"All the World's a Stage We Pass Through" R. Ayana

Showing posts with label whales. Show all posts
Showing posts with label whales. Show all posts

Friday, 5 September 2014

The Cetacean Brain and Hominid Perceptions of Cetacean Intelligence


The Cetacean Brain and Hominid Perceptions of Cetacean Intelligence

http://www.anneofcarversville.com/storage/22810dolphinsart.png?__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION=1350933095429 


An Essay by Captain Paul Watson


"What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason!
How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable!
In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god!
The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!"

- William Shakespeare, Hamlet


The human species may not be the paragon of animals as Hamlet so eloquently described to us. There is another group of species on this Earth perhaps more deserving of such lofty praise.

It is ironic that science, in its pursuit of knowledge, may soon lead us to understand that we are not what we believe or desire ourselves to be, that we are not the most knowledgeable life-form on the planet. Biological science is provoking us to shatter our image of human superiority. Confronted with new realities, we may be forced to change our perceptions. For the first time in our history, a small group of scientists stands on the threshold of communicating with a non-human intelligence. Probing the oceans instead of deep space, they are searching for an alternative terrestrial intelligence. (ATI)

Astronomers devoted to SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) keep our collective inquisitive ears tuned for signs of sentience from space. At the same time, cetologists observe, document, and decipher evidence that points to a profound intelligence dwelling in the oceans. It is an intelligence that predates our own evolution as intelligent primates by millions of years. Furthermore, it is an intelligence that may prove to be far superior to us in terms of complex associative, linguistic, and survival abilities.


Dr. John Ford's patient monitoring of the speech of orcas off British Columbia has revealed distinctive dialects between orca populations, so distinctive that it is possible to link a captive animal of unknown origin with its long-lost family in the wild. In the cold waters off Patagonia, Dr. Roger Payne thrilled the world with his recordings of the songs of the humpback whale. Behind the aesthetic value of whale music, Payne's research has revealed fascinating insights into the complex and highly sophisticated language of whales.


In the realm of zoological study, no other family of species has had such a profound impact upon human researchers. A few brilliant researchers have even been accused of losing their scientific objectivity simply because their study of cetaceans revealed knowledge about themselves. "You see," wrote Dr. John Lilly, "what I found after twelve years of work with dolphins is that the limits are not in them, the limits are in us. So I had to go away and find out, who am I? What's this all about?" Dr. Paul Spong, who came to the study of cetology as a psychologist, found himself transformed into a devout advocate of dolphin freedom. "I came to the realization," says Spong, "that at the same time I was manipulating their (orca) behavior, they were manipulating my behavior.

http://cfile1.uf.tistory.com/image/210B044D5389334A27E295
 Comparison of a human and dolphin brain showing the 4th lobe and more complex convolutions upon the neo-cortex of the dolphin as opposed to the human brain.


At the same time I was studying them and performing experiments on them, they were studying me and performing experiments on me." Both men have taken to heart an advice: eloquently expressed by novelist Edward Abbey that, "it's not enough to understand the natural world, the point is to defend and preserve it."

Other scientists have told me that they understand this effect that cetaceans have on people and resist the tendency to become "involved" with their subjects only from fear of ridicule from other scientists. Knowing something is so does not mean that others will accept it or even be open-minded enough to ponder it. Some things are just not on the table for serious scientific debate, and the idea that humans are subordinate in intelligence to another species is one of them.

Ingrained anthropocentric attitudes dismiss the very idea that a dolphin or whale could be as intelligent as a human being, or more. In this respect, science is dogmatic and intransigent, differing little in attitude from the Papal pronouncement that the Earth could not possibly revolve around the sun.

Human imagination can instantly recognize intelligence in a blob of purple protoplasm or an insectoid extraterrestrial if it steps from a space ship dressed in a metallic suit and armed with a fantastic proton-plasmodic, negative-charged, ionic-cell destabilizer-blaster. Dolphins, on the other hand, just eat fish.

We willingly accept the idea of intelligence in a life-form only if the intelligence displayed is on the same evolutionary wavelength as our own. Technology automatically indicates intelligence. An absence of technology translates into an absence of intelligence.

Dolphins and whales do not display intelligence in a fashion recognizable to this conditioned perception of what intelligence is, and thus for the most part, we are blind to a broader definition of what intelligence can be.

Evolution molds our projection of intelligence. Humans evolved as tool-makers, obsessed with danger and group aggression. This makes it very difficult for us to comprehend intelligent non-manipulative beings whose evolutionary history featured ample food supplies and an absence of fear from external dangers.

I have observed whales and dolphins in the wild for fifty years, seeing varied and complex behavior that has displayed a definite pattern of sophisticated social interactions. They have exhibited discriminatory behavior in their dealings with us, treating us not like seals fit for prey but as curious objects to be observed and to be treated with caution. They can see beyond to the manifest technological power that we have harnessed, and they can adjust their behavior accordingly. It is a fact that there has never been a documented attack by a wild orca on a human being. Perhaps they like us. More likely they know what we are.

The interpretation of behavior remains subject to the bias of the observer; one observer can classify behavior as intelligent, and a second observer will dismiss the same behavior as instinctive. There is also the tendency to be anthropomorphic -- to attribute human feelings and motives to the behavior of nonhumans. Until we can actually talk with a nonhuman, it is difficult, if not impossible, to do anything but speculate on what is being thought or perceived.

We cannot even understand with any certainty what a human being from a different culture, speaking a different language, may be thinking or perceiving. Even among people of our own culture, language, class, or academic standing, it is a formidable task to peer inside the workings of the brain. In this respect all brains other than our own are alien, and I might venture to add that the inner workings of our individual brains are still a mystery to each of us that possess one.

It is a great tragedy for our development as a species that we have been alone among hominids for the last thirty thousand years. Imagine Homo neanderthalensis existing today as a separate intelligent species of hominid primate. Our perception of the nature of intelligence would be profoundly different.

