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Speaker 1 Hey, this is Radio Lab.

Speaker 8 I'm Leftif Nasser. Over the last year, there has been a cascade of headlines about scientists trying to use AI to translate animal languages into a form we can understand.

Speaker 8 At this very moment, brilliant scientists and sophisticated algorithms are trying to decipher the snuffles of pigs, the honks of geese, the squeaks of mice, the barks of dogs, the caws of crows, the moos of cows, the clucks of chickens, the chirps of fruit bats, the meows of cats, and the songs of sperm whales.

Speaker 8 Those are just the ones that have been reported in the last year or so. But turns out, people have been trying to listen and talk across the species divide for way longer than that.

Speaker 8 Today, we bring you a Radiolab story originally broadcast in 2014 about what is, I would argue, the greatest and most shocking of these stories.

Speaker 8 And what's even better is, it's told by a human in the first person, someone who is right there.

Speaker 8 Might not be appropriate for younger kids or more sensitive listeners.

Speaker 8 But with that warning, here you go.

Speaker 13 Hello from Radiolab.

Speaker 8 That's how you say enjoy in Dolphinies.

Speaker 8 I think.

Speaker 13 Wait, you're listening.

Speaker 9 I'm listening to Radio Lab.

Speaker 10 Radio Lab from

Speaker 16 Hello, this is Lynn. Someone on the other side of this?

Speaker 9 Hey!

Speaker 3 So, a couple months ago, our producer Lynn Levy did an interview with this woman.

Speaker 16 Yeah, her name is Margaret Lovett. Yes.
And this was Margaret's first time doing a radio interview.

Speaker 19 That magic voice.

Speaker 9 This is so fun.

Speaker 16 But this was definitely not her first time talking into a microphone.

Speaker 20 One, two, three, four. this is the yellow mic.

Speaker 21 One, two, three, four, this is the orange mic.

Speaker 16 Almost exactly 50 years ago.

Speaker 22 The following recording was made on November 19, 1964

Speaker 22 at 2,300 hours.

Speaker 16 Margaret was at the center of this amazing, weird experiment.

Speaker 24 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 16 Who were you at that time? Like, what were you like?

Speaker 25 Well, I've always had a bit of, if everybody's going left, I'll go right.

Speaker 16 She tried college for a while.

Speaker 25 Tulane University for a year.

Speaker 26 But she dropped out.

Speaker 25 And I was, what, 20 or 19 or something at that point.

Speaker 16 And moved to St. Thomas in the Caribbean.

Speaker 25 I'd never been to an island.

Speaker 16 Got a job at this hotel.

Speaker 25 Did menus, checked people in and out.

Speaker 16 And one day she hears about this strange research facility on the other side of the island.

Speaker 18 And I thought, I wonder what that is about.

Speaker 25 And I asked a few people, and they said, oh, no, no. They don't like people there.

Speaker 19 Can't go there.

Speaker 25 And I was told not to go there, so I went there.

Speaker 25 Hmm.

Speaker 9 And that's how it all started.

Speaker 3 That's how we're going to start this show. I'm Jad Abumran.

Speaker 11 I'm Robert Krillowich.

Speaker 3 Today on Radio Lab, producer Lind Levy brings us a couple of close encounters. Although not with aliens.

Speaker 11 No, it's not in outer space. It's much closer to home in this case.

Speaker 3 Although they are kind of alien-like.

Speaker 11 Yes, alien-like.

Speaker 3 Not

Speaker 10 alienate. It's a dolphin.

Speaker 9 Yes, that's

Speaker 9 shows about dolphins.

Speaker 3 Hey.

Speaker 3 We're calling this hour.

Speaker 2 Hello.

Speaker 16 So when Margaret got to this mysterious place, there were dolphins there. And

Speaker 16 what happened was she ended up becoming roommates with a dolphin.

Speaker 3 Do you mean in the like Betsy one-bedroom apartment sense?

Speaker 16 Sort of, yeah. She did end up living with a dolphin for many months in this apartment.

Speaker 23 I-E-A-E.

Speaker 27 The apartment apartment? Mm-hmm.

Speaker 16 Had a little desk, had a little kitchen area with a stove.

Speaker 25 I think it was a little two-burner stove or something. And a pot and a tea kettle.

Speaker 16 But the thing that's a little bit weird about the apartment is that the whole apartment was filled with water.

Speaker 9 It was was completely filled?

Speaker 25 Well, I wasn't submerged, but I was in water up mid-thigh, sort of.

Speaker 16 It was just flooded with water.

Speaker 9 Just about there.

Speaker 16 So she could share it with this dolphin.

Speaker 18 A young male Peter.

Speaker 21 His Royal Highness Peter.

Speaker 16 Peter was a 10-foot-long bottlenose dolphin, young adolescent male. And he lived there with Margaret.
And like he would, you know, he could like swim under the desk and there was a balcony.

Speaker 16 He could like swim out onto the balcony.

Speaker 3 And the balcony was flooded too?

Speaker 16 The balcony was also flooded. Yeah, it's really cool.

Speaker 10 And what was the idea?

Speaker 3 I mean, to try and study a dolphin?

Speaker 16 To study the dolphin,

Speaker 16 first of all, and take a lot of notes.

Speaker 25 Extensive notes.

Speaker 16 Did you have waterproof paper?

Speaker 9 No.

Speaker 18 I had a typewriter on this board hanging from the ceiling. They also had microphones everywhere.

Speaker 16 And specifically, the task she was given

Speaker 16 was to teach Peter to speak English.

