Messages from the Deep (4 page)

I was swimming at Keurbooms at second beach,
beyond the restaurant, where we have swum so many times. But that
day I shouldn’t have swum there as it was Spring high tide, with
some big waves at times. But the water was crystal clear and just
the right temperature between cool and warm, so I went in anyway. I
would stay within my depth of standing comfortably and just dunk
myself a few times. Well, it was great and I enjoyed diving under
each wave that came in, then standing again before diving under the
next one, until I felt OK, enough, time to get out now.

Just then, a bigger than usual wave came in,
a dumper that had a washing machine effect on the currents behind
it. Before I could try to go towards the shore, I found myself
powerless to avoid being sucked into deeper water by the retreating
backwash of the wave.

I was coughing up some water when the next
wave hit me and, not having taken a breath first, I soon found I
was choking for air. Not sure whether I was upside-down or not, I
must have inhaled more water. I started to panic as I wasn’t even
sure if I should try to swim for the shore or rather to swim
further out, beyond the waves, hoping a current would take me
around and back to shore somewhere.

I chose the latter but I was getting
exhausted and could sense that I wouldn’t be able to keep going
much longer. I looked towards the shore but it seemed far away and
totally deserted, so it would have been a waste of energy to shout
for help. After that, I remember giving up trying to swim and just
floating, letting go of all care and anxiety about what may happen
to me, going peacefully into the unknown around and inside me. I
was surrounded by pure love with no intruding thoughts in my head.
I felt so at one with the water that I could leave my body and see
myself floating there.

I was being drawn towards a very bright
light, not blinding, but warm and comforting.

I saw my deceased grandparents, relatives and
close friends who could communicate with me without words, like
telepathy I suppose. Some were welcoming but others seemed to be
telling me to go back, it was not my time. Strangely enough, one
was a dolphin, saying it would see me later, in space.

I found that I was experiencing, at
lightning-fast speed, all the main events of my life, feelings,
thoughts and relationships. I could even see and feel the effects
and repercussions of my actions on others, and so I was able to
judge myself as to how ethically or not I had lived my life.

I had a sense that this was the ‘hell’ we
imagine if we feel extreme guilt and shame.

Just then, a power, something like my parents
and loving spirits combined, confronted me and told me to ‘go back
now !’

I felt a huge jolt, like an electric shock,
and when I opened my eyes I found I was in one of those little
gullies near the restaurant, and I was able to dog-paddle and crawl
to the shallows and beach. I lay there coughing and retching the
last of the water from my lungs, too weak to cry properly, as I
felt my whole being flooding with tears of thankfulness, not only
that I was alive, but also for the revelation I had had and still
feel deeply now. And for you being a part of my life, Ada.

I have started feeling confident that somehow
we can both have our careers and have each other.

I have had a verse from a song by The
Incredible String Band, called Painting Box, in my head for a week
now. Would you like to hear it? OK then.

‘The purple sail above me catches all the
strength of Summer,

Fishes stop and ask me where I’m bound.

I smile and shake my head and say my little
ship is sinking,

But I kind of like the sea that I’m on and I
don’t mind to drown.”

Alex and Mariada are at The Heads in
Knysna.

He finally tells her, “I heard from Earth 2
today. It’s hard to believe that I am telling you that I’m going
into deep space without you. When they asked me about that, about
you, I mean, I told them that you would make the same choice, to
go. So that’s that. But I will always love you, Ada.”

A few weeks later, Mariada and Alex are at
Storms River Mouth, standing on the foot-bridge across the
river.

She finally tells him with a huge grin, “I
also heard from Earth 2, today. And you won’t believe what they
asked me to do!”

It is 2044 and Alexander Zhivago, the 60 year
old Marine Bio-Linguist at Plettenberg Bay, is giving a talk to the
International Marine Institute at a conference in Cape Town, on
‘The history of decoding cetacean communication.’ Behind him, a
giant screen shows visuals relating to what he describes.