Homo neanderthalensis is an example of a species that possessed both technology and media communication. This tool-maker created haunting images of its experiences and environment. Some Neanderthal tools, artifacts, and cave art from the Chatelperonian period have survived and remind us that we are not the only species capable of material artistic expression. Neanderthal ivory and bone carvings were used for adornment in addition to more practical purposes. Symbols carved on antlers relating to the movement of animals in relationship to the seasons indicate that Neanderthals may have invented "writing,' and carried a hunting almanac around with them.

I have often heard lectures and read articles on the art of early humans. Yet seldom have I heard it said that it was not Homo sapiens alone but Homo neanderthalensis who also left us that legacy. Another species created something that we believe we alone created.

We perceive reality based on how we preconceive it. In other words, we see what we want to see. Let's take a close look at the anatomy of the brain. This is an organ that the human organism shares with most species above the invertebrate order. More specifically, we should look at the mammalian brain that is an organ composed of three distinct structures.

The foundation of the mammalian brain is the paleocortex, sometimes called the "reptilian" or "ancient" brain. The paleocortex segment reflects the primordial fish-amphibian-reptile structure. This basal combination of nerves is called the rhinic lobe (from the Greek rhinos, for nose) because it was once believed to be the area that dealt with the sense of smell. The poorly developed rhinic lobe is overlaid by the slightly more advanced limbic lobe (from the Latin limbus, for border). On top of this lobe is overlaid the third and much larger segment called the supralimbic lobe.


Draped over these three lobes is a cellular covering called the neocortex, meaning "new brain." This is the instantly recognizable, fissured, convoluted layer that envelops the other two more primitive segments. The neocortex is a bewilderingly complex community of intertwined axonal and dendritic nerve cells, synapses, and fibers.

The mammalian brain is a complex layering or lamination of evolutionary processes that reflects hundreds of millions of years of progressive development. The billions of electrochemical interactions within this complex organ define consciousness, awareness, emotion, vision, recognition, sound, touch, smell, personality, intuition, instinct, and intelligence.

The first factor in determining the mammalian stages of development is the number of brain laminations. The layering of the neocortex differs greatly between humans and other land animals. The expansion of the neocortex is always forward. This means that neocortex development can be used as a fairly accurate indicator of the evolutionary process of intelligence. We cannot assume, however, that the determining factor in comparative intelligence is neocortex mass. The other factors considered in the equation are differentiation, neural connectivity and complexity, sectional specialization, and internal structure. All these factors contribute toward interspecial measurements of intelligence.

Interspecies comparisons focus on the extent of lamination, the total cortical area, and the number and depth of neocortex convolutions. In addition, primary sensory processing relative to problem solving is a significant indicator; this can be described as associative ability. The association or connecting of ideas is a measurable skill: a rat's associative skill is measured at nine to one. This means that 90 percent of the brain is devoted to primary sensory projection, leaving only 10 percent for associative skills. A cat is one to one, meaning that half the brain is available for associative ability. A chimpanzee is one to three, and a human being is one to nine. We humans need only utilize 10 percent of our brains to operate our sensory organs. Thus the associative abilities of a cat are measurably greater than a rat but less than a chimp, and humans are the highest of all.

Not exactly. The cetacean brain averages one to twenty-five and can range upward to one to forty. The reason for this is that the much larger supralimbic lobe is primarily association cortex. Unlike humans, in cetaceans sensory and motor function control is spread outside the supralimbic, leaving more brain area for associative purposes.

Comparisons of synaptic geometry, dendritic field density, and neural connectivity underscore the humbling revelation that the cetacean brain is superior to the human brain. In addition, the centralization and differentiation of the individual cerebral areas are levels higher than the human brain. Many of us may remember our lessons from Biology 101. We were shown illustrations of the brain of a rat, a cat, a chimp, and a human. We listened as the instructor pointed out the ratio of brain to body size and the increased convolutions on the neocortex of the human over the chimp, the cat, the rat. The simplistic conclusion was an understanding that humans were smarter. Of course, it was a human demonstration of intelligence, and the conclusion was arrived at by discrimination based on the selection of the examples. When the brain model of an orca is inserted into the picture, the conclusion based on the same factors places the human brain in second position.

Unfortunately for the pride of humankind, this simple comparison is elementary compared to a truly astounding fact: whereas the human brain shares three segments with all other mammals, the cetacean brain is uniquely different in its physiology.

Humans have the rhinic, limbic, and supralimbic, with the neocortex covering the surface of the supralimbic. However, with cetaceans we see a radical evolutionary jump with the inclusion of a fourth segment. This is a fourth cortical lobe, giving a four-fold lamination that is morphologically the most significant differentiation between cetaceans and all other cranially evolved mammals, including humans. No other species has ever had four separate cortical lobes.

This well-developed extra lobar formation sandwiched between the limbic and supralimbic lobes is called the paralimbic. Considering neurohistological criteria, the paralimbic lobe is a continuation of the sensory and motor areas found in the supralimbic lobe in humans. According to Dr. Sterling Bunnell, the paralimbic lobe specializes in specific sensory and motor functions. In humans, the projection areas for different senses are widely separated from one another, and the motor area is adjacent to the touch area. For us to make an integrated perception from sight, sound, and touch, impulses must travel by long fiber tracts with a great loss of time and information. The cetacean's paralimbic system makes possible the very rapid formation of integrated perceptions with a richness of information unimaginable to us.

Despite Biology 101, brain-to-body ratio is not an indication of intelligence. If this were so, the hummingbird would be the world's most intelligent animal. Brain size in itself, however, is important, and the largest brains ever developed on this planet belong to whales. More important is the quality of the brain tissue. With four lobes, greater, more pronounced neocortex convolutions, and superior size, the brain of the sperm whale at 9,000 cc or the brain of the orca at 6,000 cc are the paragons of brain evolution on the Earth. By contrast, the human brain is 1,300 cc. And by point of interest, the brain of a Neanderthal was an average 1,500 cc.

