Transcript of Hello

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Hey, this is Radiolab. I'm Latif 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. At this very moment, brilliant scientists and sophisticated algorithms are trying to decipher the snuffles of pigs, the honks of geese, the Squeeks 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. 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. 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. What's even better is it's told by a human in the first person, someone who was right there might not be appropriate for younger kids or more sensitive listeners. But with that warning, here you go. Hello from Radiolab. That's how you say enjoy in Dolphinees, I think.

Wait, you're listening? Okay.

All right.

Okay. All right.

You're listening to Radiolab.

Radiolab. From? W-n-y-c.

C? Yeah.

Rewind. Hello, this is Lynn. Someone on the other side of this? Hey, Lynn.

A couple of months ago, our producer Lynn Levy did an interview with this woman.

Yeah, her name is Margaret Lovet. Yes. This was Margaret's first time doing a radio interview.

That magic voice. This is so fun.

But this was definitely not her first time talking into a microphone. One, two, three, four.

This is the yellow mic. One, two, three, four. This is the orange mic.

Almost exactly 50 years ago.

The following recording was made on November 19, 1964, at 2300 hours.

Margaret was at the of this amazing weird experiment.

Yeah.

Who were you at that time? What were you like?

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

She tried college for a while.

Tulane University for a year.

But she dropped out.

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

And moved to St. Thomas in the Caribbean. I'd never been to an island. Got a job at this hotel.

Did menus, check people in and out.

One day she hears about this strange research facility on the other side of the island.

I thought, I wonder what that is about. I asked a few people and they said, Oh, no, no. They don't like people there or can't go there. I was told not to go there, so I went there. That's how it all started.

That's how we're going to start this show. I'm Chad Abumran. I'm Robert Krollwich. Today on Radio Lab, producer Lynn Levy brings us a couple of close encounters, although not with aliens.

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

Although they are It's an alien-like. Yes, alien-like. But not out there.

Lynn, would you help? It's a dolphin. Yes. Shows about dolphins.

We're calling this hour.

Hello. When Margaret got to this mysterious place, there were dolphins there. What happened was she ended up becoming roommates with a dolphin.

Do you mean in the like, Betts die, one bedroom apartment sense?

Sort of, yeah. She did end up living with a dolphin for many months in this apartment. I-e-a-e. The apartment apartment? Mm-hmm. Had a little desk, had a little kitchen area with a stove.

I think it was a little two burner stove or something, and a pot and a tea kettle.

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

It was completely filled? Well, I wasn't surmourished, but I was in water up mid-thigh.

It was just flooded with water. Just about there. So she could share it with this dolphin.

A young male, Peter. His Royal Heinness Peter.

Peter was a 10-foot long, bottle-nosed dolphin a young adolescent male, and he lived there with Margaret, and he could swim under the desk, and there was a balcony, he could swim out onto the balcony. The balcony was flooded, too? The balcony was also flooded. Yeah, it's really cool.

What was the idea? To try and study the dolphin?

To study the dolphin, first of all, and take a lot of notes.

Extensive notes.

Did you have waterproof paper?

No. I had a typewriter on this board hanging from the ceiling.

They also had- Microphones everywhere. Specifically, the task she was given- A-E-I-O. Was to teach Peter to speak English. A-e-i-o.

She was supposed to teach the dolphin English? Yep.

Really? Well, I mean, this was John Lilley's project.

Just for some context, you know how people get all a little bit crazy these days about dolphins? They have shirts with dolphins and necklaces with dolphins, and everybody has dolphin hairbands, dolphin black light posters. This all comes from this guy, John Lilley, who was a scientist, a researcher starting in the '40s.

A total right stuff, physics major guy out of Caltech.

Man's Man, according to Graham Burnet.

I'm a historian of science.

But then, according to Graham, John Lilley has this epiphany.

During the Second World War- At the time, people just weren't thinking that much about dolphins in general.

There was not this idea that they were extraordinary beings. They were just big dumb fish. They were shot for sport. John Lilley is doing this research about brain mapping, and he ends up working with dolphins. The story that he's told goes that he was experimenting on these dolphins, and as he's working with them, shoving things into their brains, they make noises, as would anyone. When he listens back to the noises, which he's recorded, it sounds to him like the dolphins are trying to speak to him, to say something to him, not in a dolphin-y way, but in a human way, like trying to speak English to him. Really?

