The Delphis Story

The Delphis project wound up bringing the world’s leading dolphin scientists together with the world’s leading conservation advocates, and along the way involved astronauts, futurists, celebrities, and techno-pioneers.

So what sort of project gets the collaboration of Dr. Ken Norris, Dr. John Lilly, NASA, Arthur C. Clarke, John McAfee, Apple Computer, Kenny Loggins, and hundreds of others?  A project that treated dolphins, from the outset, as partners rather than research subjects.

Read on for the story…

A new Kind of Dolphin Research

By 1980 it was obvious to Dexter Cate and Don White that an entity was needed to advance the state of dolphin research, and shift the status of dolphin intelligence from the mythological to the science-based.

Dexter was a high school science teacher and Don had taught high school science for two years when moving to Hawaii. So these two activist high-school teachers spent a lot of time thinking about how to teach the world a bit more about dolphins, in a way that might help save them.

Dexter had just gotten out of Sasebo Prison in Japan.  He had served 80 days in solitary confinement for the crime of intervening in a bloody large-scale dolphin kill conducted in a Japanese bay on the island of Tatsunoshima, and freeing overnight about half the dolphins which were in the process of being stabbed to death in a multi-day kill-fest.

  Dexter shows his young son the Tatsunoshima drive-kill before intervening to release dolphins and being arrested

Clearly, although it saved some dolphins and brought world attention, such intervention was not a scalable tactic per se. It hardened Japan’s nationalism.  What was needed, thought the science teachers, was a way to get the message of dolphins “specialness” across in a more subtle and positive way.

The Ethics of Dolphin Research

This had been something they had discussed for years, and there was a central ethical problem to confront: any replicable scientific research would almost certainly have to be done with dolphins which were in captivity, yet captivity itself resulted in many dolphin deaths during the capture process as well as shortened lives and inherently miserable conditions in most cases. For this reason, nothing had been done by either Dexter or Don prior to his Japan incarceration.

However, just as Japan’s reaction to Dexter’s intervention showed that the need for such an approach was vital, it also provided what Dexter proposed to be a logical rationale for going forward, and it went like this:

While Dex was in prison at Sasebo for freeing dolphins, Don and a number of others wrote him letters, sent him games and crossword puzzles, and tried to make his time in prison more bearable.  In discussing this afterward, Dex and Don agreed that doing so was not an endorsement of Japan’s penal system or Dexter’s imprisonment. An analagous ethical case could be made for interacting with captive dolphins, IF it could be done entirely within the context of improving their life-quality, and never stray from that.

Of course, an additional ethical consideration was that the captive dolphins did not exist in a vacuum; but in the context of wild dolphins being killed in the millions on the high seas. In a very real way, the dolphins in the wild needed their message to get out.  Of course, at the time, those keeping captive dolphins were doing little more than making them tail-walk and throw balls.

Getting it Done

Computers, electronics and videotape were the obvious tools, but they were not very well-developed in 1980, so Dex & Don discussed various ways of going about it over the following years while Don tried to find a workable situation to actually do the research.  He focused on Sea Life Park on Oahu.This was somewhat ambitious, because the folks at Sea Life Park were simultaneously strongly in favor of saving wild dolphins, but strongly leery of the “free the dolphins” sentiments of the conservation movement.  Park director Ed Shallenberger had been a member of “Save the Whales-Hawaii” before Don incorporated it, but he said the “Greenpeace guys” were nuts.

  Don when he still had hair, on the join ET/GP vessel Ohana Kai

Moreover, Don, as then-president of Greenpeace in Hawaii, had taken initiative to urge Sea Life Park to release its spinner dolphins back into the wild. Those dolphins had been captured for tagging studies and were not doing well in captivity, so Don had secured the agreement of Ken Norris (the scientist who had studied them) that they should be released to the wild. This “release the spinners” push by Don succeeded in getting the last surviving spinner released to the wild in June of ’83, but it also established Don as a person willing to press SLP to release its animals and added a bit of tension to the relationship.  Don was proposing nothing less than he and his staff having free run of the most proprietary part of their training area every evening.

Finally, the sincere desire of SLP staff to collaborate in saving wild dolphins, and their appreciation of Dex and Don’s honesty at all times, made it possible. It would have been easy to say no: they deserved a huge amount of credit for the decision.

By early 1985 Don had conducted basic interaction tests with the dolphins; basically a device to make patterns on a TV screen via making noises into a hydrophone, which the dolphins enjoyed. Cetacean video games! Editing these sessions into a promo tape, Don tried pulling together more support, and began the conversion of the dilapidated concrete underwater room, half-filled with seawater, at “Bateson’s Bay”, to a sophisticated dolphin research lab.