Apart from our collective ego as a species, the idea of an Earthling species more intelligent than ourselves is difficult to swallow. We measure intelligence in strictly human terms, based on those abilities that we as a species excel at. Thus we view hand-to-eye coordination as a highly intelligent ability. We build things; we make tools and weapons, manufacture vehicles, and construct buildings. We use our brains to focus our eyes to guide our hands to force our environment to conform to our desires or our will. Whales cannot or do not do any of the things we expect intelligent creatures to do. They do not build cars or spaceships, nor can they manage investment portfolios.

Cetaceans do have built-in abilities like sonar that put our electronic sonar devices to shame. Sperm whales have even developed a sonic ray-gun, so to speak, allowing them to stun prey from a head filled with spermaceti oil to amplify and project a sonic blast. However, we expect an intelligent species to arrive in a spaceship armed with laser rayguns, bearing gifts of futuristic technologies. This is a fantasy that we can understand, that we yearn for. For us, technology is intelligence. Intelligence is not a naked creature swimming freely, eating fish, and singing in the sea.

The whale is an organic submarine. A whale may not arrive in a spaceship, but it is itself a living submersible ship. All of its technology is internal and organic. We do not accept this. The human understanding of intelligence is material. The more superior the technology, the more superior the intelligence.

Yet intelligence is relative; it evolves to fulfill the evolutionary needs of a species. All successful species are intelligent in accordance with their ecological position. In this respect, the intelligence of a crocodile or a whale, an elephant or a human is non-comparable. A complex intelligence exists within every sentient creature relevant to its needs. We as humans cannot begin to compare our elaborate intelligence to the complex intelligence of other creatures whose brains or nerves are designed for completely different functions in radically different environments.

Most modern humans believe that we are vastly more intelligent compared to our ancestors of 75,000 years ago or even 10,000 years ago. Our technology is proof, is it not? The fact is that the brain of a person living today is identical in size and composition to that of our kind from tens of thousands of years ago. If you were to set Einstein's brain beside the brain of a cave-dweller of the Paleolithic era, you would not be able to find a single difference in size or complexity.


Our technology is cumulative, the end product of millennia of trial and error. It is also exponential, and we now live in the time of the most rapid exponential growth. Individually, the average cave-dweller of the past could match the average citizen today in associative intelligence and would be as capable of learning. Our intelligence is also cultural, and the vast amount of information that we have at our disposal lies outside of ourselves as individuals. Apart from the community, we are severely limited in understanding or manipulating technologies. Left to our own resources on an undeveloped island, most of us would have absolutely no idea how to survive. We do not even have the knowledge to construct rudimentary stone tools or weapons. In this respect stone age humans would be our intellectual superiors.

If we look at the comparative intelligences of species strictly on a morphological basis, judging all aspects on cortical structural development alone, we can assign an average associative score relative to human intelligence. Let's assign the average human brain a score equal to 100. This is the number we consider average on human Intelligence Quotient (IQ) tests. Based on associative skills as defined by the physiological structure of the comparative brains, we will find that a dog scores about fifteen, and a chimpanzee around thirty-five. These are scores that are comfortably within our understanding of intelligence.

Based upon comparisons of cortical structure alone, a sperm whale would score 2,000.

The truth of the matter is that we know absolutely nothing about what goes on in the brain of a whale or a dolphin. In our ignorance, we resort to the arrogance of denial and dismissal. We deny the physiological evidence and in general we have denied that other animals can think or even feel. We forget that all mammals have climbed the evolutionary ladder with us, and some, like the whale, started climbing that ladder tens of millions of years before we evolved from that apelike ancestor that we shared with the Neanderthal, the chimp, and the mountain gorilla.

The whale has evolved in a different manner, its natural physical abilities giving it little cause to desire material baggage. The spear was not needed to get food -- the whale is one of the most efficient hunters in natural history. The whale's ability to travel, to communicate, to care for its young, and its complex social systems are all separate from external material acquisition. Whales have biologically evolved what we utilize technology to achieve. Technology is something that the whales have never needed. They contain all the assets needed for survival and development within their massive bodies and formidable brains.

Humans are big-brained manipulators. Cetaceans and elephants are big-brained non-manipulators. The hominid brain grew in size from 450 cc to 1,300 cc over a period of only five million years. Cetaceans had already reached 690 cc in brain size some thirty million years ago and had developed to their present capacity well before our own evolutionary jump in brain development.

Another major difference between the cetacean and human brain is the shape. The cranium of the whale evolved over millions of years to conform to the need for streamlined movement through the water. This need has shaped the brain, making it higher, but shortening the length front-to-back slightly. And this shape has resulted in a relatively thinner layering of the cortex that is more than compensated by the much greater surface area of the neocortex due to the tremendous in-folding of the convolutions. According to Pilleri and Gihr, dolphins, toothed whales, and primates have the most highly differentiated brains of all mammals, and Krays and Pilleri showed through electroencephalographical studies that the Amazon River dolphins have the highest degree of encephalization, much higher than primates.

Construction of the cortex was found to be equal or superior to primates. Cetaceans are the most specialized mammalian order on the planet, and we see intelligence in dozens of species. By contrast, Homo sapiens are the sole surviving hominid.