Yeah. What did he say the dolphin was trying to say to him?

I don't think that we know that, but it sounded to him enough human speech that he thought, something's going on here. This is important. According to Graham, he said later that it made him realize we are not the only intelligent organisms out there. We have company.

That maybe humans are what happens when high intelligence evolves in an animal that also has hands, and dolphins are what happens when comparably, if not still more extravagant intelligence, evolves in an animal without hands.

What do hands get you?

Well, hands basically get you an appetite for punching people in head. It makes us tool users, but the distance between 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. There's no difference at all.

By the time we got to the '60s, it's like peace and love.

It was exciting to think the dolphins and the whales have these huge brains, but 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 being, man.

Keep in mind, this is on the verge of the Vietnam War, where you have all this anxiety about What have they done to the earth? Overpopulation, environmental destruction. What have they done to our fair system? So very quickly, the dolphins become this vision.

Of how we might ourselves be so different than we'd come to feel we were, tragically. Does that make sense?

John Lilley was one of the first people to get swept up in all this. He quits his government job, moves to the Caribbean, and sets up this lab.

John Lilley's Communication Research Institute.

To try to talk to dolphins, which is where Margaret ended up.

My feeling was this, that everybody was talking about how bright they were and how smart they were, and it was dolphins, dolphins, dolphins. Then it was the hot topic. And yet every day, everybody at that building would get in their car and go home.

Yeah.

And I thought, What is that?

So she volunteered to stay? Yeah. Her bed was on this wooden platform in the middle of the apartment.

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. 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. I might as well go home. So I eventually, I didn't really shave my head, but I buzzed it, whatever it's called now, really close because the hair getting wet thing in the middle of the night was very annoying. Yeah, of course. I just got rid of the hair and that was helpful. 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.

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

A piece of cloth, a tea bag. Tea bag was a fascinating thing. I drink tea, and the tea bag would fall into the water. And he would come and get it and sonar it, this creaking noise they make when they're sonaring, and he'd look at it and take the string over his cheek and swim around very proudly with this tea bag. 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 his teabag. Eventually, of course, he It would bite it. It has very sharp teeth, and it would break. That was a very exciting thing when the tea bag finally broke open. It had babies, as it were. Zillions of tea leaves floating around, and he was so none of them all and want to count every single one of them.

What did you think you would find out?

I didn't know. I was not coming at this from a science point of view. That's not what I was bringing to the table. Yeah. I had no idea. I was programmed by John to work on the speech.

A-e-i-o.

He had declared that they could probably speak.

A, B, I, O.

Look, when you're trying to have a conversation with someone. Peter. Peter, listen. One person speaks. I, O. And the other one listens, and then you speak, and I listen. And people normally do that back and forth. When you start with a often making airborne sounds. Once they get the idea, there's a lot of screaming that goes on. They're very show-offy, and they want to override you.

I am No, Peter.

No, no. So you have to spend a lot of time getting it down to, I'm talking now. I can speak now. And now it's your turn.

I can speak now.

And yet if he's upset about something, he'll override it. Peter. And it's annoying.

Now, listen again. No. What's this? Come on, Peter. One, two, three, Three, three. Three. Now, start again. One, two, three.

Yes. But he learned very quickly to listen to me.

One, two, three, four. Yes, baby. Good.

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. He would give me back this, this, this. A parrot will often say, No, no, no. Probably want a cracker. They will peep the whole thing of whatever you said. But Peter would pick up what I wanted when he was being a good student.

And he was a good student.

There seemed to be, with this one dolphin anyway, can't speak for all of them, an interest in what we were doing. He wanted to practice. He wanted to get it right. There was a mirror, and he would spend long periods of time by himself, didn't want me to be part of it. And he would practice whatever it was we had been doing in the lesson that day, over and over and over and over. He wanted to get it right.. No, it's not right. He would work at that for no reason. He's not getting fish. I'm not interacting with him. He just wants it right.

Like doing homework.

Like homework, exactly.

After a few months of this- One. Peter did start to sound really different. One, two. One, two, three. Better. Paul. He kept getting better.

It's extremely difficult for them.

Hello.

They just have a blow hole. They do not have the apparatus to really... S's are almost impossible. I would feed him my name.

Margaret.

And M is very hard. He would eventually roll over almost into the water with the blow hole to muffle the…Moward.Moward..

Kind of a thing. Really? You're saying he would use the water as a way to help him make the sound? Yes. With that word. Do you think he knew that was your name?