   Dexter with Sue White, and early version of McAfee dolphin voice-recognition system

By 1988, the IBM PC had been invented and became affordable. Don pulled in John McAfee (later to become famous for anti-virus software), who was an expert in the then-new consumer field of computer voice recognition. John developed a custom card which would allow dolphins to manipulate images on a computer screen using key sounds as cursor keys, and Dexter worked with Don on developing programs with with dolphins might be able to give clues to the workings of their minds – while enjoying themselves at play.

By 1990, it was clear that the original IBM PC design was limited, and each new advance in consumer computing was being conceptually jumped on by Dex & Don. But then a bad thing happened. Dex had represented EarthTrust at a meeting of the Whaling Commission (IWC) and there had met famed freediver Jacques Mayal (subject of the movie “The Big Blue”). He had convinced Dexter that humans could adapt their bodies to extended underwater excursions, and Dexter felt that this could be a key to better interacting with wild dolphins.

That is how Dexter died in 1990. He tried a series of free dives (that is, breath-holding) in the clear waters on the Kona side of the big island in Hawaii, and on his third free dive to 100 feet, he suffered shallow-water blackout just before reaching the surface, and sank to the ocean floor.  No safety divers accompanied him, and only his young son in a kayak was a witness.

This enormous loss hit Don, the organization, and the movement hard, and changed the direction of the research, which Don had given a working name of “Project Delphis”.  Don was involved in directing over a dozen large campaigns as strategist, fundraiser, and manager, and could not be the guy constantly out at the lab doing the research.  That was to be Dexter’s role, flying in from his home on the big isle to run and oversee the lab efforts.  The whole dynamic of “collaborating highschool science teachers”, and the years of planning between Dex and Don, receded into the past. Don could not drop the other important campaigns in progress, some of which had millions of dolphin lives at stake, so he needed to find another person to direct the lab from day-to-day, and that person could no longer be Dexter.

  Dr. Ken Marten at the Delphis Lab

The Project’s ReBirth

After an exhaustive search, Don found Ken Marten, a PhD who had studied under Ken Norris, and had experienced threats to his life and intimidation as a federal “observer” on US tunaboats as he tried to fulfill the legal requirements of observing purse-seine net sets “on dolphins”. Marten had seen appalling losses of dolphins by uncaring and belligerent fishermen for no particular reason, and had explosives hurled at him, his records thrown overboard, and more.  Yet he fought back by testifying about this to Congress. This was a fellow whose courage and dedication to dolphin conservation were matched by a rigorous scientific background and years of research on animal behavior. He could bring a level of scientific credibility that the work could otherwise lack, and his standards were the highest. And he agreed with the restrictions Don had developed to keep ET within the ethical guidelines Dexter and Don had worked out.

Don’s directives steered the way the Delphis project took shape and was run [until 2003 when it closed]. It was a significant departure from other research, before or since.

• First: no food reward. ET would not buy in to the “training” paradigm used by all other captive dolphin researchers, called “operant conditioning”.  Don’s own past had included time doing research in a “food reward” dolphin lab in the ’70’s, and he felt that the data obtained was in some cases heavily compromised by the assumption that dolphins would behave as predictably as rats.  Moreover, what he wanted was to document original dolphin behavior, not trained behavior.
• Second: no playing with the dolphins.  As much fun as it would be, no swimming with the dolphins, no petting the dolphins; it had to be clear that the sole reason for the lab’s existence was for the dolphins, not the humans.
• Third: participation had to be optional for the dolphins.  They had to have a free choice to ignore it entirely.   The only way to be sure that it improved the dolphins’ lives was to have it only available when they wished to play with it. An amazing set of restrictions for researchers to live with.
• Fourth: whenever possible, no humans in the loop AT ALL. Ideally, the interactions would be between the dolphins and specially-programmed computers, cutting humans out of the loop. Constantly-running multi-data-channel videotape would record multiple video angles, visual displays of the dolphins ultrasonic sounds, audible recordings of the dolphins and the researchers’ comments, and any other data available, as a permanent record.
• Fifth: no manipulation of the dolphins by ET.  ET would not participate in asking that dolphins be moved or in any other way participate in the activities of the oceanarium.
• Sixth: A mandate to serve as a platform for promoting dolphin intelligence and abilities to global media, particularly within dolphin-killing nations.  It would be a condition of any news or documentary interviews given that the kills of dolphins also had to be mentioned in context with the happy and interesting imagery.
• Seventh: at the point reasonable progress to save wild dolphins stopped being possible at the lab for any reason, the project would end.  Since its existence might be used by some to argue for the benefits of keeping dolphins captive, the project had an ethical mandate to make ongoing progress toward saving wild dolphins or shut down.

