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National Geographic : 1979 Apr
Contents
they can ever meet a zero-mortality goal. And anytime they exceed the steadily declining quota, the issue will flare again. Yet, in the long run, the canny porpoise itself may solve the problem. In the skipper's stateroom aboard the gleaming thousand-tonner Raffaello, Capt. George Sousa-a third-generation fisher man-pointed out a significant trend. "For years now we've been learning how to save porpoises," he said. "But the por poises have been learning too. Nowadays when you put a school in a net, they just lie there calmly, saying, 'Hey, take it easy, fel las-it's just a routine we gotta go through.' They've been there before. But they're get ting harder to wrap all the time. "There's one bunch of 'spotters' off Costa Rica we call 'The Untouchables.' They're educated to speedboats now. When you try to lay your net around them, they dive right under it, taking the fish with them. "Who knows? Unless we find some better way, maybe in five years it just won't be economical to fish on porpoise anymore." ISHERMAN'S ALLY, a friend to man-through centuries the dolphin has inspired tales of assistance to hu mans by helping swimmers in distress, or driving off sharks, thought to be the dol phins' mortal enemy. The evidence, howev er, is far from clear. True, the animals sometimes assist their young or injured to the surface to breathe. "It even happens between species," says bi ologist Ken Norris. "I've seen a pilot whale helping a sick Dall's porpoise." But skeptics point out that similar "assis tance" toward humans might be simply a form of play, or even aggressive behavior. On rare occasions an exhausted swimmer has reported being nudged toward shore; but as one expert points out, we're not likely to hear from any who might have been pushed out to sea. (During World War II downed U. S. airmen once had to drive away a dol phin that was enthusiastically shoving their raft toward a Japanese-held beach.) Are sharks and porpoises deadly enemies? Forrest G. Wood, a senior scientist with the Navy and longtime observer of porpoises, sums it up this way: "Sometimes sharks eat porpoises. Sometimes porpoises attack sharks. Sometimes the two ignore each other completely. And that's all you can safely say about it." It would be fascinating, of course, to hear what porpoises might have to say about it -i f anything. They whistle and chirp and squeak and click and groan ... but do they have a language of their own? The dolphin's sonic repertoire appears to include emotional signals (one rising-falling birdlike cry almost certainly means "Help!") and even individual "signature" calls: "I am Joe Dolphin." But most scientists I spoke to believe, like behaviorist and veteran trainer Karen Pryor, that the whistle of the porpoise is "closer to a human frown, or sigh, or gig gle, than to a human word." Broadly speaking, language implies an ability to convey thoughts by using arbitrary symbols-words-in proper syntax. That ability, science once told us, resides only in the human species. Man's self-definition, however, once so comfortably clear and sharp, has recently crumbled around the edges. Wild chimpan zees demonstrated that the talent for using tools does not, in itself, spell Homo sapiens.* And the age-old thought that only man can have a thought has lately fallen under scien tific sniper fire. And now, electrifyingly, tame chimps and a charming gorilla named Koko have shown that other species besides our own can learn a language. t So it may be with dolphins. Beside a sun-splashed training pool at the country's original oceanarium, Marineland, near St. Augustine, Florida, I watched a graduate student, William Langbauer, and several associates give a pair of porpoises a language lesson (page 529). The Porpoise Language Acquisition Proj ect is patterned after experiments by Dr. David Premack, of the University of Penn sylvania, with a chimp named Sarah. Arbi trary black-and-white symbols are painted on metal rectangles designed to cling to a submerged magnetic board. Langbauer was teaching a bottlenose named Snoopy to match identical symbols. Using his snout with a juggler's ease, *See "My Life Among Wild Chimpanzees," by Jane Goodall, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, August 1963. tFrancine Patterson recounted her "Conversations With a Gorilla" in the October 1978 GEOGRAPHIC. National Geographic,April 1979 532
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