I don't know. But nevertheless, we were a pretty good match. I knew his mood, his temperament, and he knew mine. He knew when I was sick and I would get sick, you're in the water all the time. You're bound to get a cold or something. He just loved my anatomy. He wanted to know what my knees were doing. 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. And I gave him the time because I wasn't going home to look at my knee, to look at my feet. He was enormously interested But he was, broadly enough, in this space between my fingers. Really? Not the fingers so much, but he would... I mean, his feet 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. He didn't have any spaces anywhere. He had solid flippers, but no space in between them.

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

Yes, I Margaret and Peter ended up spending about nine months living together.

But towards the end, things started to unravel. First of all, there weren't really results from this experiment. They never were able to publish any scientific papers. There were other problems. Lily got very involved in drugs, especially.

Lsd. He did bring it down. He did give LSD. He says he did. I believe him to two of the dolphins. I would not let him give LSD to Peter. I wouldn't allow that.

Why would he give them LSD?

Well, 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. When people heard about Margaret's work, they tended to focus on one particular part of the story. You don't have to answer, but a A lot has been made of your sexually engaging with Peter. 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?

What would I like to say about that? I think The sensational side of it is- Here's what Margaret told me.

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

Eventually, I just said the heck with it.

She used her hand to…

It would quickly satisfy him, and then we could go back to doing what we were doing. I never really gave it another thought. I never thought, Oh, don't let anybody know. I never thought, Oh, this shouldn't be.

I never thought- But because of details like this and the drugs, this experiment became extremely controversial. Almost untouchable. People didn't want to be associated with Lily. Nobody wanted to fund anything that sounded like Lily. It just got this aura of- Don't go there. Don't go there. Even people who wanted to do really rigorous work with human dolphin communication had a tough time getting any funding. And that lasted for a long time. The thing is, even though there are so many reasons to disapprove of this experiment, when you talk to Margaret, you can't help but want to be in that apartment with 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, 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. And he would just sink to the bottom and close his eyes and just hang onto my foot. And then he'd have to come up and breathe. And then he'd go back down and he'd just grab my foot. And he would do this for a good while.

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

If the incoming President gets his way, mass deportation is coming to your community. Donald Trump has promised to use everything in his power, and local police as well, to remove millions of undocumented residents. I'm Ky Wright. How are immigrant communities in the US stealing themselves for what's to come? And how will it change our nation and our neighborhoods? That's next time on Notes from America. Listen wherever you get your podcast.

Hey, I'm Chad Aboumrad. I'm Robert Krollwich. This is Radio Lab, and today-Hello.

Yes. Or as a dolphin might say.

How would a dolphin say it? I don't know. Well, and you know what? That is exactly That's 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.

This is a dream that humans have had since forever.

Yeah, St. Francis of Assisi, it goes way back. Now, in so far as dolphins are concerned, after the John Lilley situation, researchers did get a little tepid.

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

No.

Because along came this Dr..

Denise Hersey, Director of the Wild Dolphin Project.

Who basically decided to take John Lilley's experiment and flip it. Rather than have the dolphin speak English, let's have the human speak dolphin. Or at the very least, let's create a shared language where humans and dolphins can speak.

Or at least whistle.

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

Back to producer Lynn Levy.

Okay. For Denise, this dream of finding that meeting spot, it goes back to when she was a little girl.

Well, when I was 12 years old, I used to page through the Encyclopedia 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.

Were you thinking that when you were 12?

I was. I was a total nerd. 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. So yeah, I don't know. I got the bug early, and here I am.

Were you having a fantasy about what you might learn?

A fantasy? 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.

Fast forward many years, Denise got a boat.

And I went out to the Bahamas.

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. And she just tried to blend in.

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

This spot in the Bermuda Triangle.

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

Where dolphins come and go.

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

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

And behave ourselves.

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

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

And it worked for- Five years? She spent five years just watching, not doing anything else?

Yes. Doesn't this take an enormous amount of patience?

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

Like feeding, mating, nursing, and talking. Or at least making a lot of noises, which she and her team would record.

Wow, that's all Dolphins It's all dolphin.

They make all these... Yeah, like that. It's like there's a clicking, quaking sound that they make.

It sounds like a zipper.

Zipper, yeah. Yeah. They make like, whistles that are more distinct, and then they make sounds that are longer and weirder.