Speaker 3 And she was supposed to teach the dolphin English? Yep.

Speaker 2 Really?

Speaker 25 Well, I mean, this was John Lilly's project.

Speaker 16 Just for some context, you know how people get all like a little bit crazy these days about dolphins?

Speaker 16 They have like, you know, shirts with dolphins and necklaces with dolphins and everybody has like dolphin hairbands, dolphin blacklight posters, right?

Speaker 16 So this all kind of sort of comes from this guy, John Lilly, who was a scientist, a researcher starting in the 40s.

Speaker 29 A total right stuff physics major kind of guy out of Caltech.

Speaker 16 Man's man, according to Graham Burnett.

Speaker 29 I'm a historian of science.

Speaker 16 But then, according to Graham, John Lilly has this epiphany.

Speaker 29 During the Second World War.

Speaker 16 At the time, people just weren't thinking that much about dolphins in general. Like, there was not this idea that they were sort of extraordinary beings.
They were just like big, dumb fish.

Speaker 16 You know, they were shot for sport.

Speaker 16 So, John Lilly is doing this research about brain mapping, and he ends up working with dolphins. And

Speaker 16 the story that he's he's told goes that he was experimenting on these dolphins and as he's working with them, you know, kind of like shoving things into their brains, they make noises, as would anyone.

Speaker 16 And when he listens back to the noises, which he's recorded, it sounds to him like the dolphins are trying to speak to him.

Speaker 16 to say something to him in not in a not in a dolphiny way, but in a human way, like trying to speak English to him.

Speaker 23 Really? Yeah.

Speaker 3 What did he say the dolphin was trying to say to him?

Speaker 16 I don't think that we know that, but it sounded to him enough like human speech that he thought like something's going on here. This is important.

Speaker 16 According to Graham, he said later that it made him realize like we're not.

Speaker 29 We're not the only intelligent organisms out there.

Speaker 16 Like we have company.

Speaker 29 That maybe humans are what happens when high intelligence evolves in an animal that also has hands.

Speaker 29 And dolphins are what happens when comparably, if not still more extravagant intelligence, evolves in an animal without hands.

Speaker 16 What do hands get you?

Speaker 29 Well hands basically get you an appetite for punching people in the head.

Speaker 29 You know it makes us tool users, but the distance between

Speaker 29 the hammer that you use to knock open your coconut and the hammer that you use to knock open the head of that other Cro-Magnon you were never that keen on is, in fact, zilch.

Speaker 29 There's no difference at all.

Speaker 29 By the time it got to the 60s, with you know, like peace and love, it was exciting to think the dolphins and the whales have these huge brains, but they don't like they're not after anything, they're not doing anything with it, they're not trying to hurt anybody, they're not building cities, they're just like being, man.

Speaker 16 And keep in mind, this is on the verge of the Vietnam War, where you have all this anxiety about

Speaker 16 overpopulation, environmental destruction.

Speaker 23 What have they done to our affairs?

Speaker 16 So very quickly, the dolphins become like this vision.

Speaker 29 Of how we might ourselves be so different

Speaker 29 than we'd come to feel we were, tragically. Does that make sense?

Speaker 16 So John Lilly was one of the first people to get swept up in all this.

Speaker 16 He quits his government job, moves to the Caribbean, and sets up this lab, John Lilly's Communication Research Institute, to try to talk to dolphins, which is where Margaret ended up.

Speaker 25 And my feeling was this, that everybody was talking about how bright they were and how smart they were, and it was dolphins, dolphins, dolphins, and then it was the hot topic.

Speaker 25 And yet every day, everybody at that building would get in their car and go home.

Speaker 23 Yeah.

Speaker 19 And I thought, what is that?

Speaker 16 So she volunteered to stay. Yeah, yeah.
Her bed was on this kind of wooden platform in the middle of the apartment.

Speaker 25 I was maybe two and a half, three inches above the water, and Peter was right there, And Peter could flip me a little water and wake me up at any point. And that was the whole point of it.

Speaker 25 I mean, this wasn't just sleep all night and then, excuse me, work in the day and then sleep again all night and then do some work in the day.

Speaker 19 I might as well go home.

Speaker 19 So I eventually,

Speaker 25 I didn't really shave my head, but I buzzed it, whatever it's called now, really close. Because any, you know, the hair getting wet thing in the middle of the night was very annoying.
Yeah, of course.

Speaker 25 So I just got rid of the hair, and that was helpful.

Speaker 25 And then when Peter would come and squirt some water or want to play or throw something at me, then I could just roll off this elevator into the water and be with him and do whatever.

Speaker 16 She says he was fascinated by the things she brought with her.

Speaker 25 A piece of cloth, a tea bag. Tea bag was a fascinating thing.
I drank, I drink tea,

Speaker 25 and the tea bag would fall into the water. And he would come and get it and

Speaker 25 sonar it, this creaking noise they make when they're sonaring. And he'd look at it and take the string over his beak and sort of swim around very proudly with his tea bag.

Speaker 25 And then he'd throw it up against a wall and it would stick. And then he'd squirt water on it and it would come back down into the water and he would play with this tea bag.

Speaker 25 Eventually, of course, he would bite it. He has very sharp teeth and it would break.
And that was a very exciting thing when the tea bag finally broke open.

Speaker 25 It had babies, as it were, gazillions of tea leaves floating around. And he would sonar them all and want to count every single one of them.

Speaker 16 And what did you think you would find out?

Speaker 14 I didn't know.

Speaker 25 You know, I was not coming at this from a science

Speaker 25 point of view. That's not what I was bringing to the table.

