“Scientists have been studying dolphins for fifty years,” Schnöller says. “We know they’re communicating in a sophisticated way but we don’t know how. We knew the same thing is going on with sperm whale, but we didn’t know how because no one was going in the water.”
In 2007, our guest, Fabrice Schnöller, was sailing off the coast of Mauritius, in East Africa, when he had an encounter that would change his life and open a new frontier in marine biology. As his boat neared land, huge pillars of steam burst out of the water and began surrounding the boat. Schnöller, an experienced diver, grabbed his snorkeling gear and jumped in to investigate. No sooner had he slipped under the water than he was overwhelmed by a crashing, creaking sound. Glancing downwards, he discovered a set of what appeared to be huge, dark monoliths accelerating towards him.
“I asked myself, ‘are these clicks only used to see the world, as sonar?’ or are they also used to communicate? If they do that, it would [involve] a completely different way of communicating.” Pictured here, Schnöller dives with a sperm whale. (Photo courtesy of Fabrice Schnöller)
“[T]here are places in the world where the spoken word doesn’t travel very far,” Dr. Diana Reiss says. “In these areas, there are people who convert their spoken words into whistle languages. They whistle the prosody, or the intonation, of the spoken language… You can look at a whistle sequence that looks like a dolphin whistle or a bird whistle, and it’s actually a human sentence that is communicating enough that another could decode it. When we look at whistles of birds or dolphins, they look simple and we don’t think about what kind of information might be in there.”
For thousands of years, humans have been enthralled with dolphins. In Ancient Greece, dolphins were considered closer to the gods than any other creature, viewed as half divine messengers between men and gods. To kill a dolphin was an offense punishable by death. The second century Greco-Roman poet Oppian wrote, “Diviner than the Dolphin is nothing yet created for indeed they were aforetime men and lived in cities along with mortals.” Reverence for these creatures was not limited to the Greeks. There are caves in the French Pyrenees with Ice Age era dolphin engravings. Stories about dolphins are part of the Australian Aborigines’ understanding of the world known as “Dreamtime.” To the Maori of New Zealand, dolphins have long been seen as water spirits who can carry messages from island to island in times of need.
“I always felt that just putting yourself aside for a moment and just seeing what you can see, hearing what you can hear, you’ll see patterns or hear patterns emerge,” Reiss says. “And that can inform what you do and the kind of questions you ask. In that way, I think we can partner with animals. My best ideas about animals come from the animals themselves.”
We are separated by 95 million years of evolution, and yet we intuitively feel a striking kinship and admiration for these intelligent creatures. Of course, mythologies like these, as our guest has pointed out, are not verified or scientific truths. “But,” she writes, “mythologies reach a different, deeper kind of truth, one that relies on resonance, not on demonstrable evidence. Mythologies do not account for the origin of people or dolphins in the way that scientific theories do, but mythologies tell us something about who we believe ourselves to be, our values and our place in the world in relation to all the other creatures of nature.”