Do you have any sense that each of these sounds means something different?

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

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 words in there? Is there more encoded information?

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

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

Peter had a name. Nobody's ever asked me that.

Here's Margaret again.

His name was... Really? It's almost saying Peter here. Right.

I can call You Lynn by your whistle and you, Robert, by your whistle.

So I could be a dolphin going Lynn.

Exactly.

Do they do that?

They do.

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

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

Yes, maybe.

Wow. That means that they're using representations of things which aren't in front of them, which is like the beginning of language.

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

It gives us hope that there's probably more information going on there than we know.

Now, finally, she has that device.

Which device again?

The magical human animal translator device that she was dreaming of writing about when she was 12. She has this box that can generate dolphin noises, and it can recognize dolphin noises. If it works the way that she's dreaming it will work, it could be the first real two-way back and forth conversation between a human and a wild animal.

We're looking forward to the summer and getting out and getting more data and really exercising the boxes and see what happens. Good. We're ready.

I I beg my way aboard.

Everybody good? See you sick pills and tubbies.

We left on July eighth from Florida and headed for the Bahamas to see this pod that she has been following forever.

Almost 30 years now.

I just saw a stenella. The boat is called the RV Stanella. 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. I think it's right there on the side of the side, on your side.

What is this boat like?

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

Who are your humans?

Well, there's Denise, obviously. How's it going? You got a captain. My name's Keir Smith. First mate. Danielle. Research Assistance. Allison Myers. Les Mason. Bethany O'Lear. Nathan Skripchack. Volunteers. Drew Meyer. There's an acoustics expert. Matthias Hoffmann. For a long time, I couldn't even figure out where everybody was sleeping because the boat seemed so small. I was like, There's not room for all these people on this boat. Behind you, there's a hot soldering iron next to the fridge. And I haven't even gotten to this guy. Don't get into him. His name is Thad Starner. So you didn't have any dolphin experience before this, right? Oh, hell no. He's one of the guys who invented Google Glass. I became a computer programmer, so I'd never have to leave air conditioning, right?

And I'm out here in what is this? A hundred degree weather. To do what?

So his job on the boat is to... He's in charge of these boxes. Those boxes probably cost at this point. We're looking for funding. We're looking for funding. He's the tech whiz when he came down to visit my lab.

I was telling him about the two-way work and the difficulty with underwater stuff, and he said, Oh, I build wearable computers. I said, Oh, can you build me an underwater wearable computer?

Sure.

That shouldn't be hard. Four years later. What does this machine look like?

It looks like a toaster, like one of those fancy chrome tosters, except you wear it on your chest. Are they silvery, in fact? They are silvery. They have a bunch of knobs and buttons and speakers on them.

It's got pre-programmed whistles in it. I can punch a key and it projects whistle A, ear whistle B, ear whistle C.

She's programmed in signature whistles of some of the dolphins. Ratt, halets, bijou.

And we made signature whistles for ourselves.

She can call their names and they can call her names. That's what she's saying?

That is the idea, yeah. And if they do call her name, this name that made for herself, then the box should be able to recognize it and can tell her that she's been called by name. It'll actually say into her ear in English, Denise.

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

Well, 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?

Well, the idea is that they're learning. So she gets into the water over and over and she says the equivalent of, Hi, I'm Denise. Hi, I'm Denise, over and over and over. And they learn it. They develop this- Oh, like maybe they'll just start to use it and call her.

Yeah.

So you hope they call you. I'd be really sad if they didn't call my name.

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

Well, see, that would be a eureka moment, I think, if you hit the Lolita button and Lolita suddenly turned and looked right at you with a shock of what the heck.

Exactly.

What the heck?

Wow, that human called me by my signature whistle.

Has that happened yet?

It hasn't happened yet.

This is something I just did not appreciate. For a while, I was on this boat. I was like, Why is this so hard? This seems like it should be... These people are so smart. This should be easy, but they're just constantly being defeated by the ocean, basically, which the ocean is a worthy foe, but it's the first year. First year was a complete disaster, trying to get the hardware to work. What happened the first year? Everything broke. It was Leak City. Basically, the boxes just kept shutting down as soon as they would get in the water. That's not good. It's not good. That's not what you want. No. And last year-We had the boxes working, but then we couldn't find the dolphins. The dolphins just disappeared.

Where did they go?

They went 100 miles away to another location.