Humans may be the paramount tool-makers of the Earth, but the whale may be our paramount thinker. We can only imagine how a dolphin perceives the stars, but they may well do so better than we. Indeed, if the power of such an awesome brain could be utilized, travel to the stars might have already been achieved. The mind can travel to realms that rockets can never reach. Or perhaps they have already discovered that the ultimate destination of a voyager is to arrive back where it belongs -- in its own place within the universe.


https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYK0KTlLi6tBodZ5CKf06cNsgbBqZKhFz9g7FexFOhsKqIRQR8z16irFihZp-AYjxmk3FebkaOeozgh1ufsvIbGrw6kgb_WBkcdglMJg1BqgICjujjfy3IknEprjj5WTNgo461rq7YyOo/s1600/comp_brain_size.JPG

The desire to travel to the stars could very well be an aberration, a need within a species that has been ecologically deprived. Intelligent species here or else where in the universe may have determined that space travel is not the ultimate expression of intelligence. It may only be the ultimate expression of technology: technology and wisdom may be widely diverse expressions of different forms of intelligence.

Intelligence can also be measured by the ability to live within the bounds of the laws of ecology -- to live in harmony with one's own ecology and to recognize the limitations placed on each species by the needs of an ecosystem. Is the species that dwells peacefully within its habitat with respect for the rights of other species the one that is inferior? Or is it the species that wages a holy war against its habitat, destroying all species that irritate it? What can be said of a species that reproduces beyond the ability of its habitat to support it? What do we make of a species that destroys the diversity that sustains the ecosystem that nourishes it? How is a species to be judged that fouls its water and poisons its own food?

On the other hand, how is a species that has lived harmoniously within the boundaries of its ecology to be judged?

It is an observable fact that whales and dolphins hold a special place in the hearts of human beings. We have had an affinity with them for years, recognizing in them something that it has been difficult to put a finger upon. What we do know is that they are different from other animals, apart from them in a manner that suggests a unique quality that we can intuitively recognize. That quality is intelligence.

Recognizing this quality has profound moral responsibilities. How can humans continue to slaughter creatures of an equal or superior intelligence? The path toward the reality of interspecies communications between cetaceans and humans may lead us to the recognition that we have been committing murder.

Utilizing the computer technology of our species in company with the linguistic and associative skills of cetaceans, we may be able to talk with these beings some day soon. The key is in understanding the different evolutionary developments within two completely different brains with uniquely developed sensory modalities.

Imagine being able to see into another person's body, being able to see the flow of blood, the workings of the organs, and the flow of air into the lungs. Cetaceans can do this through echo-location. A dolphin can see a tumor inside the body of another dolphin. If an animal is drowning, this becomes instantly recognizable from being able to "see" the water filling the lungs. Even more amazing is that emotional states can be instantly detected. These are species incapable of deception, whose emotional states are open books to each other. Such biologically enforced honesty would have radically different social consequences from our own.

Sight in humans is a space-oriented distance sense which gives us complex simultaneous information in the form of analog pictures with poor time discrimination. By contrast, our auditory sense has poor space perception but good time discrimination. This results in human languages being comprised of fairly simple sounds arranged in elaborate temporal sequences. The cetacean auditory system is primarily spatial, more like human eyesight, with great diversity of simultaneous information and poor time discrimination.


For this reason, dolphin language consists of very complex sounds perceived as a unit. What humans may need hundreds of sounds strung together to communicate, the dolphin may do in one sound. To understand us, they would have to slow down their perception of sounds to an incredibly boring degree. It is for this reason that dolphins respond readily to music. Human music is more in tune with dolphin speech.

Utilizing their skill at echo-location with elaborate detailed mental images of what they "see" through auditory channels, dolphins may be able to recreate and transmit images to each other. In other words, whereas our language is analog, cetacean language is digital. With the invention of the computer, we are now communicating with each other digitally, and this may be the key to unlocking the doors of perception into cetacean communication.

The possibilities are fantastic. Instead of communicating across the vast expanse of space, we may be able to bridge the chasm between species. But we will not be able to say that "we come in peace." The tragic reality is that we will be speaking with species that we have slaughtered, enslaved, and abused. We can only hope that they will be forgiving of our ignorance.

If so, the future holds a place for the exchange of knowledge, the secrets of the seas, alternative philosophies, and unique and different perspectives. I can envision the words of the whales translated into books. Instead of just listening to the music of whale song, we will be able to understand what the songs convey. This may open up new horizons in literature, poetry, music, and oceanography.

In return, Moby Dick by Herman Melville might serve to show the whales that our species has come a long way toward peace between humankind and whalekind. The whales will learn the mysteries of the land and will be able to negotiate the release of members of their families that have been held captive for human amusement. Perhaps we can convince them that our species is not uniform in its evolution toward morality and understanding. If so, we may be able to convince them that our whalers are aberrations, throwbacks to our more barbaric origins and a collective embarrassment to our species.

Most importantly, we will learn the lesson that we cannot presume to judge intelligence based upon our own preconceptions, prejudice, and cultural biases. In so doing, we will be able to understand that we share this Earth with millions of other species, all intelligent in their own manner, and all equally deserving of the right to dwell in peace on this planet that we all call our home -- this water planet with the strange name of Earth.



“They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent."
-- D.H. Lawrence, Whales Weep Not


Bibliography and Sources:

Bunnell, Sterling. 1974. The Evolution of Cetacean Intelligence. Deacon, Terrence W. 1997. The Symbolic Species: The Coevolution of Language and the Brain. Jacobs, Myron.1974. The Whale Brain: Input and Behaviour. Lawrence, D.H. Whales Weep Not. Licino, Aldo. "Just Animals? Mammalian Studies Point to an Anatomical Basis to Intelligence." Mensa Berichten: Mensa International Journal Extra. June 1996. Lilly, John. 1961. Man and Dolphin. Morgane, Peter. 1974. The Whale Brain: The Anatomical Basis of Intelligence. Pilleri, G. Behaviour Patterns of Some Delphinidae Observed in the Western Mediterranean.Sagan, Dr. Carl. 1971.The Cosmic Connections, The Dragons of Eden. Watson, Lyall.1996. Dark Nature: The Nature of Evil. Some information based on conversations over the last two decades with Dr. Michael Bigg (orcas), Dr. John Ford (orca dialects), Dr. Roger Payne (whale communication), and Dr. Paul Spong (orcas).



