Marine biologist Denise Herzing is drawing on decades of research, a vast digital library of whistles and clicks, and new computer wizardry designed to bridge the species gap.
She has an extensive video and sound library of the clicks and whistles the dolphins use to communicate. She has also learned intimate details about their complex world—how males form tight coalitions and cruise the waters like scrappy gangs; how young females babysit calves to prepare for motherhood; how everyone seems to have sex (or at least play at sex) with everyone.
“It’s really interesting to see what’s going on in the mind of another species,” says Herzing, who is an affiliate assistant professor in the biological sciences department at Florida Atlantic University.
She is refining a set of portable underwater communication devices that can recognize and generate dolphinlike whistles, and she plans to use them to establish two-way communication.
She’ll start by exposing the dolphins to a few of the whistles, using pattern-recognition software to tell her, via earphones she’ll wear underwater, if they use them to whistle back. Herzing hopes that once the dolphins, who are skilled mimics, get the idea, they can build a communication system together.
“Maybe it will lead to an extensive artificial language,” Herzing says. “But the real breakthrough would be if the dolphins introduce their own vocalizations and whistles.”
I actually have a particular interest in this; way back in college I carried on an email correspondence with a researcher at the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory in Hawaii with whom we talked a great deal about the potential for developing exactly this kind of thing with either dolphins or orca.
That was twenty years ago; it’s really nice to see that the idea is finally getting some traction. This is, I think, the most logical and promising approach for all that it is unorthodox.
I guess more people need to read David Brin‘s The Uplift War.