October 06 Interspecies Newsletter

Fewer whale experts than you might expect, are willing to acknowledge that the whales possess a genuine interest in human beings as cultural animals. Few acknowledge that whales will occasionally attempt to interact with us in a coherent, logical manner.

Communication between species is subjective, anecdotal, often personal, and usually subtle. Consequently, people who do not believe that such an interaction is possible, are the most likely to miss it as it is unfolding. They prefer to reach into the bag of acceptable behavior, to explain it as something far more mundane. In other words, it can be argued that a person must be open to the very possibility of interaction, to perceive a whale's attempt at interspecies communication as it unfolds.

For years now I have been speaking at whale conferences, where I play audio interactions I have recorded underwater with orcas, dolphins, or belugas. I usually precede these demonstrations by stating, "If interaction between species is really happening, you will simply hear it for yourself, and therefore I do not need to make any claims." The vast majority of my audiences do hear it for themselves, and this includes some of the world's best known dolphin and beluga scientists. Overwhelmingly, the only people who never hear it are the orca scientists. I don't know why this group remains so uniquely unmoved. Orca scientists are the most likely to contend that I am merely playing along with the calls the orcas are making simultaneously (but not synchronously) as I play. I try to point out that these recordings often demonstrate the whales changing their own tune to copy my melodies, or changing pitch to match my pitch, or that the whales and I often remain silent while the other is calling, and vice versa. Nothing I play seems capable to sway this professional judgment. Science is deep with answers, and it can easily provide alternative explanations for ostensibly misguided people like myself who experience whale behavior and sense contact. The fact that orca vocalizations have probably been analysed in so much more detail than the other two species, may play some role in this negative professional judgment.

One can make the case that orca scientists — the scouts whose job it is to inform human culture about the truth of orca existence — are actually trained to disbelieve in correspondence between species. The experience of correspondence is subjective. It lacks the mandatory objectivity. Our experts are, therefore, always going going to be the last people to acknowledge that the whales may be reaching out to us seeking correspondence, juice, relationship, community.

Many non-experts who possess deep experience observing orcas and their behavior, posit that the whales possess perceptions and communication abilities beyond the stereotypical calls, movements, and other replicable, data-driven behaviors that constitute the totality of scientific acceptance. These talents and perceptions include a pro-active seeking of interspecies interaction, a well-developed whale sense of aesthetics, musical communication, and even telepathy.

Ironically, while all these subjects are often discussed with a sense of awe at scientific conferences, such discussions always occur off the podium, and never onstage or in the journals. That pervasive silence about alternative whale talents is one reason why interspecies.com exists — to grant a plausible forum for all the serendipitous and professionally discredited experiences that have always defined human/whale relations. We at Interspecies have long believed that our culture errs when it grants whale scientists the power to define these beings for the rest of us.

I have just returned home from a week spent on a boat off the north coast of Vancouver Island, occasionally playing the electric mandolin (photo at the top) through an underwater system whenever the local orcas were in the vicinity. I have been conducting this communication research with the same pods of orcas almost every summer since 1976. When I started, the place was usually void of boat noise for hours at a time, and the wilderness setting offered a uniquely focused opportunity to interact with these orcas. Clearly, the best recorded interactions occurred before 1990. Some critical mass was achieved that year. The wilderness was dwindling, nearby towns had blossomed, boat traffic was increasing, and tourism expanded every year. Today, in summer, three or four whalewatching boats follow those local orca pods for 12 or more hours every day, and it has become virtually impossible to record an acoustic interaction with the whales without ambient boat noise sounding louder than either the whales or my own musical offerings.

The whales are awesome acoustic sensors. They seem to have responded to the growing lack of acoustic privacy by vocalizing less often among themselves, and far less often still, to express their well-developed acoustic aesthetic among humans. Ironically, because I have always been the only researcher in the neighborhood who was actively seeking correspondence with these animals, I seem to be the only researcher to have concluded that these northern resident orcas are no longer as animated with their calls, nor as likely to interact with a human being. Every year that I return, I go through a period of sadness to recognize that whatever correspondence I once enjoyed has ended, perhaps forever. And still, no other whale expert in the area seems willing to consider the possibility that a potent opportunity can exist, ever did exist, let alone that it has ended.

This year I was joined on the boat by distinguished author and musician David Rothenberg, who is writing a book to shed fresh insight into the fabled whale-to-human-to-whale perception, music, language, aesthetics, etc. His last book was called Why Birds Sing. You can read for yourself what David has written on the general subject of interspecies music.

As I say, communication with cetaceans is subjective, anecdotal, often personal, and always subtle. Although our recent voyage sometimes left me feeling a sense of deja vu about long gone events, the whales still showed us one spectacular behavior beyond the norm. Dolphin researcher, John Lilly, once confided to me that whales and dolphins are "masters of coincidence control." He offered that odd description to explain the common (and mysterious) experience of cetaceans so often showing themselves precisely when we need them to. In other words, what we humans often experience as a serendipitous meeting, Lilly believed was a planned event. "Coincidence control" also verifies that Lilly also believed that cetaceans are telepathic. Our skipper for this recent trip, Jim O'Donnell, is a firm advocate of Coincidence Control. He has reached this conclusion while cruising these waters, quietly filming the local orcas, for over 30 years.

David and I played music into the water for a day and a night and yet never succeeded to engage the local orcas. Jim O'Donnell then heard a forecast for bad weather on the radio, and decided to follow his intuition to go find them sooner than later. He found them soon enough. It was the same pod with which I had experienced my best interactions and recordings 20 years earlier. They were frolicking right in our path in a tiny inlet, and almost seemed to wait until we were next to them. Then the eight whales started traveling up the strait at the same slow pace of our sailboat. Ten minutes later, at a point between our own boat and the OrcaLab research center, all the whales started jumping out of the water, in an uncommon behavior called breaching. All of them were breaching, perhaps 30 times in ten minutes. In 30 years of watching them, neither Jim nor I had ever witnessed such a visual display of orca bodies. Still traveling slowly, within another mile they cut directly under our boat, and sped away at top speed, soon losing us. Both Jim and I smiled to speculate that we had just been gifted with a splendid example of coincidence control. It was David's first encounter with wild orcas, and he was less inclined to describe the event in such odd terms. All the pictures above were taken by David.

2 Coping with Stress

submited by Naomi Fuhrmeister

STRESS

I am not sure exactly how it works, but this is amazingly accurate. Read the full description before looking at the picture.

The picture below has 2 identical dolphins in it. It was used in a case study on stress levels at St. Mary's Hospital.
Look at both dolphins jumping out of the water. The dolphins are identical. A closely monitored, scientific study revealed that, in spite of the fact that the dolphins are identical, a person under stress would find differences in the two dolphins. The more differences a person finds between the dolphins, the more stress that person is experiencing.
Look at the photograph and if you find more than one or two differences you may want to take a vacation.