Speaker 23 Yeah.

Speaker 25 I just, I just, I had no idea. I

Speaker 25 was

Speaker 25 programmed by John to work on the speech.

Speaker 25 He had sort of declared that they could probably speak.

Speaker 14 A E I O

Speaker 25 Look, when you're trying to have a conversation with someone.

Speaker 14 Peter,

Speaker 20 Peter, listen.

Speaker 25 One person speaks,

Speaker 24 and the other one listens.

Speaker 25 And then you speak and I listen. And people sort of normally do that back and forth.

Speaker 25 But when you start with a dolphin making airborne sounds, once they get the idea, there's a lot of screaming that goes on.

Speaker 25 They're very show-offy, and they want to override you.

Speaker 25 I am not.

Speaker 25 No, Peter.

Speaker 25 So you have to spend a lot of time getting it down to, I'm talking now. I can speak now.

Speaker 25 And now it's your turn.

Speaker 25 I can speak now.

Speaker 25 And yet, if he's upset about something, he'll override you.

Speaker 22 Peter. And it's annoying.

Speaker 20 Now listen again.

Speaker 20 No. Ah, what's this? Come on, Peter.

Speaker 20 One, two, three.

Speaker 20 Three.

Speaker 20 Now start again.

Speaker 20 One, two, three.

Speaker 23 Yes, one more.

Speaker 25 But he learned very quickly to listen to me.

Speaker 20 One, two, three, four.

Speaker 20 Yes, baby.

Speaker 20 Good.

Speaker 25 And not to pick up my instructions. If I would say, no, no, no, Peter, I don't want you to do that.
I want you to do this, this, this.

Speaker 25 He would give me back this, this, this.

Speaker 18 A parrot will often say, no, no, no, Polly want a cracker.

Speaker 25 They will repeat the whole thing of whatever you said.

Speaker 25 but peter would would pick up what i wanted when he was being a good student and he was a good student there seemed to be

Speaker 25 with this one dolphin anyway i can't speak for all of them an interest in in what we were doing

Speaker 25 he wanted to practice he wanted to get it right he uh there was a mirror and he would spend long periods of time by himself didn't want me to be part of it.

Speaker 25 And he would practice whatever it was we had been doing in the lesson that day.

Speaker 19 Over and over and over and over.

Speaker 25 He wanted to get it right.

Speaker 19 That's not right.

Speaker 25 And he would work at that for no reason. He's not getting fish.
I'm not interacting with him.

Speaker 25 He just wants it right.

Speaker 16 Like doing homework.

Speaker 19 Like homework, exactly.

Speaker 16 And after a few months of this,

Speaker 16 Peter did did start to sound really different.

Speaker 20 One, two,

Speaker 20 three,

Speaker 20 one, two, three.

Speaker 24 He kept getting better.

Speaker 25 It's extremely difficult for them.

Speaker 23 Hello.

Speaker 25 They just have a blowhole. They do not have the apparatus to really...

Speaker 25 S's are almost impossible.

Speaker 25 I would feed him my name,

Speaker 21 and M is very hard.

Speaker 25 He would eventually roll over almost into the water with the blowhole to muffle a

Speaker 16 kind of a thing. Really? You're saying he would use the water as a way to help him make the sound? Yes.

Speaker 31 With that word.

Speaker 24 And

Speaker 16 he knew that was your name?

Speaker 16 I don't know.

Speaker 25 But nevertheless, we were a pretty good match.

Speaker 25 I knew his mood, his temperament, and he knew mine. He knew when I was sick and I would get sick.

Speaker 18 You're in the water all the time.

Speaker 25 You're bound to get a cold or something.

Speaker 25 He just loved my anatomy. He wanted to know what my knees were doing.

Speaker 25 He would go behind my knee and sonar and look at it and feel it and push it and find out which way it would and wouldn't go. He just, and I gave him the time,

Speaker 25 because I wasn't going home,

Speaker 25 to look at my knee, to look at my feet. He was enormously interested,

Speaker 25 oddly enough, in the space between my fingers.

Speaker 19 Really?

Speaker 25 Not the fingers so much, but he would, I mean, you know, his beak could just barely fit there, but he wanted to put in between each finger and see what that was all about. The same with the toes.

Speaker 25 He didn't have any spaces anywhere. Yeah.
You know, he had solid flippers, but no space in between them.

Speaker 16 Do you think he was so interested in your fingers and toes because he didn't have any?

Speaker 25 Yes, I do.

Speaker 16 Margaret and Peter ended up spending about nine months living together. But towards the end, things kind of started to unravel.
First of all, there weren't really results from this experiment.

Speaker 16 They never were able to publish any scientific papers. And there were other problems.
Lily got very involved in drugs, especially.

Speaker 25 LSD, he did bring it down. He did

Speaker 25 give LSD. He says he did, I believe him to two of the dolphins.
I would not let him give LSD to Peter.

Speaker 18 I wouldn't allow that.

Speaker 3 Why would he give them LSD?

Speaker 5 Well,

Speaker 16 it's not 100% clear, but it seems like he was trying to find a way to get the dolphins to open up, to connect, maybe to talk. In any case, by 1965, 66, his funding had started to dry up.

Speaker 16 And when people heard about Margaret's work, they tended to focus on like one particular part of the story.

Speaker 16 You don't have to answer, but a lot has been made of your

Speaker 16 sort of sexually engaging with Peter. And I just want to ask, because you don't seem like a shrinking violet, I just want to ask, is there anything you want to say about that?

Speaker 25 What would I like to say about that?

