20 Years with the Dolphins

We're 30 miles from the nearest land, 25 feet

under water, trying to establish contact

with a school of dolphins I've known for more than 20 years.

Using a computer especially designed to work under water,

we're broadcasting dolphin sounds

into an apparently empty ocean.

It appears to be a fool's errand,

but the sounds are answered.

This is the continuation of a conversation

begun 20 years earlier when Hardy Jones and Julia

Whitty first came to the Bahamas with a primitive computer,

attempting to entice a group of spotted dolphins

to their cameras.

I couldn't have imagined, when I first set out

on this quest to meet dolphins in the open sea,

that the work would take up the rest of my life.

Not only did I find friendly dolphins in the Bahamas,

but their discovery led me to seek out

other species around the world, from bottlenose dolphins

in French Polynesia, to killer whales in the Arctic.

Julia Whitty, trained as a biologist,

faced a unique challenge when confronted

with animals as curious about her as she was about them.

I quickly found I couldn't study dolphins the way

I had studied other animals.

The dolphins demanded interaction with us

or they'd leave.

And that presented a new kind of problem,

how to keep them interested without influencing

their behavior.

One dolphin emerged from the group

as astonishingly friendly and curious.

We called him Chopper.

He'd swim with us nearly every day.

And we've had the privilege of literally watching him grow up.

Today, Hardy Jones uses film and the internet

to inform and educate people to the unique world

of dolphins and the environment they live in.

Though Hardy's work takes him around the world,

he still returns to the Bahamas nearly every summer,

especially to see Chopper.

When first setting out, Hardy and Julia planned

to stay a single summer.

And the title they had in mind for their film

was "A Year with the Dolphins."

Little did they know.

In the late 1970s, the idea of swimming

with dolphins in the wild was the stuff of myths.

In those days, whales and dolphins are still

being killed by the thousands.

My idea was that if I could capture the lives

of free-swimming dolphins on film,

depicting their curiosity and friendliness towards humans,

that it would help stop the ghastly slaughters of dolphins

that were taking place in the tuna fishery

and in places like Japan.

The effort started when Hardy learned of a place

north of Grand Bahama Island, where a treasure diver had

been swimming with a school of dolphins

for more than a decade.

These were spotted dolphins, a typically

shy species, that occurs in tropical oceans

around the world.

But in this one location, they were reported

to be uniquely friendly.

In 1979, Hardy got together a team

of underwater cameramen and sound engineers

to join him on the quest.

That could be Didi.

During their earlysearches for the dolphins,

they patrolled the western edge of the Little Bahama Banks,

staring at a very empty sea.

But they were not disappointed.

I'll never forget the excitement

of those first encounters.

The dolphins raced in to see us, swirled

around, sonaring wildly.

After a while, they slowed down to examine

us intently with their eyes.

There was a tremendous sense of discovery and exhilaration.

They thought it was, ah, high tide or something.

It's incredible.

I was trying to use it to... as a bridge,

to see if I could get them to come to the fin,

and then come...

come further.

But then the dolphins were gone,

and we could not find them again.

During our first two years, we found the dolphins only twice.

One of the first things we learned,

as we returned to the Bahamas year after year,

was that we wouldn't find the dolphins, they'd find us.

We learned we could identify individual members

of the school by body markings.

And in one case, by a remora or suckerfish, which,

to our amazement, stayed with one particular female for six

years.

She was so curious and friendly that she began to get

a reputation as a camera hog.

The dolphin with the remora

was accompanied by rambunctious younger dolphins,

including the male who was missing

the tip of his dorsal fin, the one

they'd come to call Chopper.

The team had decided from the first

that they would never tag or feed the dolphins.

All interactions would be on a voluntary basis.

Those were heady days.

We were getting to know a school of dolphins in the wild.

But there were some who took objection to our treating

the dolphins as individuals.

After we did our initial reports on our work in the Bahamas,

there was a lot of skepticism about what

we were doing because we were giving names to dolphins.

We were dealing with them as individuals.

This was kind of upsetting to some

in the scientific community.

They thought we should give them numbers, to deliberately keep

ourselves remote from them.

The work Hardy and Julia did in the early 1980s

showed that dolphins did not need to be

in captivity to be studied.

Long-term research could be carried out underwater

in the wild with free dolphins.

The principal problem was that while the dolphins would

arrive with great enthusiasm, they

would depart just as suddenly.

And the team would be left with long days, in the hot sun,

waiting.

On one of these mornings with little to do,

the captain ran the outboard just for fun,

and the dolphins immediately showed up.

It gave us a first clue about what we

needed to do to attract them.

And it wasn't long before they were

hanging out, waiting for some action from this new toy.

A second breakthrough

came when I dropped my swim fin to test

how the dolphins would react.

The results were astonishing.

The dolphins came in, sonaring the fin,

circling, and ultimately touching it.

This is the same way they respond to anything

new in their environment.

First, as they approach, they sweep their heads

back and forth, sonaring.

When very close, they examine with their eyes.

You can feel the sonar directed at you,

resonating through your body, especially

in your chest and sinuses.

Dolphin sonar ignores water.

So it can penetrate body tissues and literally

see inside other animals, a form of X-ray vision.

Because visibility in the sea rarely exceeds 100 feet,

this sonar also enables them to detect

distant objects, such as a shark, from a quarter of a mile

away.

Using their jawbones as receivers,

the dolphins pass sound signals to their brains,

where they are transformed into three-dimensional imagery.

So when I took off my fin, I knew

they could easily discern the difference

between the rubber and my body.

But I hoped that pulling off the fin would make them curious,

and it did.

As we spent time with the dolphins,

we began to recognize their individual signature whistles.

We named the female with the remora Didi

because she always approached us making

the same up-down whistle.

While making these signature whistles,

the dolphins emit a stream of bubbles from their blowholes.

So it's easy to spot which animal is identifying itself.

Didi was a constant companion

of Chopper, the young dolphin with a blunted dorsal fin.

During the first encounter in 1979,

his skin was a pearly gray, with no spotting at all, indicating

he was less than two years old.

By the third year, he had begun to develop some spotting.

Between the ages of three and five,

he was often seen with a younger sibling,

perhaps acting as a baby sitter.

As he reached adulthood, he began to form

alliances with other males.

With each passing year, Chopper developed more spots.

But the unique dorsal fin made him always identifiable.

I'm not certain how old Chopper was when

we first encountered him, since no human had

observed his birth.

But he was certainly in the first year of his life.

Indeed, no one had ever observed the birth

of a dolphin in the open sea.

And it took me 20 years before I even came close to witnessing

such a remarkable event.

In June of the year 2000,

the team departed West End on Grand Bahama,

and made their way north to test a new computerized dolphin

communication system.

It was the first trip out here for John Ross, computer

designer and sound engineer.