“I have given many talks at schools recently,
and it’s very pleasing to see that children often ask questions
that are radical — they get to the root of the issue. And so today
I will start each section of information with a radical question or
two that children have asked.

Are cetaceans as old as dinosaurs, and are
they as intelligent as humans? No, they are not quite as old, but
they came relatively soon after dinosaurs, and before humans. About
70 million years ago, the terrestrial ancestors of whales and
dolphins re-entered the ocean where life originally began. About 30
million years ago, cetaceans evolved brains the present size of the
human brain, which we have had for only about 100 000 years.

The main conditions for human intelligence —
a large brain, a convoluted cerebral cortex, a complex system of
social interaction and communication — may be greatly exceeded by
cetaceans.

How long do whales and dolphins live, do they
have families and how do they talk to each other?

Whales form stable, matrilineal groups, some
offspring staying with their mothers for life, and live for 50 to
80 years, like humans do. Groupings of extended families form clans
or bands, with common calls, something like our dialects.

Sounds, made in water and air, consist of a
blow, moan, growl, burp, wheeze, groan, bellow, grunt, yelp and
snort, amongst others. The male has ‘songs’, used for
communication, for fun, sometimes for mating, and probably also in
following migratory routes.

Dolphins use mainly whistles and clicks, the
whistles using a narrow FM band of signals for communication, and
the clicks on a broad band of pulses for echo-location. They have
unique ‘signature’ whistles, seemingly to identify and call each
other, a slight variation of the mother’s call and is developed
early.

Whales express bursts of air from as low as
20 Hz up to 9000 Hz in frequency, and at 100 to 180 dB in volume,
in their songs.

The notes are in phrases which are repeated,
before the next phrase follows, a phrase sequence forming a theme,
and there being five to eight themes per song.

They can repeat a song exactly, much later,
even when the song was more than half an hour long, and they can
change the song in methodical ways, at varying times. The songs can
be sent over huge distances, especially at the level of the deep
sound channel, about one kilometre deep.

Dolphins can redirect the attention of
another dolphin by using an acoustic ‘flashlight’, which is like
pointing to indicate something. They can learn human sign language,
including a long sentence of four or five instructions, and can
understand chronological order. They can categorise objects through
visual and acoustic discrimination and matching.

In an experiment, they took the same time as
humans to learn what was required, which was to produce novel
behaviour, and clearly showed self-awareness.

How do you learn whale and dolphin languages,
and when will we be able to talk to them?

Cracking the codes of cetacean languages and
communications has been an arduous process. As dolphins have lived
in captivity in dolphinaria for many decades, and as we have
formulated increasingly sophisticated theories about the content of
their communications, we have had a much better idea of the
meanings of dolphin sounds than of whale sounds.

For example, if a single captive dolphin in a
group is instructed to do something, whether verbally or in sign
language, it tends to repeat or pass on that instruction to the
other dolphins in ‘delphinese’, enabling us to make an educated
guess about the meanings of the sounds used. We could then look for
these sounds in other communications and see if they mean the same
things, thus gradually building up a vocabulary.

While dolphins can roughly copy some human
sounds and understand the meanings of the words they form, and
therefore they can converse with us to a limited extent, the
converse is usually not true — our attempts to copy dolphin sounds
do not get us too far, as the dolphins usually greet these attempts
with contempt, judging by the snorting and spitting sounds that
follow.

This difference in ability to copy sounds and
words led some in the past to believe that, instead of us battling
to learn delphinese and whale language, we should rather
concentrate on captive dolphins and teach them to communicate with
us in English. Maybe then they could teach us dolphin language and
thinking, and maybe also how to understand whales.

However, Robert Stenuit, in ‘The Dolphin,
Cousin to Man’ (1968), expressed it succinctly:

“All researchers today agree that the future
of cetacean sonar research does not lie in the tanks of
institutions.

To make a serious study of marine mammals it
is necessary to study them in their natural environment, in the
sea. In captivity animals do not use their total normal vocabulary
nor the full reach of their sonar; moreover, the echoes sent back
by the walls of the tanks confuse the recordings.”