Speaker 19 I think

Speaker 25 the sensational side of it is is Here's what Margaret told me.

Speaker 16 Peter was a young dolphin. He was horny and he would hump her leg a lot, kind of like a dog might do, which was getting in the way of their work.

Speaker 25 So eventually I just said the heck with it.

Speaker 16 And she'd use her hand to,

Speaker 18 you know.

Speaker 25 And it would quickly satisfy him and then we could go back to doing what we were doing. And I never really gave it another thought.

Speaker 19 I never thought, ooh, don't let anybody know.

Speaker 25 I never thought, ooh, this shouldn't be. I never thought that.

Speaker 16 But because of details like this this and the drugs, this experiment became extremely controversial,

Speaker 16 almost untouchable. People didn't want to be associated with Lily.
Nobody wanted to fund anything that sounded like Lily. It just got this like aura of...

Speaker 10 Don't go there. Don't go there.

Speaker 16 Even people who wanted to do really rigorous work with human dolphin communication had a tough time getting any funding.

Speaker 16 And that lasted for a long time.

Speaker 16 And the thing is, even though there are so many reasons to disapprove of this experiment,

Speaker 16 when you talk to Margaret, you can't

Speaker 16 help but want to be in that apartment with them.

Speaker 25 He would come over, and when he was in what I call his sweet mood, and Peter had a lot of very, very sweet mood to him,

Speaker 25 he would sink to the bottom and take my foot in his mouth. And he wasn't sonaring and he wasn't looking at anything.
It was almost like a little kid comes and just wants to hold your hand.

Speaker 25 And he would just sink to the bottom and close his eyes and just hang on to my foot.

Speaker 25 And then he'd have to come up and

Speaker 13 breathe.

Speaker 25 And then he'd go back down and he'd just grab my foot.

Speaker 24 And he would do this for a good while.

Speaker 11 We'll be back in a moment with another encounter.

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Speaker 3 Hey, I'm Jad Applemarod.

Speaker 11 I'm Robert Krolwich.

Speaker 3 This is Radiolab, and today...

Speaker 12 Hello. Yes.

Speaker 11 Or as a dolphin might say.

Speaker 3 How would a dolphin say it?

Speaker 10 I don't know. Well, you know what?

Speaker 3 That is exactly kind of the question of this next segment. I mean, the dream that a human being can talk to a dolphin or any animal really, get in their heads and cross that gap.

Speaker 11 This is a dream that humans have had since like forever.

Speaker 3 Yeah, St. Francis of Assisi goes way back.
Now insofar as dolphins are concerned, after the John Lilly situation, researchers did get a little tepid.

Speaker 11 Yeah, but they didn't stay tepid, as you say, for long.

Speaker 26 No.

Speaker 3 Because along came this woman.

Speaker 33 Dr. Denise Herzeg, director of the Wild Dolphin Project.

Speaker 3 Who basically decided to take John Lilly's experiment and flip it. Rather than have the dolphin speak English, let's have the humans speak dolphin.

Speaker 3 Or at the very least, let's create a shared language where humans and dolphins can speak.

Speaker 16 Or at least whistle.

Speaker 33 Well, you know, it's about finding, finding a place you can meet.

Speaker 3 Back to producer Lynn Levy.

Speaker 16 Okay, so for Denise, this dream of finding that meeting spot, It goes back to when she was a little girl.

Speaker 33 Well, when I was 12 years old, I used to page through the Encyclopædia Britannica in the days when we had books and I would always stop at the whale and dolphin page look at the dolphins and go wow I wonder what their brains are like because they've evolved in the water.

Speaker 16 Were you that when you were 12? I was I was I was a total nerd.

Speaker 33 In fact I entered this contest in Minnesota like what would you do for the world if you could do something and I actually wrote I would build a human animal translator so we could figure out what was going on in the minds of animals.

Speaker 32 So yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 33 I got the bug early and here I am.

Speaker 11 Were you having a fantasy about what you might learn?

Speaker 24 A fantasy?

Speaker 33 No, I was just curious. So I don't know, you look in their eyes, there's definitely something behind there.
You just want to know what it is.

Speaker 16 Fast forward many years, Denise got a boat.

Speaker 23 And I went out to the Bahamas.

Speaker 16 She was like, if I'm going to study these dolphins, I'm going to do it in the wild. That's where they live.
So she tracked down a pod of wild dolphins.

Speaker 26 Yep.

Speaker 16 Yep. And she just tried to blend in.

Speaker 33 I actually anchored the boat in one spot most of the time.

Speaker 16 This spot in the Bermuda Triangle.

Speaker 26 In the middle of, I call it the Dolphin Highway.

Speaker 16 Where dolphins come and go.

Speaker 33 They could come by if they wanted to, and if they didn't, they didn't.

Speaker 16 When they would come by, she and her team would just slip into the water.

Speaker 33 And behave ourselves.

Speaker 16 Just sort of watch, paying attention to who was who, which dolphin had a crooked fin, which one didn't.

Speaker 33 And when they'd leave, we'd get out and that's really how we operated for the first five years and it worked.

Speaker 12 Five years?

Speaker 3 She spent five years just watching? Not doing anything else? Yes.

Speaker 11 Doesn't this take an enormous amount of patience?

Speaker 33 Well, sure, I mean, but after about five years they started realizing, well, these guys aren't gonna grab us and poke us and prod us. So they started just going about their own business.

Speaker 33 Like feeding, mating, nursing, and talking.

Speaker 16 Or at least making a lot of noises.

Speaker 16 Which she and her team would record.