From Paul Watson on Facebook @ https://www.facebook.com/captpaulwatson/photos/a.443115070931.234296.155430570931/10152578876395932/?type=1&relevant_count=1




India declares Dolphins to be "Non-Human Persons" and bans keeping them in captivity


After weeks of protest against a dolphin park in the state of Kerala and several other marine mammal entertainment facilities which were to be built this year, India has officially recognized dolphins as non-human persons, whose rights to life and liberty must be respected. Dolphin parks that were being built across the country will instead be shut down.

India's Ministry of Environment and Forests has informed state governments to ban dolphinariums and other commercial entertainment that involves the capture and confinement of cetacean species such as orcas and bottlenose dolphins. They issued a statement that said, "research had clearly established cetaceans are highly intelligent and sensitive, and that dolphins "should be seen as 'non-human persons' and as such should have their own specific rights."

India becomes the fourth country in the world to ban the capture and import of cetaceans for the purpose of commercial entertainment - along with Costa Rica, Hungary, and Chile. Three years ago, the movement began to recognize whale and dolphins as individuals with self-awareness and a set of rights. The movement gained momentum in Helsinki, Finland when scientists and ethicists drafted a Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans. "We affirm that all cetaceans as persons have the right to life, liberty and well-being," they wrote.

It has been shown that dolphins can recognize their own reflection, use tools and understand abstract concepts. They develop unique signature whistles allowing friends and family members to recognize them, similar to the way human beings use names. "They share intimate, close bonds with their family groups. They have their own culture, their own hunting practices - even variations in the way they communicate," said FIAPO's (Federation of Indian Animal Protection Organizations) Puja Mitra.


Belinda Wright from the Wildlife Protection Society of India summed the ban up this way,"I hope this will put some energy into India's Action Plan for the Gangetic Dolphin, which is supposed to run until 2020. But there's been very little action."

She added that the ban was a good first stop, but warned against excessive optimism. "I'm very proud that India has done this," she said. "I'm not trying to be cynical but I have been a conservationist in India for four decades. One gets thrilled with the wording, but I don't think it's going to turn to the tables. But dolphins for now are safe from dolphinariums, and that's a good thing."


From White Wolf Pack @ http://www.whitewolfpack.com/2013/10/india-declares-dolphins-to-be-non-human.html
 


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Monday, 11 August 2014

The Story of One Whale Who Tried to Bridge the Linguistic Divide Between Animals and Humans

The Story of One Whale Who Tried to Bridge the Linguistic Divide Between Animals and Humans

 
Noc (in 1995) strongly “wanted to make a connection,” says former naval trainer Michelle Jeffries. “I think that was part of the thing behind him mimicking speech.” (U.S. Navy)





While captive in a Navy program, a beluga whale named Noc began to mimic human speech. What was behind his attempt to talk to us?





Millions of years before we humans came along, the earth’s oceans were a vast, unbroken web of whale song. The complex courting arias of humpbacks, the distinct clicking dialects of migrating sperm-whale clans, the congalike poundings of Pacific grays, the multi-thousand-mile moans and blips of massive blue and fin whales conversing across oceans at octaves well below our range of hearing, the nearly nonstop Arctic chatter of belugas: All of them are being drowned out now by our clamor.

And yet a single beluga managed to make his voice go global again, and in the only medium left him: the worldwide web. The extraordinary history of Noc (pronounced no-see) resurrects a captive who somehow has found a way to speak to us, both literally and figuratively, of the true nature of his kind.

Since the early 1960s the United States had been deploying marine mammals, beginning with dolphins, for tasks including mine detection and recovery of test torpedoes. By the mid-1970s, the locus of the naval cold war had shifted to the Arctic, where the latest Soviet submarines were secreting themselves under the ice cap, an environment off-limits to animals including dolphins and sea lions used in the Navy Marine Mammal Program (NMMP). Experiments commenced on weaponry that could function in such extreme conditions. The Navy needed marine mammals with built-in sonar, capable of locating and retrieving sunken experimental torpedoes in the frigid waters and low visibility of the Arctic.

In August 1977, with Canadian government consent, Sam Ridgway, a Texas-born veterinarian and a co-founder of NMMP, dispatched a team to the northern coast of Manitoba. There, the Navy would procure the first belugas for a new Arctic initiative, known as “Cold Ops.” Belugas typically travel in pods of approximately 25 whales, led by a dominant male but bound by close ties between mothers and their calves. Newborns nurse for about two years and, living within a multitiered matriarchal society very similar to that of elephants, are also raised by an extended group of females.



Belugas make for obliging quarry, their affable, curious natures often leading them directly up to divers and boats. As for the vessel Ridgway had deployed that summer 37 years ago, it also contained two Inuit hunters hired to expedite the recruitment process. When a beluga approached their boat, one hunter would jump on the whale’s back and slip a lasso around its neck, like a high plains mustang. The other would then slide a floating stretcher under the whale and lead it ashore. Once there it was placed in a leak-proof crate containing a few centimeters of water and loaded onto a transport jet for immediate transfer to a netted underwater enclosure at the Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center, off Point Loma, California.

Six belugas were caught between 1977 and 1980. Among them was the 2-year-old male calf named Noc, after the tiny biting summer flies known as no-see-ums. The youngest of the Cold Op’s recruits, Noc lived virtually his entire life in captivity, working side by side with human trainers. He ended up being deployed for two top-secret Navy surveillance and retrieval programs before succumbing to meningitis in 1999 at the age of 23 while still in the Navy’s care.

Then Noc suddenly re-emerged in the form of a 20-odd-second recording, included as a mere supplement to a research paper by Ridgway, “Spontaneous Human Speech Mimicry by a Cetacean,” in the October 23, 2012, edition of the journal Current Biology.

