The Dolphin in the Mirror: Exploring Dolphin Minds and Saving Dolphin Lives [Hardcover]

Who is that dolphin in the mirror? When a dolphin looks in a mirror, does it know it is looking at itself? Dolphin expert Diana Reiss says yes, and her colleagues agree. Reiss has spent 30 years studying dolphins and getting to know them as intimately as one can hope to know a marine mammal species. Central to her research were experiments to determine if a dolphin could recognize itself as itself in a mirror, rather than thinking it is seeing another dolphin.

Mirror self-recognition is considered a sign of extremely high intelligence, and was previously believed possible only in humans and higher primates such as chimpanzees. Dolphins have now been added to that elite category. Once a dolphin figures out that the image in the mirror is himself, he will explore his body, gazing into his own eyes, checking out his teeth, and displaying various body parts for self-inspection. If a researcher makes a mark on a dolphin's body, the dolphin will quickly swim to the mirror and orient himself so as to look at the mark. This "mark test" was first used on primates and is considered the definitive proof of mirror self-recognition.

The self-recognition findings are the pinnacle of Reiss's work, but there's much more to the book. She discusses dolphin myths in various cultures and the centuries-long history of man's fascination with dolphins. She also outlines some of her other dolphin intelligence studies, including an underwater keyboard dolphins could use to select a specific toy or other reward. The stories of dolphin antics during the various experiments were my favorite parts of the book. The author is careful not to ascribe human traits to these animals, but it seems to me they have quite a sense of humor. They're also prone to behaviors strongly resembling empathy and service.

Near the end of the book, Reiss slips out of her role as scientist and into that of activist. She describes the brutal slaughter techniques used on dolphins in Taiji, Japan. These practices were the subject of the 2009 film "The Cove," which won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Film. These dolphins are the victims of several methods of slow, painful death, including something resembling a torture rack. The Japanese government has refused to ban these inhumane practices, but Diana Reiss is not giving up.

Reiss writes with a style that is easy for anyone to understand. She maintains scientific integrity while avoiding pretentiousness or oversimplification. The organizational structure of the book seems a little odd at times, but it's not a major drawback. The stories of the antics and exploits of the dolphins Reiss worked with over the years made me laugh out loud, and sometimes laugh and cry at the same time. I would have liked to see even more of these stories, and perhaps a little less of the history of research done on species other than dolphins.

What led me to take an interest in this book was author Dr. Diana Reiss's relationship with Dr. John Lilly who was probably the finest and one of the earliest researchers on the Dolphin mind. Lilly was a Cal Tech trained physicist and biologist who went on to get a medical degree from Dartmouth College. He was a very big part of the counterculture during the Viet Nam era. His expertise in dolphin research probably led to two Hollywood movies.

Dr. Reiss, the author makes it very clear that John Lilly was very influential on her own development as a scientist. She was also blessed with certain corporate sponsors who believing in her work were willing to help fund it by giving her the necessary equipment to carry on when it was necessary.

The Dolphin in the Mirror is the story of a lifetime of work devoted to trying to understand the mind of another species, not only different from our own, but also from a different environment - the SEA. We as humans occupy the land, we breathe through our nostrils. Dolphins on the other hand were once land creatures, and somewhere in the last several hundred million years made the journey into the sea and never came out again.

EXTRAORDINARY BOOK

The first chapters are devoted to the author's attempt to save a humpback whale that are lost in the inland waterways of California. She is successful at helping the whale make it back to the open ocean. She then proceeds to tell us about the history of dolphins as it relates to mythology and origin stories. At times she goes all the way back to ancient Greece to tell us about the impact the dolphins had on history. As an example the sheer number of stories relating to dolphins saving the lives of distressed sailors by either keeping them afloat or leading them back to land is so extensive that you cannot discount the truth of these narratives.

Dr. Reiss takes us through each of her research assignments both in this country and abroad in France. Many of these engagements last anywhere from months to years. In each case she learns more and more about the minds of these incredible and misunderstood creatures. Her description of her scientific endeavors is so extensive, so detailed that a graduate student in any field could use it as a model to do their own work.

Dolphins Dr. Reiss shows us are extremely intelligent, and have large, complex brains with brain weights even greater than our own. They have the ability to become vocal mimics. Their great achievement is an echo-location ability that blows away anything the Navy has ever dreamed of creating. They can locate a ping pong ball in a body of water from 400 yards away. If you want to explore how they can be used in war, go to the search engines and explore the swimmer nullification program deployed by the Navy during the Viet Nam conflict.

Chapters of this book are devoted to Dr. Reiss's attempts to study the range of the dolphin's intelligence. Experiment after experiment conclusively shows that these mammals can do a whole lot more than scientists previously modeled in their templates. Many scientists still reject the results that are so clearly evident in her research, but that is the nature of science. One would think that researchers are open minded by definition. Instead we find that they could as biased and closed minded as anybody else.

By the end of the book, the reader has explored not only the minds of these captivating inhabitants of our planet, but also what might be called their emotional nature. The author and the dolphins in each segment of the book become great friends. When Dr. Reiss leaves to begin her work somewhere else, she suffers greatly at the loss of her friendship with her dolphins. At times she suffers the almost unbearable loss of a dolphin dying, which he equates to the same feelings we experience when a human dies that we care about.

Hopefully a book like this will cause many of the readers to appreciate man's place on this planet, and that we may not be alone. After all, how much difference is there between a dolphin intelligence that might be able to interact with, and an alien intelligence that researchers might encounter? Are the difficulties of one versus the others that much different from one another? Read the book and find out. I promise you that you will not be disappointed.

Richard Stoyeck

I was really looking forward to this book (I typically eat up anything that has to do with the ocean), but as much as I wanted to like this book it never really clicked for me. I readily admit that the story of how Diana Reiss started a career in theater and then returned to school and switched over to the life of a marine mammalogist/researcher was interesting. She is now considered to be one of the nation's leading researchers in marine mammal cognition, learning, and marine mammal psychology(?).

If you are a psychologist interested in questions like what it means to be self-aware, what it means to have intelligence, or related questions then you should enjoy this book. In it Reiss spends many pages detailing how she did different experiments designed to discover how smart marine mammals are, especially bottlenose dolphins, as well as to see if they really are self-aware. Reiss also spends many pages reflecting on her conclusions and her bonds to her subjects. I imagine that it would be virtually impossible not to develop emotional and deeply sentimental connections with dolphins if you worked with them every day. The risk of having those kinds of emotional connections and trying to do objective, empirical research, however, is that it becomes increasingly difficult to minimize bias in that kind of setting. You see, if you love dolphins and you have a pre-existing bias that they are intelligent, there is a very real risk that when they do something it will be interpreted as intelligence. Am I saying that dolphins are not intelligent? No. What I'm saying is that what Reiss did was extremely difficult...to manage to separate bias and observation enough to do some good science.

Toward the end of the book Reiss started to get into the topic of marine mammal protection, not using conservation as the argument, but that humans have a moral obligation to protect other species that show evidence of self-awareness and intelligence. That's an interesting idea, but, sadly, that argument has not yet shown an ability to sway nations like Japan that continue to harvest wild bottlenose dolphins for marine mammal parks, shows, etc., and also butcher the rest for sale as food. For more on this particular situation you should watch the documentary, The Cove.

All in all, there is a good message here and the science is pretty interesting, but the heavy dose of sentimentality and writing that is not really engaging (for me) leads me to award 3 stars for this book.

"The Dolphin in the Mirror" is OK, but I do not intend to add this title to my list of recommended readings for my marine biology students.

3 stars.