Speaker 16 Wow, that's all dolphins.

Speaker 33 All dolphin makes things.

Speaker 16 They make all these things. Yeah, like that.
That's like there's like a clicking, kind of queaking sound that they make.

Speaker 19 Ooh.

Speaker 37 It sounds like a zipper. Zipper, yeah.

Speaker 16 Yeah, they make like whistles that are more kind of distinct, and then they make sounds that are like longer and weirder.

Speaker 3 And do you have any sense that each of these sounds means something different?

Speaker 16 Well, that's exactly what we don't know.

Speaker 33 I could tell you what kinds of sounds are correlated with fighting and with mating or disciplining a calf. What we don't know is, are there detailed kind of words in there?

Speaker 33 Is there more kind of encoded information?

Speaker 16 But what they do know is that each dolphin seems to have its own kind of signature whistle.

Speaker 33 Which is basically a name. Every individual has its own name.

Speaker 18 Peter had a name.

Speaker 25 Nobody's ever asked me that.

Speaker 16 Here's Margaret again.

Speaker 18 And his name was.

Speaker 25 Really? It is almost saying Peter here.

Speaker 18 Right.

Speaker 33 So I can call you Lynn by your whistle and you Robert by your whistle.

Speaker 3 So I could be a dolphin going,

Speaker 11 Lynn.

Speaker 11 Exactly.

Speaker 24 Do they do that?

Speaker 26 They do. Huh.

Speaker 16 Not only that, apparently dolphins will use the names of other dolphins who aren't even around, like they can't see them.

Speaker 3 Like they'll talk about each other behind their backs?

Speaker 16 Yes, maybe.

Speaker 3 Well, that means that they're

Speaker 3 using representations of things which aren't in front of them, which is sort of like the beginning of language.

Speaker 16 If that's what they're doing and we don't know, but if that's what they're doing, then yeah, that's kind of like the edge of language.

Speaker 33 So, you know, it gives us hope that there's probably more information going on there than we know.

Speaker 16 And now,

Speaker 16 finally,

Speaker 16 she has that

Speaker 16 device.

Speaker 16 Which device again? The magical, you know, human-animal translator device that she was dreaming of writing about when she was 12.

Speaker 16 She has this box that can generate dolphin noises and it can recognize dolphin noises.

Speaker 16 And if it works the the way that you know that she's dreaming it'll work, it could be the first like real two-way back-and-forth conversation between a human

Speaker 27 and a wild animal.

Speaker 33 So we're looking forward to this summer and getting out and getting more data and really exercising the boxes and see what happens.

Speaker 33 Good, we're ready.

Speaker 26 So I

Speaker 16 beg my way aboard. Everybody good? Seasick pills and tummies?

Speaker 16 We left on July 8th from Florida

Speaker 16 and headed for the Bahamas to see this pod that she's been following kind of forever.

Speaker 33 Almost 30 years now.

Speaker 16 Boat is called the RV Stanella.

Speaker 16 Stanella is the scientific name for this particular type of dolphin, the spotted dolphin. Have you seen a spotted dolphin? I've never seen one in person.

Speaker 3 What is this boat like?

Speaker 16 It's like not a tiny boat, but it's not a big boat. And it was just absolutely full of humans.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 11 who are your humans?

Speaker 16 Well, there's Denise, obviously. That's a god.
And you got a captain.

Speaker 39 My name's Kier Smith.

Speaker 16 First mate. Danielle.
Research assistants. Allison Myers, Les Mason.

Speaker 26 Bethany Ollier.

Speaker 16 Nathan Skripchak. Volunteers.
Drew Mayer. There's an acoustics expert.

Speaker 37 Matthias Hoffman.

Speaker 16 For a long time, I couldn't even figure out where everybody was sleeping because the boat seemed so small. I was like, there is not room for all these people on this boat.

Speaker 37 Behind you, there's a hot soldering iron next to the fridge.

Speaker 16 And I haven't even gotten to this guy. Don't get into him.

Speaker 16 His name is Thad Starner. So you didn't have like any dolphin experience before this, right?

Speaker 23 Oh, hell no.

Speaker 16 He's one of the guys who invented Google Glass.

Speaker 37 I became a computer programmer, so I'd never have to leave air conditioning, right? And I'm out here in what is this, 100-degree weather.

Speaker 16 To do what? So his job on the boat is to, he's in charge of these boxes.

Speaker 37 Those boxes probably cost us $100K at this point.

Speaker 23 We're looking for funding.

Speaker 12 Looking for funding.

Speaker 16 So he's the tech whiz. When he came down to visit my lab, I was telling about the two-way work and the difficulty with underwater stuff, and he said, Oh, I build wearable computers.

Speaker 26 I says, Oh, can you build me an underwater wearable computer?

Speaker 37 That shouldn't be hard.

Speaker 37 Four years later.

Speaker 11 What does this machine look like that you buy?

Speaker 16 It looks like a toaster, like one of those fancy chrome toasters, except you wear it on your chest.

Speaker 37 Are they silvery and fun?

Speaker 16 They are silvery. They have a bunch of sort of knobs and buttons and speakers on them.

Speaker 33 It's got pre-programmed whistles in it. I can punch a key and projects.

Speaker 33 Whistle A. Here whistle B.

Speaker 26 Here whistle C.

Speaker 16 She's programmed in signature whistles of some of the dolphins.

Speaker 12 Rat, Pellet, Bijou.

Speaker 33 And

Speaker 33 we made signature whistles for ourselves.

Speaker 23 Oh.

Speaker 3 She can call their names and they can call her names. That's what you're saying?