Within days Noc’s voice was burbling from computers around the globe. He sounds, on first hearing, at least, less like a person talking than a delirious drunk humming an atonal tune through a tissue-covered comb. A goofy quotient only heightened by the photo of Noc that ran with most of the breaking news stories about him: his duck-billed and dumbstruck mouth; his deep-set, frontally fixed eyes. But the science behind Noc’s mimicry and its apparent motives reveals something far more urgent and haunting: the spectral outpourings of a young white whale calling to us across both time and the vast linguistic divide between humans and the other animals.

 
(Henry Horenstein / CORBIS)


“I’d never worked with belugas before,” Ridgway recalled as we sat in a Point Loma coffee shop one morning in March 2013. In semi-retirement now at age 77, his naturally high-pitched voice further thinned and perforated by age, he did his best at first to compete with the coffee shop’s blaring music. And then one of the world’s leading experts on the auditory powers of cetaceans stood, made his way to the service counter, and shouted at the young woman there: “I’m sorry. I’m an old man. Could you please turn that down?”

“So...” he continued upon shuffling back to our table, “when the Navy contacted me and said we’re going to start doing some stuff up in the Arctic, our program decided, well, we’ll get belugas. They spend most of their lives in those conditions. And we’d done similar work with dolphins for years, so we kind of figured belugas would be comparable.”

In one e-mail I’d received from Ridgway he enclosed some extraordinary footage of Noc and another beluga captive, Muk Tuk (after the Inuit word for whaleskin and blubber), in the course of deep-diving training tests off San Clemente Island, 70 miles west of the Southern California coast: recurring images of the two whales dutifully reporting to the side of the Navy training vessel, receiving both spoken and hand-signaled instructions, and then disappearing under the water surface.

The new Cold Ops recruits proved not only to be remarkable divers, ultimately reaching preset platforms at depths of over 2,000 feet, but pinpointing retrievers as well. Belugas evolved their precisely honed echolocation powers in order to both navigate the Arctic’s dark waters and to find available pockets of breathing air between the ocean surface and the underside of the ice cap. Pinging on mud-embedded test torpedoes proved, by comparison, an easily dispatched task. They would also learn to wield a mouthpiece with a special “grabber assembly” for retrieval of the torpedoes from the ocean floor.

Still, the most critical factor for Ridgway and his team was that the new Cold Ops trainees willingly returned to their trainers. The darker undercurrent of such fidelity, of course, was that the animals had nobody else to turn to. During training sessions at a special weapons testing range, a jointly operated Canadian-U.S. facility in Nanoose Bay off the east coast of Vancouver Island, a group of animal rights activists managed to infiltrate the base there and release Noc and Muk Tuk from their enclosure. Both whales headed at first for open water, but Noc returned of his own volition a short time later. Muk Tuk swam some 14 miles south along the coast before willingly following a pursuing Cold Ops training vessel back to base.

“They come to think of us as family,” Ridgway said. “And that’s the reason they stay with us. We have no way of completely controlling them, and yet they do their job and come back. They kind of view themselves as part of a team. Or at least we view them as seeing themselves as part of a team.”

Ridgway said he didn’t remember there being anything particularly strange or different about Noc over the course of the first seven years preceding his sudden speech episodes. He did describe him as being somewhat lazy and unfocused at first during open-sea training sessions, often delighting in purposely delaying the proceedings through an avoidance behavior known as “mucking” (diving down to suck invertebrates from the seafloor). Sometimes he’d just bow out completely, swimming the 70 miles back to his enclosure in San Diego Bay.

“I do remember Noc would often kind of sit back and watch Muk Tuk,” Ridgway offered at one point. “And then he’d get all jealous when Muk Tuk did her job and got her reward. Suddenly he’d want to have his turn. But he had to wait for Muk Tuk to finish first.”

Michelle Jeffries, one of Noc’s early trainers, presented a decidedly different picture of her young whale charge. A zoological manager of the Oakland Zoo and a co-author of the Current Biology paper on Noc, Jeffries began working with the Cold Ops belugas in 1981. Noc was 6 at that point and had, it seemed, evolved by then into the consummate team player.

“Noc really warmed my heart,” Jeffries said over lunch one afternoon in Los Angeles, where she’d just moved to assist her ailing mother. “He was very easygoing. He wanted people’s attention. He wanted you to stay around and interact with him and rub him. He didn’t try to bullshit you like some of the dolphins did. He was just glad for your time, and he was very patient. Plus being the younger one, he was a little bit more reactive, eager. Noc was the kid who was willing to try. I think that was part of the thing behind him mimicking speech. He liked watching people. He liked being around people. The connection. He wanted to make a connection. I think that was his thing. He liked the interface.”




Sam Ridgway deployed whales in the Navy Marine Mammal Program. “They come to think of us as family,” he says. “And that’s the reason they stay with us.” ( Robert Benson)



In May 1984 Ridgway and his fellow Cold Ops personnel began hearing strange noises emanating from the whales’ enclosure—sounds they would liken in the Current Biology paper to “two people conversing...just out of range for our understanding.”

“My office was on the end of a pier in San Diego Bay,” Ridgway recalled over coffee that morning. “Noc had his home enclosure next to the pier. I would hear these ‘talking sounds’ late in the day as I headed down the pier toward the parking lot. I assumed these talking sounds resulted from a conversation on one of the two adjacent piers about 150 feet away from me.”

Also that May, two Navy divers were making underwater repairs on the Point Loma whale enclosures. Throughout these sessions they would talk with their onshore dive supervisor through an audible underwater communications device known as a “wet phone.” In the middle of that day’s outing, one of the divers, a Navy veteran in his late 30s, Miles Bragget, abruptly surfaced and asked a puzzled supervisor: “Who told me to get out?” Informed of the incident later, Ridgway and his team decided to start keeping a closer eye and ear on their beluga recruits.

