Are Dolphins Talking About Us Behind Our Backs?

Cool! Dolphins apparently change their clicking and whistle sounds in the presence of other species of dolphins in order to better communicate with each other. Or so indicates the audio research of biologist Laura May-Collado of the University of Puerto Rico, who recorded pods of bottlenose dolphins and Guyana dolphins separately, and then as they came into contact with each other off the coast of Costa Rica. As Dr. May-Collado told BBC Earth News:

“I was surprised by these findings, as I was expecting both species to emphasise, perhaps exaggerate, their species-specific signals. Instead the signals recorded during these encounters became more homogenous. This was a very exciting discovery.”

It was! And not just because we now know that these highly intelligent cetaceans are probably conspiring against humans in their underwater language codes. (Or, at the very least, making fun of us.) But also because it presents an opportunity for me to recommend that you read this article about Dr. John Cunningham Lilly from the May/June issue of Orion magazine. I just read it recently, and it’s great!

A sort of real-life Dr. Doolittle, Lilly was experimenting on dolphin brains in the late ’50s, when, as one of his unlucky specimens was dying, it emitted a “wheezing phonations that Lilly interpreted as an effort to mimic the voices of the laboratory personnel.” Feeling himself on the verge of a monumentally important scientific discovery, Lilly spent the next decade trying his darnedest to “break through” our inter-special barrier with dolphins and establish real communication with them. He got millions of dollars in grant money and published a very succesful book, Man and Dolphin, and got a credit line on the 1963 movie Flipper. He was also the inspiration for William Hurt’s character in Altered States. His story takes us

through the strange history of postwar American science and culture, and the unbraiding of a set of unlikely historical threads: Cold War brain science, military bioacoustics, Hollywood mythopoesis, and early LSD experimentation.

J. Edgar Hoover, extra-terrestrial research and interspecies sexual congress, too! Please read it. I’m telling you, it’s got it all.