Speaker 16 That is the idea, yeah. And if they do call her name, this name that she's made for herself, then the box should be able to recognize it and can tell her that she's been called by name.

Speaker 16 It'll actually say into her ear in English, Denise.

Speaker 33 This is real-time, I call it real-time sound recognition, but it's real-time whistle recognition underwater.

Speaker 3 How does, if she's made up this name for herself, how is it that they're going to know that that's her name?

Speaker 16 Well, the idea is that they're learning. So she gets into the water over and over and she says, you know, the equivalent of, hi, I'm Denise.
Hi, I'm Denise, over and over and over. And they learn it.

Speaker 16 You know, they develop this.

Speaker 3 Oh, like maybe they'll just start to use it and call her. Yeah.

Speaker 26 So you hope they call you.

Speaker 33 I'd be really sad if they didn't call my name.

Speaker 3 But I guess at the very least, she could call their names and see how they react.

Speaker 10 Right.

Speaker 11 Well, see, that would be a Eureka moment, I think, if you hit the Lolita button and Lolita suddenly...

Speaker 33 turned and looked right at you with a shock of exactly what the heck wow that human called me by my signature whistle whoa has that happened yet it hasn't happened yet

Speaker 16 And this is something I just did not appreciate. For a while, I was on this boat, I was like, why is this so hard? Like, this seems like it should be...
These people are so smart.

Speaker 16 Like, this should be easy, but they're just like constantly being defeated by the ocean, basically, which and the ocean is like a

Speaker 16 worthy foe, but it's like the first year.

Speaker 37 The first year was a complete disaster trying to get the hardware to work.

Speaker 23 What happened the first year?

Speaker 3 Everything broke.

Speaker 16 It was leak city. Basically, the boxes just kept shutting down as soon as they would get in the the water.

Speaker 10 That's not good.

Speaker 16 It's not good. That's sort of not what you want.

Speaker 24 No.

Speaker 26 And last year...

Speaker 37 We had the boxes working, but then we couldn't find the dolphins.

Speaker 16 The dolphins just disappeared. Where did they go?

Speaker 33 You know, they went 100 miles away to another location.

Speaker 26 They don't know why.

Speaker 37 I kept up with my side of the DLDDs.

Speaker 3 Your dolphins stood you up.

Speaker 16 And one of the reasons I was on the boat is it felt like everybody was thinking like, this is it. This is the year.
We're going to go out there.

Speaker 16 We're going to find some dolphins and we're going to make some history.

Speaker 16 You ready?

Speaker 24 Ready, excited.

Speaker 16 Now.

Speaker 26 Any minute now.

Speaker 16 Okay, it turns out it's not that easy to find these dolphins. They're not tagged, you know, they're wild dolphins.
So you just like you go to where you think they might be.

Speaker 39 Did you know that song?

Speaker 16 You stare at the water and you wait.

Speaker 16 Yeah, what is that?

Speaker 16 For the first three days, pretty much, we were just driving around.

Speaker 16 In circles, like literally in circles. You know, I feel like I had like a

Speaker 16 five-hour conversation about Game of Thrones. I've never even seen an episode of Game of Thrones.
Any dolphins? Any dolphins anywhere?

Speaker 23 Oh, right.

Speaker 16 No.

Speaker 16 There's nothing else to do.

Speaker 39 Dolphins, come on, dolphins. We need you now.
Come on, dolphins, come on, dolphins, come on, dolphins.

Speaker 23 To kick in.

Speaker 14 Dolphins.

Speaker 16 See a piece of seaweed that would look like a dolphin.

Speaker 16 A wave that looks like a dolphin.

Speaker 16 I have to say that I'm like, everything looks like a dolphin to me right now.

Speaker 16 There are days like that.

Speaker 23 Oh yeah, they are right there.

Speaker 16 All of a sudden out on the water we see one fin, two fins, three fins.

Speaker 26 Five, six, seven, eight, nine.

Speaker 16 Oh, there's so many of them and they're so cool. As we're all standing there watching them, Denise turns to me and she goes, you want to go in?

Speaker 26 I don't know, do you recommend it?

Speaker 16 And I was not prepared for her to say that. And also, I was holding recording equipment and everything.
And so I just, I ended up just having to go in like in my clothes. Like

Speaker 16 wearing like my shorts and like a bra. And I had like, I, all modesty aside, like thrown aside, they were like, you can go in.

Speaker 23 And I was like, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, go in.

Speaker 9 Jesus Christ.

Speaker 20 Here it goes.

Speaker 20 Other species.

Speaker 3 We'll be right back.

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Speaker 3 Hey, I'm Jada Bumrod.

Speaker 11 I'm Robert Krulwich.

Speaker 3 This is Radio Lab, and today...

Speaker 11 The show's called Hello.

Speaker 3 Back to Lynn.

Speaker 16 I mean, it's a total sensory shift.

Speaker 16 The temperature changes, everything goes quiet.

Speaker 16 It almost feels like this, like, classic through-the-looking-glass moment

Speaker 16 where you like you go through the looking glass and like everybody's walking on the ceiling.

Speaker 16 And I jumped in, and there were two pretty big dolphins coming right

Speaker 27 at me,

Speaker 16 like maybe two feet from my head,

Speaker 16 and staring at me. And I was like,

Speaker 27 I don't know what I know.

Speaker 11 What did you do?

Speaker 16 I stayed very still. I

Speaker 3 pretty much froze. Now, how far were they from you? Two feet.
Oh my gosh. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 16 Dolphins are not small, and they were looking at me in a way that was like, we see you. And also,

Speaker 16 they make these

Speaker 16 sort of clicking, sonar-y sounds, which are like...