“After a set period of time,” Ridgway explained, “or after the divers completed a task, the supervisor would typically order them out. It was also not uncommon for Noc to be in the vicinity when the underwater communications systems were being used. But Bragget had come up at a point when the supervisor had said nothing. It turns out that Bragget heard Noc. The ‘out’ he thought he’d heard, we realized, had come from Noc. He repeated the word several times.”

“I didn’t observe Miles’ initial interaction,” Jeffries said of Bragget, who died in 1990, “but I was at the facility that day. I remember when Miles got out of the water he was sure the dive monitor and the guys around the pens were kidding him when they said they did not call him out of the water. He thought they were pulling his leg. But we realized pretty quickly what was going on, maybe because of the way Noc reacted to the divers, watching them from his pen, following them, focusing on Miles in particular. Belugas are very aware of people and their actions, especially Noc, and Miles had a nice touch with Noc. He was a gentle man. And once we figured out that it was Noc, we were all excited, laughing, and, I think, completely humbled by this amazing animal.”

Once Noc had been identified as the source of Bragget’s perceived evacuation order, Ridgway and his Marine Mammal Program cohorts began recording their precocious white whale’s by-then irrepressible speech episodes. He spoke both underwater and in open air, either spontaneously or on command, and yet only when around humans or off by himself, never with his fellow whales. Before long, Jeffries told me, she had only to point at Noc and say the word “out,” and he would start rambling away, sometimes as much as 30 or more unbroken seconds of his surreal juice-harp oratory.

There had been numerous claims in the past about the naturally vociferous beluga talking in our language as well. Until Noc, however, no one had ever had an opportunity to do the repeated observations, acoustic recordings and audio analysis required to verify what people had long believed they were hearing.

Subsequent spectrum analysis of Noc’s utterances soon revealed just how skilled a speaker he was. The rhythm and amplitude of his vocal bursts and the intervals between them were found to pattern those of human speech. His fundamental frequencies, meanwhile, also matched those of humans, registering around 200 to 300 hertz, roughly the octave of middle C, and several octaves below the white whale’s usual sounds. Noc would even yield to the repeated insertion of a device known as a “rapid response pressure catheter” into the nasal cavities and air sacs beneath his blowhole. This allowed Ridgway to get a clearer understanding of just how Noc was accomplishing his bizarre vocal acrobatics.

Belugas produce sounds by building up air pressure in the nasal cavities within their melon, the echolocation organ at the front of their heads, and then forcing the air through a set of “phonic lips” atop each cavity. The vibrations of the lips result in the whale’s typical repertoire of echolocation clicks, pulse bursts and chirp-like whistles and squeaks. Noc, Ridgway discovered, was so over-inflating his nasal cavities during his mimicry episodes that his melon would visibly distend, seemingly to the point of bursting, and all to wrench his natural speech into the precise tenor and sonic topography of our own.

“We do not claim that our whale was a good mimic compared to such well-known mimics as parrots or myna birds,” Ridgway’s Current Biology paper concludes. “However, the sonic behavior we observed is an example of vocal learning by the white whale. It seems likely that Noc’s close association with humans played a role in how often he employed his human voice, as well as in its quality.”




Navy mine-detection dolphin, Persian Gulf. (Brien Aho / U.S. Navy)


 
 
Episodes of animal mimicry have long been dismissed as “mere parroting,” a disparagement that recent research on the intelligence of parrots and a number of species, including whales, reveals to be rather narrow-minded on our part. Through a process known as “parallel evolution,” whales—some 55 million years our seniors—first developed a brain comparable to our far more recently evolved one. It’s a brain that has structures involved in functions such as self-recognition, memory, advanced socialization and language, enabling a fluency in some forever other and yet deeply parallel parlance.

“Vocal imitation, vocal learning, is a very sophisticated cognitive process,” says Lori Marino, a senior lecturer in the department of psychology at Emory University who specializes in cetacean intelligence and brain evolution. “For an animal to imitate another species takes a level of self-awareness, a level of understanding of their body and your body and the acoustics of it. Manipulating one’s vocal tract to produce a desired effect is very, very sophisticated.”

“Yes, their brains are different,” Marino adds. “The cortex is completely different. And that’s what makes them so fascinating. The old line was that their brains are just these big masses of tissue for hearing, just giant audio receivers. But there’s so much integrative cortical tissue there that does more than just receive. It brings things together, synthesizes and does complex processing in ways we obviously don’t understand yet. But it’s not as though we have this huge complex whale brain and no commensurately complex behavior. They are individuals. They have lives to lead and social relationships. They have families, and they have really good memories. And that’s something places like SeaWorld don’t want to touch because then you start getting into issues that people can really relate to.”

Navy harbor-patrol sea lion, San Diego. ( Bob Houlihan / U.S. Navy)

 
Ruby, the last surviving member of the Cold Ops belugas, now resides at SeaWorld San Diego, one of five belugas in the theme park’s “Wild Arctic” exhibit, situated just across San Diego Bay from the Point Loma enclosure where she, Noc and their fellow Cold Ops belugas spent their early years. Ruby is 36 now, exceptionally old for a captive beluga, contrary to the claim that SeaWorld trains their guides to repeat to patrons: Whales in their care live longer than those in the wild. It had long been thought that wild belugas had a life span of 20 to 35 years. But a 2006 study has now shown that they can live as long as 70 to 80 years, if not longer.

The challenge of confining such long-lived creatures accustomed to roaming as much as 100 miles of icy ocean a day in extensive, multi-tiered social groups is daunting. Recent advancements on such fronts as water circulation, tank hygiene and nutrition have vastly increased life expectancy for the likes of Ruby, and yet most captive belugas rarely live past their teens or early 20s, typically succumbing to one of various fungal and bacterial infections such as pneumonia or meningitis. Or to a noxious surfeit of human noise.