These directives were followed rigorously for the life of the lab, which meant creating an entirely new research paradigm: educational toys. The overriding constraint was that dolphins had to enjoy any research enough to participate in it rather than engaging in social behavior with the other dolphins or other distractions; that is, unless the dolphin found it inherently rewarding to participate, it didn’t happen. The only reward a dolphin might get would be the reward of an enjoyable activity.

  Don designs the delphis lab and paradigm

Designing Research based on “Dolphin Fun”

This meant, among other things, figuring out what the dolphins enjoyed. It also meant developing interaction interfaces like the world had never seen before, with which the dolphins could flexibly control computers to made things happen, in safety and without intrusion into their lives. The onus was on the research team to design things dolphins thought were “cool” enough to engage them.

It is perhaps worth taking a step back and remarking on this, as a slight digression from this narrative. Some of these were wild animals born in the open sea. None of them had been trained in any way to use a computer or display screen. Yet to varying degrees they taught themselves to do so using various programs and interfaces, much as a non-technological human might play a video game, entirely of their own initiative and volition. Isn’t that cool?  There may be a Copernican-level reframing of the default human worldview hiding in there somewhere.

Don designed the lab layout and its data-acquisition standards and set the priorities, goals, and research directions while Dr. Marten conducted the day-to-day research with very bright people like Suchi Psarakos and many gifted volunteers.

Another responsibility shouldered by Don was to keep the project funded, and keep Sea Life Park from kicking it out. Both were a challenge; the lab always ran at a significant loss, and to a large extent the salaries for Marten and other lab staff were paid by Don out of what would have been his retirement savings.  Moreover, the ownership of SLP changed hands many times during the duration of the project, and each time it did, ET was given an order to vacate. It was up to Don to intercede to prevent that from happening, and it was no small task. Ultimately, in 2003,  with Dr. Marten needing to retire for health reasons and SLP changing over to a dolphin-swim facility under authority of bankruptcy proceedings, Don stuck by the original guidelines and closed the lab.

It has never been duplicated, and it was one of the longest-running, original, and open-ended attempts ever conducted to learn more about the mind of the dolphin. In a very real way, dolphins themselves controlled the research directions.The senior advisors included Dr. Ken Norris, considered by many the world’s leading authority in Dolphin research, who considered the program very important and kept in close touch with Ken Marten, visiting the lab when he could. Another very active advisor was Dr. John C. Lilly, who Don had initially spent time with in 1979 discussing the concepts and practicalities.  John lived on Maui and visited the lab multiple times as an adviser and collaborator, publicly endorsing it as the logical extension of his own groundbreaking research into dolphins and the nature of Mind.  There’s no way to list all the others here, but mentioning Norris and Lilly may pretty well bracket the scope of dolphin experts who considered it a vital project.

  John Lilly with Don at Delphis tankside

Notable among the advisors, part of the funding to keep it going came from Sir Arthur C. Clarke personally.

The lab inspired many dozens of documentaries and hundreds of international news stories over the years, as well as conducting utterly groundbreaking research. Prior to Project Delphis, for instance, it was believed by most scientists that “self-awareness” had only evolved once in the universe, in the great apes. By 1991, due to the Delphis research, it was clear that it had evolved from scratch at least twice, in beings evolutionarily separated by over 60 million years. This has profound implications for the likelihood of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Textbooks had to be changed, as did human understanding of our own place in the universe.

It got very close to doing much more.  For instance, by 2001 White and Marten had set up everything necessary to allow computer-using dolphins to interact in realtime over the internet with students in schools around the world – including nations conducting high dolphin kills. This was a “holy grail” goal Don had worked towards for many years. There were no technical obstacles left to be overcome, and the computer-using dolphins were ready and willing. But the latest ownership of the marine park did not have a comfort level with it being out of their control, and would not allow it to “go live”, blocking the donated broadband internet from being connected. It concerned them that their captive animals might be freely interacting with foreigners over the internet. And one can kind of see how it would mess with their core narratives. Thus it never happened, and one wonders whether it ever will. But it came so close….

  The Delphis project became a focus for Documentaries, and brought many people together.

The lab is closed, but the work continues

So the project started by Dex & Don went a long way, and is still going (as a set of principles and methodologies, and a data and video archive, if not a lab). Project Delphis brought together astronauts, futurists, conservationists, musicians, celebrities, politicians, and teachers, while presenting the realities of dolphins to billions of people and improving – if only a little – the life-quality of the dolphins who participated. The program itself did not close when the lab did, and its voluminous archived video data, experience, ethics and methods still exist to help us all reach a far future with dolphins still our earthly companions.

Now as we survey the prospects of oceans acidified and heated by human CO2 emissions, the spirit of Project Delphis needs to motivate us all. Scientists, conservationists, visionaries, and good people – with both legs and flippers – need to work together.