Speaker 11 Do you think they were talking to you or just talking about you?

Speaker 16 Well, no, what? I mean, what I think they were doing is

Speaker 16 sonaring me. Sort of looking at me with sound.
I mean, my head was vibrating.

Speaker 16 mean they can see not just body shape they can see your bones oh they can see into you like you really feel looked at wow it was heart-stopping

Speaker 23 that was unfing believable

Speaker 23 it was so cool

Speaker 27 At that point, I was like, the trip could end now and I go home happy.

Speaker 16 You know, and everybody was like, calm down. Those weren't even the right dolphins.

Speaker 26 What do you mean?

Speaker 16 Well, those were bottlenose dolphins. Denise studies spotteds.

Speaker 15 But

Speaker 16 the next day.

Speaker 16 All right, onward for spotteds.

Speaker 31 Spotteds are bust.

Speaker 16 We set out again.

Speaker 16 Go for a few hours.

Speaker 16 Bethany does this dolphin dance.

Speaker 16 And.

Speaker 39 God saw them. Yeah.

Speaker 4 The dance worked.

Speaker 39 You saw them, right? Yeah, right right there. Yeah, there we go.

Speaker 16 Gotta be spotted. So then,

Speaker 16 everybody's like, you know, it's like all hands-on deck situation. Everybody's like strapping on the boxes and strapping on the headphones.
What are you doing?

Speaker 37 Which there's a lot of scrambling.

Speaker 23 There's so, so much scrambling. Oh, there's one off the bow here.

Speaker 16 It's like a fire. It's like a fire drill.

Speaker 33 Now, if I'm putting on my box, here's the problem.

Speaker 26 So I'm just testing.

Speaker 16 Unlike a captive dolphin, wild dolphins, they have other things to do. They have, you know, fish to catch.
You kind of have to entice it into having a conversation. Otherwise it'll just swim away.

Speaker 16 But how do you do that when you don't know its language?

Speaker 16 Well, turns out dolphins are just crazy for scarves. Scarf high.

Speaker 19 Scarf low.

Speaker 16 When you throw them a scarf, they sweep it up with their tail fin and then they let it go and it wafts through the water and another dolphin comes up and sweeps it up with their rostrum.

Speaker 16 So the idea is you use the scarf as kind of like a bridge. Denise and another diver will get in the water with a scarf.
We'll get in the water and we'll just start passing it back and forth.

Speaker 33 It's human to human.

Speaker 16 Like, hey, look at this fun thing we're doing.

Speaker 33 Let them watch. If they want to get in the game, we let them in the game.
Sometimes we'll take the toy over to them, show it to them, and press the word for scarf.

Speaker 21 Say, hey, this is a scarf.

Speaker 3 They just made up a whistle for scarf.

Speaker 16 Yep. And ideally, and this is the key, the dolphins will pick up the word and use it too to ask for the scarf.
If and when they do that,

Speaker 16 then you've got like a tiny bit of common ground that you can build on.

Speaker 16 Okay. Who you got?

Speaker 21 We have four spotted alpha.

Speaker 16 We are our little candidates, kissing and pallets. Yes, we've been waiting for them, right? We have.
Just before they jump in, Denise walks another diver through the game plan. Oh, I know.

Speaker 16 So you're gonna hold it and you're not gonna give it to them. Okay.

Speaker 21 You're gonna entice it with him. You're gonna be like, oh, this is so nice.

Speaker 21 Dive down with it and like wave it or.

Speaker 16 Yeah, first start at the surface and just really get them with you. Moments later, all clear.

Speaker 39 Good, we're ready.

Speaker 16 Denise jumps in, followed by three other divers.

Speaker 3 Were you in the water at this time?

Speaker 16 No, I actually had to watch the whole thing from the deck, and like you could see from the surface three or four adolescent dolphins. See, Denise is right up next to one of them.

Speaker 16 You see the back of her head and her little snorkel.

Speaker 37 That's good. She's surrounded right now.

Speaker 23 What are they doing? I'm not sure.

Speaker 16 Oh, they're kind of like twisting around each other. I will say this.
She is tremendously graceful in the water. She gets in the water and she's like totally at home.

Speaker 11 So maybe she is a dolphin.

Speaker 16 She might secretly be a dolphin. Going like around and around.

Speaker 26 And there she goes under.

Speaker 23 Man, what is happening under there?

Speaker 16 This is what it sounds like underwater.

Speaker 3 This is the actual sound from the scarf dance?

Speaker 26 They record everything that goes on under there.

Speaker 16 I mean, a lot of that is the dolphins just doing whatever they're doing.

Speaker 16 But some of it is Denise with the box making this scarf whistle over and over, like, scarf?

Speaker 26 You want the scarf?

Speaker 20 Yeah?

Speaker 23 Scarf?

Speaker 3 Because she's like trying to get the dolphin to say the word, right?

Speaker 10 Yeah.

Speaker 16 Eventually, she and the dolphins surface and...

Speaker 23 He's got the scarf. Oh!

Speaker 23 He's got the scarf!

Speaker 16 One of the dolphins is holding the scarf. Hey.
It's like this flash of red.

Speaker 26 Yep.

Speaker 16 And then they all go back under.

Speaker 37 And if Denise comes back up with it, that's real good.

Speaker 16 Alright, wait and see.

Speaker 16 After about a minute, she surfaces.

Speaker 37 I think Denise has it now. Got it.

