocalizing.
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So just take a guess in your mind which one is the dolphin.
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Now, it turns out burst-pulsed sounds actually look
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a bit like human phonemes.
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Now, one way to crack the code
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is to interpret these signals and figure out what they mean,
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but it's a difficult job, and we actually don't have a Rosetta Stone yet.
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But a second way to crack the code
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is to develop some technology,
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an interface to do two-way communication,
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and that's what we've been trying to do in the Bahamas
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and in real time.
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Now, scientists have used keyboard interfaces
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to try to bridge the gap with species
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including chimpanzees and dolphins.
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This underwater keyboard in Orlando, Florida,
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at the Epcot Center, was actually
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the most sophisticated ever two-way interface designed
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for humans and dolphins to work together under the water
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and exchange information.
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So we wanted to develop an interface like this
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in the Bahamas, but in a more natural setting.
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And one of the reasons we thought we could do this
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is because the dolphins were starting to show us
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a lot of mutual curiosity.
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They were spontaneously mimicking our vocalizations
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and our postures, and they were also inviting us
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into dolphin games.
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Now, dolphins are social mammals, so they love to play,
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and one of their favorite games is to drag seaweed,
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or sargassum in this case, around.
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And they're very adept. They like to drag it
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and drop it from appendage to appendage.
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Now in this footage, the adult is Caroh.
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She's 25 years old here, and this is her newborn, Cobalt,
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and he's just learning how to play this game.
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(Dolphin noises)
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She's kind of teasing him and taunting him.
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He really wants that sargassum.
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Now, when dolphins solicit humans for this game,
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they'll often sink vertically in the water,
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and they'll have a little sargassum on their flipper,
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and they'll sort of nudge it and drop it sometimes
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on the bottom and let us go get it,
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and then we'll have a little seaweed keep away game.
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But when we don't dive down and get it,
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they'll bring it to the surface
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and they'll sort of wave it in front of us on their tail
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and drop it for us like they do their calves,
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and then we'll pick it up and have a game.
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And so we started thinking, well, wouldn't it be neat
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to build some technology that would allow the dolphins
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to request these things in real time, their favorite toys?
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So the original vision was to have a keyboard
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hanging from the boat attached to a computer,
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and the divers and dolphins would activate the keys
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on the keypad and happily exchange information
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and request toys from each other.
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But we quickly found out that dolphins simply
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were not going to hang around the boat using a keyboard.
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They've got better things to do in the wild.
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They might do it in captivity, but in the wild --
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So we built a portable keyboard that we could push through the water,
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and we labeled four objects they like to play with,
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the scarf, rope, sargassum, and also had a bow ride,
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which is a fun activity for a dolphin. (Whistle)
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And that's the scarf whistle,
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which is also associated with a visual symbol.
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And these are artificially created whistles.
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They're outside the dolphin's normal repertoire,
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but they're easily mimicked by the dolphins.
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And I spent four years with my colleagues Adam Pack and Fabienne Delfour,
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working out in the field with this keyboard
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using it with each other to do requests for toys
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while the dolphins were watching.
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And the dolphins could get in on the game.
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They could point at the visual object,
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or they could mimic the whistle.
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Now this is video of a session.
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The diver here has a rope toy,
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and I'm on the keyboard on the left,
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and I've just played the rope key,
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and that's the request for the toy from the human.
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So I've got the rope, I'm diving down,
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and I'm basically trying to get the dolphin's attention,
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because they're kind of like little kids.
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You have to keep their attention.
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I'm going to drop the rope, see if they come over.
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Here they come,
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and then they're going to pick up the rope
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and drag it around as a toy.
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Now, I'm at the keyboard on the left,
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and this is actually the first time that we tried this.
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I'm going to try to request this toy, the rope toy,
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from the dolphins using the rope sound.
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Let's see if they might actually understand what that means.
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(Whistle)
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That's the rope whistle.
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Up come the dolphins,
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and drop off the rope, yay. Wow.
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(Applause)
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So this is only once.
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We don't know for sure if they really understand the function of the whistles.
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Okay, so here's a second toy in the water.
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This is a scarf toy, and I'm trying to lead the dolphin
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over to the keyboard to show her
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the visual and the acoustic signal.
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Now this dolphin, we call her "the scarf thief,"
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because over the years she's absconded
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with about 12 scarves.
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In fact, we think she has a boutique somewhere in the Bahamas.
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So I'm reaching over. She's got the scarf on her right side.
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And we try to not touch the animals too much,
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we really don't want to over-habituate them.
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And I'm trying to lead her back to the keyboard.
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And the diver there is going to activate the scarf sound
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to request the scarf.
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So I try to give her the scarf.
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Whoop. Almost lost it.
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But this is the moment where everything becomes possible.
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The dolphin's at the keyboard.
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You've got full attention.
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And this sometimes went on for hours.
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And I wanted to share this video with you
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not to show you any big breakthroughs,
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because they haven't happened yet,
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but to show you the level of intention and focus
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that these dolphins have, and interest in the system.
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And because of this, we really decided we needed
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some more sophisticated technology.
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So we joined forces with Georgia Tech,
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with Thad Starner's wearable computing group,
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to build us an underwater wearable computer
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that we're calling CHAT. [CHAT: Cetacean Hearing And Telemetry]
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Now, instead of pushing a keyboard through the water,
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the diver's wearing the complete system, and it's acoustic only,
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so basically the diver activates the sounds on a keypad
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on the forearm,
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the sounds go out through an underwater speaker,
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if a dolphin mimics the whistle
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or a human plays the whistle, the sounds come in
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and are localized by two hydrophones.
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The computer can localize who requested the toy
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if there's a word match.
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And the real power of the system is in the real-time
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sound recognition, so we can respond to the dolphins
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quickly and accurately.
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And we're at prototype stage, but this is how we hope it will play out.
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So Diver A and Diver B both have a wearable computer
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and the dolphin hears the whistle as a whistle,
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the diver hears the whistle as a whistle in the water,
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but also as a word through bone conduction.
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So Diver A plays the scarf whistle
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or Diver B plays the sargassum whistle
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to request a toy from whoever has it.
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What we hope will happen is that the dolphin mimics the whistle,
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and if Diver A has the sargassum, if that's the sound
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that was played and requested,
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then the diver will give the sargassum to the requesting dolphin
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and they'll swim away happily into the sunset
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playing sargassum for forever.
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Now, how far can this kind of communication go?
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Well, CHAT is designed specifically to empower the dolphins
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to request things from us.
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It's designed to really be two-way.
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Now, will they learn to mimic the whistles functionally?
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We hope so and we think so.
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But as we decode their natural sounds,
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we're also planning to put those back into the computerized system.
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For example, right now we can put their own signature whistles
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in the computer and request to interact with a specific dolphin.
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Likewise, we can create our own whistles,
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our own whistle names, and let the dolphins
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request specific divers to interact with.
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Now it may be that all our mobile technology
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will actually be the same technology that helps us
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communicate with another species down the road.
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In the case of a dolphin, you know, it's a species that,
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well, they're probably close to our intelligence in many ways
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and we might not be able to admit that right now,
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but they live in quite a different environment,
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and you still have to bridge the gap with the sensory systems.
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I mean, imagine what it would be like
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to really understand the mind
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of another intelligent species on the planet.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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