Once inside SeaWorld San Diego’s front gates, one is immediately subsumed by sound. Calypso Muzak clashes with rock ’n’ roll and these with the blaring triumphal trumpets and 60-foot-boat-slide screams from the popular water ride, Journey to Atlantis. Loudspeakers issue repeated reminders of the fast dwindling seats for upcoming shows at the Shamu and Dolphin stadiums. It’s impossible to imagine what all that sounds like to whales: creatures who can hear one another across oceans.

Only four belugas were visible in the tank as I approached, circling in the same direction before breaching, and then doing that same circuit, over and over again: a classic pathology of life in captivity or, per the SeaWorld training manual, “controlled environment.”

Down one level, there was a rare, uncontested spot at the exhibit’s underwater viewing glass. Allua, Ferdinand and Nanuq—I’d gotten their names from the guide—all swam by, as did Pearl, Ruby’s 4-year-old calf by Nanuq. But there was still no sign of Ruby.

And then, as though she’d been waiting for her own uncontested moment at the glass, a wide-smiling gray-spotted melon appeared before me. She just hovered there, her body straight upright, her head—belugas are unusual among whales in the number of unfused neck vertebrae, permitting a high degree of vertical neck movement—assuming a strangely dazed and asking tilt, like that slow-blinking alien standing on the open spaceship ramp at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Dolphin marking a practice mine, undisclosed location. (U.S. Navy)

 
“Belugas in captivity actually mute their senses,” Samantha Berg, a trainer at SeaWorld from 1990 to 1993, told me recently. “It’s so loud around them, and they don’t need to use their echolocation because they’ve been in the same tank every day and already know all the boundaries of their world. When I was working with them, my impression was that they weren’t all there, as though they were deeply bored, disinterested. They were like people with post-traumatic stress disorder. I don’t know what belugas are like in the wild, but it was almost as though they were staring at me through a veil. Like they weren’t really home.”

Diana Reiss, a professor of biopsychology at Hunter College, has spent much of her career studying cetacean cognition and communication, mostly in dolphins. “Noc had other female belugas around, but he was the only male, like the odd guy out,” Re­­iss told me. “And the question often asked: Is this an attempt to communicate or is this just mindless mimicry? I suspect that for these animals there is something very reinforcing about what they’re doing. They’re not doing it for food. But if they can get the attention of those around them by sounding like them, it may give them the social reinforcement they need. It has some social function.”

For 16 years, Toni Frohoff, a marine mammal behaviorist based in Santa Barbara, California, has studied a subset of the beluga population in the St. Lawrence estuary known as “solitary sociables”: whales separated from their families, usually because of a mother’s death at the hands of hunters or from effects of pollution, who end up gravitating to people for companionship.

Most orca and dolphin vocalizations, Frohoff has found, occur underwater. But solitary sociable wild belugas rise up out of the water when they speak to us, purposefully orienting their bodies and voices in our direction. “Wild, free-ranging belugas,” says Frohoff, “do not initiate this kind of vocal behavior, no matter how many boats and people may be around. So there’s an obvious analogy between these geographically isolated and socially deprived animals in the wild and captive belugas like Noc. We’re talking about social deprivation here, a lack of any reasonable normal interaction with his own kind. So what may seem amusing to us, or an attempt to communicate with us, is in a sadder vein a coping mechanism for him, both an outgrowth and avoidance of his own boredom.”

Samantha Berg, who now runs an acupuncture clinic with her husband in Palmer, Alaska, vividly remembers the time she heard the recording of Noc.

“It gave me chills,” she said. “There’s something about the quality of the sound that’s deeply disturbed. Like if you woke up at 3 o’clock in the morning and heard somebody screaming in distress. Whether such a sound comes from another human or not, I think there is some part of us that is able to recognize distress. I’ve heard a lot of beluga noises, and I’ve never heard a beluga sound like that.”

Four years after Noc launched into his talking spree, he just as abruptly stopped, reverting in 1999 to “Beluga” for the rest of his days in captivity. In the early 1990s, with the end of the cold war and cutbacks in defense spending, the Marine Mammal Program was greatly downsized. By then only three belugas remained in the Point Loma enclosure, Muk Tuk, Noc and Ruby. Lyl had succumbed to pneumonia only two years into his training. Chr died of a lung infection in 1984. Churchill died in 1987 of pneumonia. In April 1997, Ruby was transferred to SeaWorld, though she remains the property of the U.S. Navy.

Muk Tuk and Noc, however, were retained for a new operation, dubbed Deep Hear. It was developed to test the potential effects on marine mammals of a new type of low-frequency active sonar (LFAS), which has since been cited by more than 100 scientists as the cause of massive whale strandings. The noise often induces entire pods to surface so rapidly in an attempt to escape it, they die of a condition to which scientists had assumed whales to be immune: the bends. In 2001, Muk Tuk joined Ruby behind the glass at Wild Arctic. She died of a lung infection in 2007.

Language, however we might define it, is everything to whales. They see with it, navigate, hunt, socialize, sing, grieve and—according to one Russian scientist’s study—likely dream in it as well. Scientists in France recently recorded captive dolphins talking in their sleep. And they weren’t speaking dolphin but rather doing perfect imitations of humpback whales. Briefly trying on our babble for a time is a trifle for a young whale, like a cat batting about a ball of yarn.

Noc’s long-ago speech episodes are perhaps best thought of in that way now, the years of his outbursts having coincided—as they do in most documented instances of animal mimicry—with the period of adolescence. It’s as though he was a deeply bored teenager at once mocking us and sounding a desperate plea for help. The extraterrestrial intelligences we humans have so long sought contact with turn out to have been right here beside us all along. It’s only fitting then, somehow, that all we have left now of Noc is his human voice.


From The Smithsonian @ http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/story-one-whale-who-tried-bridge-linguistic-divide-between-animals-humans-180951437/?all&no-ist


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