Inside our quest to talk to dolphins

The big question out here that we're trying to address is one of the Rosetta Stones in animal behavior. How do we communicate with the thousands and thousands of species that surround our planet? In this case we're focusing on wild spotted dolphins. Dolphins have really complex relationships. They teach their young. They can understand abstract concepts. They can problem solve. And they have complex politics. We want to know how dolphins communicate within their own society. And to do that you have to go under the water where they live. My work was really driven by women like Jane Goodall, Diane Fossey. The scientists who went out in the field and just decided to sit somewhere with a community of animals and see what would emerge from that. Because I was young and naive enough to go, well, I think I'll do that with dolphins. Denise Herzing is a pioneer in the study of dolphin communication. In the 1990s we started noticing that the dolphins were doing very specific attempts to interact with us by mimicking postural behaviors and sometimes what we thought were sound mimics. And because people had developed keyboards in captivity to try to bridge the gap between primates and dolphins, we thought, wow, could we do something like that in the wild? Dolphins make basically three types of sounds. One are frequency modulated whistles, which are basically long distance communication signals. They make clicks, which are their sonar. And finally they make burst pulse sounds, which are clumps of clicks that are close proximity social sounds. Our hearing range extends from about 100 hertz to 15 kilohertz. Dolphins' hearing range goes from 100 hertz to about 150 kilohertz. So ten times the range that we have. For us, if we're in the water, the sound seems to be coming from everywhere. You hear sounds, but you don't know where they are. This system, for the first time, really solves that problem. Now you can pinpoint and say, that animal produced that whistle. So that's really exciting. These are two animals and they're both vocalizing. For example, you could look at mother calf development. They can say, well here, that's the mom, and maybe that's the calf imitating or learning. The chat system that we've created is the only one in the world. This is the only place in the world where this is occurring. We have a keyboard for the marine biologists to cue up different sounds to play to the dolphin. We have a 3D printed underwater speaker, and then we also have two underwater microphones. Dolphins! It's an acoustic keyboard. One diver in. So we play sounds, we associate them with objects. If I'm in the water and Adam's in the water with a box, we request toys from each other using the system. I would press the key for scarf. If I wanted the scarf from Adam, he would give me the scarf. This is happening when the dolphins are around. The idea is to do that back and forth enough, the dolphins get the idea, oh, if I make this sound, will I get a scarf? So if the dolphins mimic the sound, the computer would recognize that and tell us real time in the water that someone has made a mimic of that sound. And then we would take the appropriate behavior off of the object that was requested and try to build the rapport that way. It's a bit like Close Encounters of a Third Kind, where you're playing the sounds and you get a response back and you're going back and forth and back and forth until you finally figure out what the matchup is. And then you start really to communicate about stuff and you talk into a different species then. As of last season, we had spent three pretty solid years taking the boxes in with semi-regular individual dolphins and exposing them to the communication system so that we could look at how are they really trying to respond if they are and is our technology adequate to capture it. Unfortunately, the answer was our technology isn't adequate to capture it. Hive is really a visual and acoustic representation of the lives of now four generations of dolphins and all the details that go with it. Last year, we were in one of our sessions, we were playing these games with the dolphins and nothing jumped out during the session. But as we looked at the sounds after the session, we saw that they were actually trying to mimic the sound of Sargassum. They were mimicking the sound in a very unique and new way. It was way up in frequency, so in the ultrasonic, that we couldn't hear in the water. And then I actually went back in all the old data and all the files and sure enough, there they were, mimicking our sounds. This is well within our hearing range. Shortly after, we see all this information in the high frequency, so this is all above human hearing range. So this was actually the big discovery, that they actually were trying all this time to mimic in these unique ways and we're just deaf, we don't hear that. And who knows where it'll lead. It could lead to an understanding of not only dolphins, but other species. Look at some of the tsunamis where the elephants are walking up the hill because they can sense infrasound. I mean, wouldn't it be cool if you could have a communication system to get help from species that have other sensory systems? If we can describe the process of trying to bridge a gap between another non-primate-like species, who knows where that will lead. That could be something helping us explore the galaxy.