They don't know why. I kept up with my side of the deal, Denise. Your dolphins stood you up. And one of the reasons I was on the boat is it felt like everybody was thinking, This is it. This is the year. We're going to We're going to go out there, we're going to find some dolphins, and we're going to make some history. You ready?

Ready. Excited.

Now. Any minute now. Okay, it turns out it's not that easy to find these dolphins. They're not tagged. They're wild dolphins. So you just, you go to where you think they might be. Do you know that song? You stare at the water and you wait. Yeah, what is that? For the first three days, pretty much, we were just driving around. Game of Thrones. In circles, like literally in circles. I feel like I had a five-hour conversation about Game of Thrones. I've never I haven't seen an episode of Game of Thrones. Any dolphins? Any dolphins anywhere? Oh, right. No. There's nothing else to do. Dolphins, come on, Dolphins. We need you now. Come on, dolphins. Come on, Dolphins. Come on, Dolphins. To kick in. Dolphins, the dolphins. See a piece of seaweed. It would look like a dolphin. Dolphins, come on, dolphins. A wave that looks like a dolphin. I have to say that everything looks like a dolphin to me right now.

There are days like that.

Dolphins.

Dolphins. Oh, yeah, they are right there. All of a sudden, out on the water, we see one fin, two fins, three fins, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Oh, there's so many of them in there. So cool. As we're all standing there watching them, Denise turns to me and she goes, You want to go in? I don't know. Do you recommend it? And I was not prepared for her to say that. And also I was holding recording equipment and everything. And so I ended up just having to go in in my clothes, wearing my shorts and a bra. And I'd all modesty thrown aside. They were like, You can go in. And I was like, Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, go on. Jesus Christ. Here I go. Other species.

I'm We'll be right back.

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Hey, I'm Jadaboumran. I'm Robert Krolwich. This is Radio Lab. And today-The show's called Hello. Back to Lynn.

I mean, it's a total sensory shift. The temperature changes. Everything goes quiet. It almost feels like this classic through the Looking Glass moment, where you go through the Looking Glass and everybody's walking on the ceiling. And I jumped in and there were two pretty big dolphins coming right at me. Maybe two feet from my head and staring at me. And I was like, I don't know what...

What did you do?

I stayed very still. I pretty much froze.

Now, how far were they from you?

Two feet.

Oh, my God.

Yeah. Dolphins are not small, and they were looking at me in a way that was like, we see you. And also they make these clicking, sonar-y sounds, which are like-Do you think they were talking to you or just talking about you? Well, no. What I mean, what I think they were doing is sonarring me, looking at me with their with sound. I mean, my head was vibrating. They can see not just body shape, they can see your bones. They can see into you. You really feel looked at. Wow. It was heart-stopping. I was unfucking believable. I thought it was waiting for. It was so cool. I thought what was like, The trip could end now, and I go home happy. And everybody was like, Calm down. Those weren't They're even the right dolphins. What do you mean? Well, those were bottle-nosed dolphins. Denise studies spotted. But the next day. All right, onward for spotted.

Spotted or bust.

We set out again. Go for a few of yours. Bethany does this dolphin dance. Leaking energetic. Spotted. And?

Got some. Yeah.

The dance worked. You saw them, right? Yeah, right there. Yeah, there we go. Got to be spotted, right? So then? Everybody's like, it's like all hands on deck situation. Everybody's like strapping on the boxes and strapping on headphones. What are you doing?

So there's a lot of scrambling.

There's so much scrambling. There's one-off the bow here. It's like a fire drill. Now, I'm putting on my box. Here's the problem.

So I'm just testing.

Unlike a captive dolphin, while dolphins, they have other things to do, they have fish to catch, you have to entice it into having a conversation. Otherwise, it'll just swim away. But how do you do that when you don't know its language? Well, turns out dolphins are just crazy for scarves. Scarf high. Scarf low. 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. The idea is you use the scarf as 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. It's human to human.

Hey, look at this fun thing we're doing.

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. Say, Hey, this is a scarf.

They just made up a whistle for scarf? Yep.

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, then you've got a tiny bit of common ground that you can build on. Okay. Who you got?

We have four spot of dolphins. We have our little candidates, Tristan and Palette.

Yes, we've been waiting for them, right? We have. Just before they jump in, Denise walks another diver through the game plan.

You're going to hold it and you're not going to give it to them. You're going to entice it with them. You're going to be like, Oh, this is so nice. Can I dive down with it and wave it? Yeah, first start at the surface and just really get them with you.

