This monthly newsletter is only published online. Interspecies.com is a 501(c)(3) US nonprofit. To make a credit card donation, click the paypal button below. This is our 30th year. This monthly newsletter is only published online.

1 Communicating a Better World

I started this online newsletter/blog in the spring of 2005 as the logical continuation of the printed Interspecies Newsletter, which I published quarterly for over 25 years. Online statistics indicate that roughly 1000 people read it each month. I remain a naive visionary, and so I imagine it growing to attract 100 times that many readers. The subject matter is certainly cogent, presenting ideas, media, news, and links that promote a cultural and emotional transformation in the way human beings perceive nature. This newsletter has no subscribers, per se, because we provide it for free. It is funded through general support to interspecies.com. We could not make it any easier for you to support this organization. just click the credit card link at the bottom of this page.

It has become much more evident that I need help to keep this newsletter growing.

1. Mail me your links to worthwhile articles, or even groups of related articles. Send me photos, audio clips, and short films. What do I mean? Like the photo, below of beluga whales underwater that knocked off my socks. Mark Fischer often sends us his latest breakthroughs in wavelet imagery. This one provides an audio graph of the call of a pseudorca.
2. I'd especially like to start featuring Flash, and other web technologies that will allow us to create interactive media for our readers. To do that well, I need a few committed volunteers to design these elements and then to program them into our format.
3. Interspecies has a huge library of animal calls and digital music composed from these samples. We need an innovative way to showcase this library.
4. I need a volunteer to manage the mailing list and oversee the monthly promos. As some of you have experienced, I sometimes send out two or more announcements, mostly because my server insists I send it out at a measly 100 mailings at a time, and yet it does not provide proper feedback for this process.
5. Think of it as your newsletter. What would you like to do to make it better. I am open to any possibility, so long as, one, it does not make more work for me; and two, it continues to serve as a genuine bridge between the worlds of science, environment, art, and consciousness.

2 Looking at Flipper, Seeing Ourselves

By Franz de Waal

No one blinks when a celebrity is called “vacuous” or a politician a “moron”. But when headlines screamed recently that dolphins are “dimwits”, I was truly shocked. Is this a way to talk about an animal so revered that there are several Web domain names that include “smart dolphin”? This is not to say that one should believe everything about them. For example, their supposed “smile” is fake (they lack the facial musculature for expressions), and all we seem to have learned from chatting “dolphinese” with them is that lone male dolphins are keenly interested in female researchers.

That dolphins are dimwits is the claim of Paul Manger, a South African scientist who says that dolphins’ relatively large brains are due simply to preponderance of fatty glial cells. These glia produce heat, which allows the brain’s neurons to do their job in the cold ocean. Based on this observation, Professor Manger couldn’t resist speculating that the intelligence of dolphins and other cetaceans (like whales and porpoises) is vastly overrated. He offered gems of insight, such as that dolphins are too stupid to jump over a slight barrier (as when they are trapped in a tuna net), whereas most other animals will. Even a goldfish will jump out of its bowl, he noted.

If we skip the technicalities — such as that glial cells are not simply insulation, that they add connectivity to the brain, and that humans, too, have many more glial cells than neurons — the question remains why the prospect of animal intelligence sets off such controversy. Could it be that the huge size of the dolphin brain, which exceeds ours by 15 percent or more, threatens the human ego? Are we to ignore the billions and billions of neurons that dolphins do possess?

The goldfish remark reminded me of a common strategy of those who play down animal intelligence. They love to “demonstrate” remarkable cognitive feats in small-brained species: if a rat or pigeon can do it, it can’t be that special. Thus, some pigeons have been trained to use “symbolic communication” by pecking a key marked “thank you!” that delivered food to another pigeon. And they have also been conditioned to peck at their own bodies in front of a mirror, supporting the claim that they are “self-aware.”

Clearly, pigeons are trainable. But is this truly comparable to the actions of Presley, a dolphin at the New York Aquarium, who, without any rewards, reacted to being marked with paint by taking off at high speed to a distant part of his tank where a mirror was mounted? There he spun round and round, the way we do in a dressing room, appearing to check himself out.

