The Dolphin in the Mirror by Diana Reiss

Author:Diana Reiss [Reiss, Diana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

6. Through the Looking Glass

THE DANCER IN ME was quite captivated as I watched Presley perform a bizarre sequence of horizontal swirls. He was lying below the water's surface on his left side, his body curled in a fetal position as he spun and looked, spun and looked, spun and looked. From modern dance lessons I had taken as a child, I knew that when a dancer executes a spin, he has to visually fix on a particular point after each rotation. It helps keep the dancer oriented and stable, and during practice sessions in front of a mirror it allows him to check out the aesthetics of the move. Presley appeared to be doing something very similar as he visually fixed on a particular point after each rotation. Spin and look, spin and look, spin and look. Round and round and round he went, this thirteen-year-old male bottlenose dolphin. In the five years I had known him, I'd never seen him (or any other dolphin, for that matter) do this, and he'd not been trained to do it either. It wasn't part of the natural behavioral repertoire of dolphins. Yet Presley was suddenly motivated to carry out the swirl. He was regarding himself in a three-by-five-foot horizontal mirror that I had placed in his pool. This dolphin spin-dancer glanced toward the mirror at the same instant in each rotation, looking at himself.*

This was early in 1998 at the Wildlife Conservation Society's New York Aquarium in Brooklyn, and I had embarked on mirror-self-recognition investigations again, with two male dolphins, thirteen-year-old Presley and seventeen-year-old Tab, both of them captive-born. I had spent a lot of time thinking about the mirror we should use, trying to put myself in the mind of a dolphin. What would be the best possible demonstration that they really wanted to see themselves in the mirror? Then it came to me one day: Make it smaller. This way, if the dolphins truly wanted to see themselves, their actions would have to be quite deliberate. I thought we might see much more specific behavior as an indicator of their intentions. This approach would allow them to show me what they were capable of without my shepherding them toward a particular behavior.

In some ways it makes little difference what size a mirror is if all you are going to do is put an eye close to it, as I'd seen Presley and Tab do separately several times. But if Presley wanted to see himself fully in the three-by-five mirror while he swirled, he'd have to position himself some distance away from it, which is precisely what he did. He quite deliberately backed away from the mirror until he could see his entire body, and then he went into the horizontal swirl: spin and look, spin and look, spin and look. Presley apparently first tested out the physics of seeing the whole of his body in the small mirror, and then went into this entirely novel behavior, a move he invented.

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