Each year hundreds of thousands of dolphins die from driftnet and purse seine fishing, from being harpooned, from being shot as crab bait, and from pollution. Although it is already known that dolphins are large-brained, intelligent, social creatures, humans continue to slaughter these amazing mammals at an enormous rate.Don White, President of Earthtrust, has long seen the need to establish scientific evidence that would shed light on the issue of dolphin intelligence. Project Delphis was created in 1985 by Don and by pioneer dolphin advocate Dexter Cate as an innovative and positive project to investigate and assess dolphin cognition. It seeks to bring about a clearer understanding of these friendly mammals, to publish the significant discoveries in the scientific literature, and to share the information with the world at large. It is Earthtrust’s profound hope that new perceptions of dolphin intelligence will motivate humans to respect and protect these friendly people of the sea, and their natural ocean habitat.

Project Delphis is a conservation effort to save wild dolphins, as well as an international dolphin behavior and cognition research project. Its purpose is threefold:
1. to save dolphins in the ocean from the holocaust they currently experience. By learning all we can about the intelligence of dolphins, and sharing these findings with the global public in an effort to raise people’s awareness about these animals, it is hoped this information will further dolphin conservation efforts worldwide.

2. to conduct scientific research on the behavior and cognition of dolphins and learn more about their minds, and contribute these findings to the scientific literature;

3. to enrich the environment of these dolphins by offering a vehicle for their recreation.
Construction of the first Project Delphis underwater viewing laboratory was completed in July 1990 in Waimanalo, Hawaii. Research on perception and self-consciousness began immediately. That lab functioned until late 2002, building up a huge archive of recorded data and preparing the Delphis program for its next steps.
[50K GIF Schematic of Underwater Lab]
Research At Project Delphis
Our research methodology is unique for scientific work with dolphins: all work is done purely on the dolphins’ own motivation, with no food reward.
Do Dolphins Perceive Television As Reality, Or Just Fancy Lights?
A central goal of Project Delphis is to devise and perfect flexible interfaces betweenfor u dolphins and computers se in multiple labs and situations worldwide. As a first step, a basic method of operation in the Delphis program is to interact with the dolphins and explore their mental abilities and characteristics using a computer and TV monitor. [83K GIF Photo of Interior of Lab] The dolphins were shown a videotape of a trainer feeding them. It was anticipated that if the dolphins viewed TV as reality, they would swim to their feeding area. These dolphins first tried to catch the fish they saw being thrown on the screen, and then swam off to their regular feeding location. This response indicated a positive reality test: the dolphins accepted the small TV image as a representation of reality.
Self-Awareness Research
Experimental psychologists have measured self-awareness by observing an animal’s reaction to its mirror image: if it uses the mirror for self-examination, it implies a mental concept of self. This cognitive ability is only seen in the most advanced minds. Self-awareness has been demonstrated in the apes and man by anesthetizing the subject, marking his forehead, and watching his reaction when he wakes up: when he sees the mark in a mirror, does he investigate it by touching himself or the mirror? By these measures, a primate touching itself indicates self-awareness, whereas touching the mirror, a social response, suggests the subject is investigating what it perceives as another individual.

We conducted this “mark test” on five bottlenose dolphins by putting a harmless sunscreen cream on their sides and videotaping their behavior through a one-way mirror. Indeed they came to the mirror and twisted and turned as if they were looking at their mark. To test whether their postures were self-aware rather than social, we conducted control experiments: (1) we compared marked to unmarked behavior; (2) we compared mirror behavior to behavior with a real stranger through an underwater barred gate; and (3) we let the dolphins watch themselves on TV, both real-time and playback, and compared the two. The results of the mark tests and all control experiments strongly suggest self-awareness in the bottlenose dolphin. Our work has subsequently been repeated by independent labs with the same result.

If true, this is a profound result: previously, no animals except a few of the great apes – man and his nearest kin – have shown this trait. Finding self-awareness in a creature whose evolutionary history is separated from ours by 60 million years may say something fundamental about the evolution of intelligence in mammals, and perhaps the evolution of intelligence in this universe.

Scientific treatment of the self-awareness research appears as a chapter in the book Self-Awareness in Animals and Humans: Developmental Perspectives (Eds. Parker, S., Mitchell, R., and Boccia, M., Cambridge University Press, 1995). This entire chapter, including figures and photos, is available here. Extensive treatment has also been carried in the international science journal Consciousness and Cognition (Volume 4, Number 2, June 1995). Included in this journal is our paper outlining our research results, followed by commentary articles from a range of other animal awareness researchers. This commentary is followed, in turn, by our rebuttal to various comments presented by the other authors.
Underwater Touch Screen For The Dolphins
Since dolphins cannot interact with computers using traditional means, we have searched for alternate methods which will allow them to interact with their Mac computer. We tried to teach the dolphins to use an acoustic joystick, a way of controlling a computer cursor with sounds. They did not show sustained interest in the concept, and in the early 90′s the logistics of programming the computer to recognize their complex sound was problematic. However during initial tests using a TV display device which responds to sound with light patterns, the dolphins controlled the display by squeaking their rostrums against the underwater windows in their tank. This suggested the design of an underwater touchscreen. During 1992 and 1993 we worked with Carroll Touch, (now Elo TouchSystems) in Texas, one of the country’s major touchscreen manufacturers. Their design is dolphin safe: infrared beam production and sensing electronics are in the lab, and a “reflector frame” on the dolphin side of the underwater window bends the beams 90 degrees so they run parallel to the window surface. Control of the computer through touch allows the dolphins to run programs that to make choices in various experiments devised to explore their mental abilities and preferences. Carroll Touch has a special page on their web site devoted to the dolphin touch screen.

Dolphin interacting with touchscreen at Project Delphis. The inset is what the dolphin sees on the screen, which he/she can manipulate to produce different effects, e.g. music, sounds, visuals, etc.
Underwater Bubble Sculpture
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN READERS: Click here for additional photos of dolphin bubble ring sculpture. Email or phone EarthTrust to get involved or make a donation to the next-generation research. Please also see Dr. Ken Marten’s testimony to Congress on the “Dolphin Death Bill” which altered the definition of ‘dolphin safe’ tuna in the USA.

A physicist would marvel at some of the play behavior observed in young dolphins at the Project Delphis laboratory. They blow underwater bubble rings