Daily MOS: NASA Funded Dolphin Handjobs

Someone asked if I could write about, and I quote, “the one where the lady was trying to teach the dolphin to speak and it fell in love with her and then killed itself out of frustration.”

I had no idea what the fuck they were talking about. But I was sold.

Today’s Moment of Science… NASA funded dolphin handjobs.

There was this era when we were sure dolphins were super intelligent, and could possibly even communicate with humans. The idea started in the 1960s and had a resurgence in pop culture and new age spirituality in the 1990s. We definitely all had that one friend who was maybe a little, uh, weird into dolphins.

In the 1960s, NASA was that friend.

Physician, neuroscientist, and fan of psychedelic drugs, John Lilly took notice of the relatively large brain of the dolphin. He suspected the animal could have a high degree of intelligence, perhaps even the capacity to communicate. The obvious thing to do was get some government funding, open a lab in the Virgin Islands, and spend a few years working on teaching dolphins to talk.

I can find no records of how that conversation went, but man, to have been a fly on the wall during the “hey, NASA, this is totally more for you than for me” pitch asking funding to hang out with dolphins in paradise.

The main reason NASA funded this? In case we ever meet aliens, this could help us communicate with them. Smart people like Carl Sagan thought there was something to this, so who knows. I’m bringing them my proposal to fund a cat cafe so that we can talk to ghosts.

Margaret Howe Lovatt lived on the same island, just effing loved animals, and decided “I’m gonna go introduce myself.” She had no formal science education but she had gusto, and Lilly was impressed by her natural ability to work with the facility’s three dolphins. First she was given unlimited access to observe, then they planned out a long term experiment together. She was going to live for three months in isolation with one of the dolphins, Peter, doing everything she could to train him to talk.

Frankly, the rumors about dolphin sex got a little out of hand.

Peter was the only male dolphin of the bunch, and when he was taken away from the two females he would get a bit randy. It became easier to take care of his urges manually than bring in the fleet every time he interrupted lessons with a boner. It’s not like Lovatt was mounting him, but it’s also undeniably weird.

At the end of three months, it became clear that lessons were going nowhere. Dolphins were not picking up human speech, and we weren’t understanding theirs any more clearly either. NASA was like “we don’t want the aliens to know about this,” and the project was ended. The dolphins were sent back to Miami, where they were to continue working as stars on the show Flipper.

But as the sad tale goes, the end of this relationship was too much for Peter the dolphin, and he became hopelessly depressed. Eventually he took his final breath, then descended to the bottom of his tank for the last time. Dolphins have to actively choose to surface for air, which means they can also choose not to, ending their lives with quiet devastation.

Language is a complicated process, and the well-intentioned efforts of Lilly and Lovatt perhaps overlooked this. Do the dolphin whistles and noises signal specific thoughts or concepts? Are they capable of stringing these noises together into coherent phrases? But more to the point, since we had the computers and the recording equipment, why didn’t we try to learn their language first?

Typical Americans. We even expect another species to learn English.

Still, humans haven’t entirely given up on the dream of interspecies communication. At the Wild Dolphin Project in Florida, they’re using more modern approaches in trying to communicate with the animals. Displaying a better understanding of the animal, they’re employing artificial dolphin whistles, and trying to establish some common vocabulary with the dolphins.

There are apparently anti-bestiality laws in Florida now.

This has been your daily Moment of Science, reminding you that if dolphins were supposed to get handjobs, Jesus would have given them opposable thumbs.

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