Twenty Years with the Dolphins Page #2

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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.

John had designed a computer built

into an underwater housing,

which he and Hardy hoped

would attract the dolphins.

The computer is controlled by

a magnet, which acts in place

of the more familiar mouse.

So sort of just slip that in there.

The actual... a little bit

too hard to hold onto.

So if we can insert it in the glove,

it makes it much easier.

So I can just do the basic cursor

movements with the mouse and

my click, and drag, and enter.

So I can navigate around the screen

here and move the mouse in any location.

And since it's picture-oriented

and menu driven,

I can pretty much do almost

all the controls for the software

just from the mouse.

At first, bringing a computer

in the water

may seem preposterous.

But it makes sense.

The dolphins are primarily

acoustical creatures.

And so to interest them,

we developed a computer that

would not only replay sounds,

but record sounds in real time

and play them back to the dolphins.

We can also manipulate the sounds,

altering them in a variety of

ways to interest the dolphins.

We did not believe that

we'd be able to communicate

with the dolphins as one

human talks to another.

But we did hope we could

show the dolphins that we

were interested in them.

And at the very least, the computer

should attract the dolphins and

make it easier to film them.

But to do this, we needed dolphins.

Instead, we got a

rather large barracuda,

who seemed genuinely interested

in the sounds John was making.

So interested, in fact, that

John refused to play further.

It's no mystery

that finding the dolphins

on any given day is difficult.

Their home range covers

over 100 square miles,

including the coral reefs

on the edge of the Gulf Stream

and the sugar-white sands

on the Little Bahama Banks.

In this featureless zone,

the occasional shipwreck

becomes an oasis for fish

and a landmark for dolphins.

Here, they share their world

with great shoals of barracuda,

with eagle rays, and even

the occasional manta.

The spotted dolphins

spend the daytime hours

over the white sand,

a habitat vital to their survival.

This fact was vividly

illustrated to me in 1985,

during the single most extraordinary

experience I've ever had

with the spotted dolphins.

I was swimming with a small group, when

a very large Atlantic hammerhead shark

came up over the edge of the reef,

onto the White Sand Ridge.

I needed to breathe.

And when I went to the surface,

the shark followed.

Some of the dolphins

seemed to desert me.

I didn't want to be caught

with my legs dangling.

So I dove down a few feet

and started filming.

Then the most remarkable thing happened.

Here is the footage,

exactly as I shot it.

Chopper swam under my left arm and made

straight for the shark.

Two other juveniles came in and mobbed

the now confused hammerhead.

There's no question in my mind

that those dolphins

intervened to protect me.

Once the hammerhead was gone,

the dolphins resumed play

amongst themselves.

Because the dolphins

feed mostly at night,

out in the deep waters

of the Gulf Stream,

they need to find somewhere safe to rest

during the daylight hours.

Over the white sand,

they can shut off their sonar,

enabling that vital part of their brains

to rest, while their eyes take

over the important business

of keeping watch.

Against deep water or a reef,

sharks are difficult to see.

But over white sand,

they stand out clearly.

Seeing that hammerhead come at me,

and the dolphins' response to it,

is what led me to believe

that the white sand habitat is

critical to the dolphins' survival,

especially during their

daytime resting hours.

Another extraordinary

encounter one morning

during the summer of 2000 showed me

further reason why the white sand

is critical to the dolphins' survival.

A few youngsters arrived on the bow.

A larger group of dolphins

appeared in the distance,

but they seemed unusually preoccupied

with their own activities and did

not race to the bow as usual.

The juveniles, while staying close

to the main group of dolphins,

played amongst themselves.

But the densest concentration

was made up of adults.

Those are dolphins are

we sometimes call the heavies.

They are large male groups,

heavily spotted.

And they cluster together.

It sometimes can be

a defensive formation.

With the dolphins swimming

quietly around our boat,

we finally had a real chance to

test the computerized dolphin

communicator.

Several of the juveniles

made quick passes,

but surprised me by moving on quickly.

My eyes strained to spot Chopper.

But the water was so murky I could only

see dolphins within 15 feet.

These younger dolphins were

more interested in grabbing

tasty snacks from the bottom

than in our computer.

Sonaring loudly, they moved over

the bottom like hound dogs

on the scent.

Once they spotted a fish, they would

snap it up with an audible

clacking of their jaws.

It's clear their sonar

can penetrate the sand

and discover small fish

in their burrows,

proving they will use their

versatile sonar in the daytime

if they didn't get enough

to eat the night before.

Even after two hours

of contact, the dolphins

continued to show virtually no interest

in the computer-generated

sounds and paid

no attention to us personally.

But they didn't try to avoid us either.

I'd never seen anything

like this before.

When I did get close to the main school,

I saw the dolphins were tightly packed

into a very defensive formation,

even though there was

no evident source of danger.

Staring through the murky water, I tried

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