What is so upsetting to some people about the closeness between animal and human intelligence, or between animal and human emotions, for that matter? Just saying that animals can learn from each other, and hence have rudimentary cultures, or that they can be jealous or empathic is taken by some as a personal affront. Accusations of anthropomorphism will fly, and we’ll be urged to be parsimonious in our explanations. The message is that animals are no humans.

That much is obvious. But it is equally true that humans are animals. Is it so outlandish, from an evolutionary standpoint, to assume that if a large-brained mammal acts similarly to us under similar circumstances, the psychology behind its behavior is probably similar, too? This is true parsimony in the scientific sense, the idea that the simplest explanation is often the best. Those who resist this framework are in “anthropodenial” — they cling to unproven differences.

Since Aristotle, humans have known that dolphins are incredibly social. Each individual produces its own unique whistle sound by which the others recognize him or her. They enjoy lifelong bonds and reconcile after fights by means of “petting.” The males form power-seeking coalitions, not unlike the politics of chimpanzees and humans. Dolphins also support sick companions near the surface, where they can breathe. They may encircle a school of herring, driving the fish together in a compact ball and releasing bubbles to keep them in place, after which they pick their food like fruit from a tree.

In captivity, dolphins are known to imitate the gait and gestures of people walking by, and to outsmart their keepers. One female dolphin that was rewarded with a fish for every piece of debris she managed to collect from her tank managed to con her trainers into a bounty of snacks. They discovered she had been hiding large items like newspapers underwater, only to rip small pieces from them, bringing these to her trainer one by one.

There are tons of such observations, which is why most of us believe in dolphin intelligence — glia or no glia. It also explains why the slaughter of dolphins, as still occurs every year in Japan, arouses such strong emotions and controversy. Still, I must admit that the whole dolphin affair has also offered me some fresh insights. From now on, if I find my goldfish thrashing on the floor, I will congratulate him before dropping him back into his bowl.

Frans de Waal, a professor of psychology at Emory University, is the author of “Our Inner Ape”.

3 Peering at Minke, Seeing a Citizen

Three documents to ponder. The first is an official Japanese government permit allowing some scientist to kill 120 Minke whales off the coast of Japan. The meat will be sold to markets within the country. The second is a letter from the Cousteau Society to the US Secretary of Commerce protesting the change in US foreign policy that has weakened our country's committment to uphold the moratorium against commercial whaling. The third is a declaration seeking political standing for cetaceans, co-authored and updated over thirty years time by Jacques Cousteau, John Lilly, Scott Taylor, and Jim Nollman.

Japanese whaling permit		Cousteau letter to Commerce		The Cetacean Nation

4 Links for November

• A new and brilliant CD by Matthew Herbert, Plat de Jour includes music composed from audio samples taken from food sources, including 60,000 factory farmed chickens, several brands of bottled water, coffee beans, and ads of famous celebrities endorsing fast food. You really want to read the page explaining how this CD was made. It follows the same basic conceptual aesthetic as Interspecies own recent CD: The Belly of the Whale.
• Check out oddmusic.com for a grand tour of all the extraordinary musical instruments in the world that you have never heard of. Matthew Herbert could easily have used the Beer Bottle Organ, or the Cigar Box Guitar. Especially take a look at the Waterphone invented by Richard Waters. I used to use one for years, while floating in the water with orcas. With good results.
• If, as our prime article this month suggests, many species display rich emotional and intellectual lives, that is if WE only knew how to see them, why should we NOT also expect that wild elephants in Uganda would go to war or go insane when their habitat is completely usurped by human farmers. This New York Times story may ask you to sign up, which doesn't cost you anything.
• Our website pick of the month, from the Foundation for Global Community, with a talking wombat insisting that we all need to get along with one another because planet Earth is the only one we got.
• The Liquid Sound experience just held the world's first underwater music conference, which featured a saturday night in-the-pool sold out concert debut for our own Belly of the Whale CD. Read this recent article from australia about the concept.
• There are a growing number of websites that transmit live sound from some underwater environment 24/7. Here's one I never encountered before, called the Whale Song Project, which has installed a radio transmitter in the waters off Maui so tyour browser can easily play the live courting calls of humpback whales.