It must be noted that dolphins, while having
a larynx, have no vocal cords, flexible tongue or lips as we have
for speech, so they cannot correctly reproduce human sounds.
However, they have a range of sound frequencies so wide that we
need sophisticated electronic equipment to record and analyse them
for us.

So, research became more focused on
collecting high-quality data with cameras and hydrophone and air
sound recorders to capture the images and sounds of passing
dolphins. Boats were and still are used as they can get close
enough for you to get clear recordings, but the engine noise and
the fact that you are intruding in the dolphins’ space could easily
change their natural behaviour. To counter this, hydrophones, which
are under-water microphones, have been placed in areas where
cetaceans often visit or pass by. If you can have simultaneous
sightings with clear images to accurately identify individuals, you
can then link the sounds recorded to specific subjects.

Some studies have used trained dolphins who
co-operate with researchers in the open sea and may interact with
other dolphins.

The U.S. Navy has been doing this off the
Bahamas in a specially-equipped boat called Sea Hunter. Some
subjects have been tagged, in order for us to follow their
movements and know exactly where they are, and some have even had
microphones and cameras implanted, giving continuous recordings for
the researchers.

What did we do with all this information?

Endless records of whale and dolphin sounds
were collected in oceans all over the world and at different times
of the year, and then analysed, classified and stored. Some studies
were longitudinal, seeing how sounds and behaviour of individuals
and groups changed over time; and some were cross-sectional,
comparing different groups at the same times.

In the early 2020s, breakthroughs started
happening in decoding cetacean language and communication.

Research into whale and dolphin sounds showed
that they use

3D imagery in much of their communications,
making a type of sono-pictorial or quasi-holographic language.
Sound-pictures can be shown in a rapid sequence, something like the
individual frames of a film. This language could convey subtleties
even more complex than our own, rather one-dimensional, human
languages.

Whale and dolphin researchers and watchers
around the world were reporting a propensity by some, especially
older matriarchs and lone males, to come closer to boats and show
more interest than usual, with more eye-contact and sounds
produced, often almost human sounds. This gave researchers new hope
of progress in communicating with cetaceans.”

“What are the latest developments in
understanding and communicating with cetaceans?

After closer contact between humans and
cetaceans, many people became very excited, and money from sponsors
poured in as never before.

Marine linguists converged on a few notable
spots for cetacean contacts all over the world, from California to
Costa Rica, Argentina to Ireland, South Africa to Australia, and
Samoa to Japan. In the Southern hemisphere, late Winter to early
Summer is a time when most whales do not feed or have to go
anywhere in particular, other than for some to calve or mate, so
they have some ‘free time’. One of those spots was in my home-town
of Plettenberg Bay, a well-sheltered sweep of curving shoreline and
well away from the underwater noise of the shipping lanes and
fishing boats.

We had hydrophones and a reliable network of
spotters on a stretch of coastline about 150 kilometres long, from
Knysna to Robberg, ‘Plett’, Keurboomstrand, Nature’s Valley and
Storm’s River.

Have I ever made friends with a whale or
dolphin, and what type of personality (or ‘dolphinality’) did it
have?

I have always found cetaceans friendly when
the situation is right and they don’t feel threatened.

While we monitored all recordings closely, we
also went out in boats, and found that whales and dolphins were
coming closer as they got to know us better. We had already learned
some basic communication skills, including having our own
‘signature calls’, and had established relationships with some of
the ‘regulars’. A whale, an old loner male whom I had come across
many times and with whom I had talked before, known as Aristotle,
was the first to arrive. He was in good spirits and seemed deeply
appreciative that I was there. He related directly to me and looked
me straight in the eye at all times, seeming to convey subtle
nuances of expression by moving his eyeball or pupil slightly as he
made each sound. He encouraged me to talk a lot and listened
intently as I spoke, his eyeball flickering in rhythm with my
speech.