Speaker 16 She dives one more time.

Speaker 16 A minute later, dolphin has the scarf.

Speaker 16 And this went on and on. They were passing it back and forth so fluidly that I thought maybe the dolphin has begun to ask for the scarf by name.

Speaker 16 Eventually, Denise gets

Speaker 16 hauled back up onto the boat.

Speaker 16 And we all just sort of gather around, like, well, well?

Speaker 31 Yeah, the two juveniles picked up the scarf right away, and we played some signage whistles, and played some scarf whistles, and then some sargassum came floating by.

Speaker 16 Piece of seaweed.

Speaker 31 Showed him that and played the sargassum whistle.

Speaker 16 You think you got any mimics?

Speaker 33 Nothing that triggered the system, but you know, we'll see what it looks like.

Speaker 31 It's exhausting.

Speaker 3 Wait, she didn't get anything?

Speaker 16 Well, I mean, nothing the box recognized as a match. You know, nothing that indicated the dolphin learned a word.

Speaker 16 It sounded like they were right there.

Speaker 16 But

Speaker 16 there was this one thing that happened. She said that when she

Speaker 16 addressed one of the dolphins by its name,

Speaker 16 the dolphin turned around and looked at her and kind of cocked its little dolphin head.

Speaker 10 Really? Yes.

Speaker 9 I was hoping that you'd say that.

Speaker 9 Wow.

Speaker 16 Also, there was this moment where Thad and Celeste were looking at the data later. Who was that?

Speaker 16 And they saw that right after Denise made her signature whistle, is that somebody responding with her signature whistle? Another dolphin made its signature whistle.

Speaker 12 Sweet.

Speaker 23 Whoa, that's pretty cool.

Speaker 3 You mean like she said hi and it said hi back?

Speaker 11 Yeah. That's amazing.

Speaker 16 Well, maybe. I mean, the thing is, dolphins make their signature whistles all the time.

Speaker 16 So it could be nothing.

Speaker 16 Or it could be this

Speaker 10 moment.

Speaker 16 I mean, she's a very rigorous scientist. Like, she wants that to happen another 30 times before even starting to take it seriously.
But still.

Speaker 16 It does make you think about the possibilities. What do you want to ask?

Speaker 33 I don't know. I want to ask everything, so.

Speaker 16 Like what?

Speaker 33 Well, I'd like to know what their lives are like when we're not around. I mean, how do you spend your day? You know, do they think about things? I mean, do they think about the future?

Speaker 32 Do they think about the past?

Speaker 33 I mean, we know they have long-term memories. You know, do they remember their calves from ten years ago?

Speaker 16 Do they think about death?

Speaker 33 Yeah, they certainly see it.

Speaker 33 It'd be anything you'd ask your friends, right?

Speaker 3 although part of me wonders, like,

Speaker 3 are they ever gonna even get there?

Speaker 11 What do you mean?

Speaker 3 Well, if the goal is to have a conversation, and you're gonna do it this way where you're in the wild and you can't touch them, and you've got to verify every whistle 35 times.

Speaker 3 Well, are they ever actually gonna have a conversation?

Speaker 10 Well, because this is like day one of the language lesson.

Speaker 11 I can't believe that.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I get it, but like, don't you feel like Margaret was

Speaker 3 all the problems with that experiment aside, was she was actually getting somewhere with Peter? Like, they were actually having a real exchange?

Speaker 11 In the moment, perhaps, but thinking forward, I believe that what you can accomplish by talking, by having a two-way conversation, is just infinitely greater.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and I totally agree. But if it's taken her 30-something years to get to...

Speaker 3 A maybe hello. Yeah.
She doesn't even know if she got to hello yet.

Speaker 3 And if all she has is just a limited amount of time with with these dolphins every summer, then 50 more times is going to take her 50 more years.

Speaker 3 And I'm just like, oh, God, the planet's going to be 17 degrees warmer by that point. Dolphins are going to have all migrated to some other spot.
It just feels like, oh, come on.

Speaker 3 Just get in a pool and hold, let the dolphin hold your foot.

Speaker 11 She's already got the hello going for her, maybe. So that's like a start.
And then, yes, in 50 years, she may have moved past hello to a three-word sentence. How's your mackerel today?

Speaker 16 Yeah. I think that too.
A three-word sentence, yes. I would put money on a three-word sentence in 50 years.
The question is, do we ever get to the point of

Speaker 11 exploring death? Yeah. Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 3 Lynn, do you have faith?

Speaker 2 I have faith that

Speaker 16 if Denise continues with what she's doing, that we'll be able to talk about concrete things. We'll be able to talk about seaweed and we'll be able to talk about

Speaker 16 coral and we'll be able to have a scintillating conversation about scarves. I do believe that, and that is not nothing.

Speaker 16 I mean, that is pretty impressive in its own way.

Speaker 3 Big thanks this hour to our producer, Lynn Levy.

Speaker 11 I'm Chad Abum Rod. I'm Robert Krowich.

Speaker 3 Thank you guys for listening.

Speaker 13 Hi, I'm David and I'm from Baltimore, Maryland. Radio Lab was created by Jad Abumra and is edited by Soren Wheeler.
Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts.

Speaker 13 Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W.

Speaker 13 Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Shindu Nyanam Sambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Rebecca Lacks, Alex Neeson, Sara Kari, Sarah Sandback, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster.

Speaker 13 Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton.

Speaker 40 Hi, this is Susanna calling from Washington, D.C.

Speaker 40 Leadership support for Radio Lab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simon Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation.

Speaker 40 Foundational support for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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