Moments later. All clear?

Good, we're ready.

Denise jumps in, followed by three other divers. Four in the water.

Were you in the water this time?

No, I actually had to watch the whole thing from the deck. You could see from the surface three or four adolescent dolphins. See, Denise is right up next to one of them. You see the back of her head and her little snorkel. That's good. She's surrounded right now. What are they doing? I'm not sure. They're twisting around each other. I will say this. She is tremendously graceful in the water. She gets in the water and she's totally at home. So maybe she is a dolphin. She might secretly be a dolphin. Going around and around. There she goes under. Man, what is happening under there? This is what it sounds like underwater.

This is the actual sound from the scarf dance?

They record everything that goes on under there. I mean, a lot of that is the dolphins just doing whatever they're doing. But some of it is Denise with the box making this scarf whistle over and over like, Scarf. You want the scarf? Yeah?

Scarf? Because she's like trying to get the dolphin to say the word, right? Yeah.

Eventually, she and the dolphins surface and... Got the scarf right here. He's got the scarf. One of the dolphins is holding the scarf. Hey. It's like this flash of red. Yeah. And then they all go back under. If Denise comes back up with it, that's real good. All right. Wait and see. After about a minute, she surfaces. Is.

I think Denise has it now. Got it.

She dives one more time. A minute later, Dolphin has the scarf. 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. Eventually, Denise gets...

Gravity sucks.

Hauled back up onto the boat We all just gather around like, Well, well.

Yeah, the two juveniles picked up the scarf right away and we played some signature whistles and played some scarf whistles and then some sargassum came floating by. Piece of seaweed. Showed him that and played the sargassum whistle.

You think you got any mimics?

Nothing that triggered the system, but, you know, we'll see what it looks like. It's exhausting.

Wait, she didn't get anything?

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

It sounds like they were right there.

But there was this one thing that happened. She said that when she addressed one of the dolphins by its name, the dolphin turned around and looked at her and cocked its little dolphin head. Really? Yes.

I'm so hoping that you'd say that.

Wow. Also, there was this moment where Thad and Celeste were looking at the data later. Who was that? They saw that right after Denise made her signature whistle.

Is that somebody responding with their signature whistle?

Another dolphin made its signature whistle. Sweet. That's pretty cool.

You mean she said hi and it said hi back? Yeah.

That's amazing.

Well, maybe. I mean, the thing is, dolphins make their signature whistle muscles all the time, so it could be nothing, or it could be this moment. I mean, she's a very rigorous scientist. She wants that to happen another 30 times before even starting to take it seriously. But still, it does make you think about the possibilities. What do you want to ask?

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

What?

I'd like to know what their lives are like when we're not around. How do you spend your day? Do they think about things? Do they think about the future? Do they think about the past? We know they have long-term memories. Do they remember their calves from 10 years ago?

Do they think about death?

Yeah, they certainly see it. It'd be anything you'd ask your friends, right?

Although part of me wonders, are they ever going to even get there? What do you mean? Well, if the goal is to have a conversation, and you're going to 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. Are they ever actually going to have a conversation?

Well, because this is day one of the language lesson. I could get there.

Yeah, I get it. But don't you feel like Margaret was… All the problems with that experiment aside, she was Are they actually getting somewhere with Peter? Like they were actually having a real exchange?

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.

And I totally agree. But if it's taken her 30 something years to get to a maybe hello, she doesn't even know if she got to hello yet. And if all she has is just a limited amount of time with these dolphins every summer, then 50 more times is going to take her 50 more years. And I was like, oh, God, the planet is 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. Just get in a pool and let the dolphin hold your foot.

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 Mac roll today?

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…

Exploring death. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know.

Lynn, do you have faith?

I have faith that 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 coral, and we'll be able to have a scintillating conversation about scarves. I do believe that, and that is not nothing. I mean, that is pretty impressive in its own way.

Big thanks this hour to our producer, Lynn Levy. I'm Chad Abumrad.

I'm Robert Krolwich.

Thank you guys for listening.

Hi, I'm David, and I'm from Baltimore, Maryland. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keef is our Director of Sound Design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becker Bresler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Nianam Sambandan, Matt Kielte, Annie McKewen, Rebecca Lacks, Alex Niesen, Sara Kari, Sara Sandback, Ariane Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton.

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