Objects of Language Study Will Be Trained for Release to the Wild : Captive Dolphins Will Have a Choice--Take Refuge or Go to Sea

Late last month, a team of researchers loaded two bottle-nosed dolphins into blue wooden troughs, put them in an Army helicopter and flew them to a pristine wildlife refuge on the southeast Atlantic Coast.

There they were placed in a floating 40-by-80-foot pen that will serve as a sort of dolphin halfway house for a few months. The dolphins, Joe and Rosie, have spent most of their lives in steel laboratory tanks as scientists studied their language.

If all goes well, by the end of the summer the pen will be opened and they will decide whether to stay in the refuge under the watchful eye of human guardians or join their own kind and fend for themselves in the open sea.

“We are not really setting them free. We are opening the gate and giving them a choice,” said Ric O’Barry, a dolphin trainer who has helped to wean Joe and Rosie from human dependency.

The National Marine Fisheries Service, which has had jurisdiction over dolphins since the Marine Mammal Protection Act took effect in 1972, issues dozens of permits each year to capture dolphins. The permit issued in February to release Joe and Rosie was the first ever issued to train a captive dolphin for release to the wild.

Although captive dolphins have been set free in the past without permits or fanfare, there has been no documentation of their fate afterward. Joe and Rosie are being carefully observed every step of the way.

For their protection, the location of the refuge has been kept secret.

Joe and Rosie were about 18 months old when they were captured June 17, 1980, off Gulfport, Miss., for an experiment to find a language that humans and dolphins could share.

“The promise that was sort of carried throughout is that they would go back and what they had learned could be shared with other dolphins. They would be sort of ambassadors from our world to theirs,” said Virginia Coyle, project director for the Oceanic Research and Communication Alliance, the group formed to oversee the pair’s release.

The language experiment, conducted by Dr. John Lilly at Marine World in Redwood City, Calif., ended in 1985 without the success Lilly had sought. But he and his colleagues kept their promise and gave the dolphins to ORCA, part of the nonprofit Tides Foundation in San Francisco, to be prepared for freedom.

Joe and Rosie were taken to the Dolphin Research Center on Grassy Key, near Marathon in the middle Florida Keys, where O’Barry and the rest of the ORCA team coached them in self-reliance in a fenced-off pen in the warm ocean waters.

“We are untraining them,” O’Barry said. “They had to get used to the tide coming and going. They had forgotten how to catch live fish.”

For six years, Joe and Rosie had been fed dead fish, their meals delivered on schedule with no effort on their part.

O’Barry gradually introduced live snapper to their diet, snipping off the fish tails to slow them down enough for the dolphins to catch their supper before it swam away.

Once they caught on, live mullet--the main foodstuff in their new home--were flown in and tossed into the pen with their tails intact. The chase was successful and beneficial, O’Barry said.

“They have become more active,” he said. “They have spent years and years in a tank. Captivity is a very boring environment for them. They can’t swim very far. All they see are these boring walls. They get depressed.

“It’s like breaking a horse. They become something else after a while, something less. I have observed them changing. They’re happier. They are becoming dolphins again.”

To help the dolphins grow accustomed to their new home, the team recorded the underwater sounds made by the refuge inhabitants and played the tape over and over at the Key Largo pen.

Strange New Sounds

Joe and Rosie heard oysters opening and closing their shells, marsh grasses moving, and the strange new sounds of whitefish, flounder and shrimp.

Souvenirs of the Key Largo pen were moved to the refuge with them to ease the transition--the floating wooden platform where O’Barry sits and performs flute recitals for them and the potted plant and multicolored papier-mache parrot that float on the platform.

“These have become Linus’ security blanket. They’ll see all this and that will help ease the stress of moving to a new place,” O’Barry said.

The original plan was to return Joe and Rosie to the Gulfport area. But the team feared that they would again be captured by dolphin hunters, that the food supply would be inadequate or that they would fall prey to boaters in the area, Coyle said. The refuge was chosen instead for its security and its abundance of fish.

“We sort of played God with that aspect,” O’Barry said. “This is a dolphin paradise. Life is not a struggle.

‘Why Don’t You Go Back?’

“To anyone who asks why we didn’t take them back to the place they were born, I would ask them the same question. ‘Where are you from? Why don’t you go back there?’ ”

The refuge also was attractive because several mothers with young calves had been spotted there. That is crucial for Rosie, who is pregnant and not only must learn to care for her calf, but also must make friends with another female dolphin to assist in the birth.

When dolphins give birth in the wild, a second female acts as a midwife, pushing the new calf to the surface at regular intervals to breathe until the exhausted mother can take over. Breathing is a conscious action for dolphins, not an instinctive one.

When the ORCA team learned that Rosie was pregnant, they moved a dolphin named Theresa and her 6-month-old calf to the adjacent pen in Grassy Key, enabling Rosie to pick up a few cues on motherhood. Before long, she was hovering over the calf, looking after it while Theresa fed.

“She even jumped over the fence and was in there with the baby,” Coyle said.

Male May Be Rejected

Joe also will have to find a social niche if the pair join a pod of wild dolphins after their release. Because he is a small male, he may be rejected by the dominant males of the pod.

“It is much easier for a female to be accepted into a strange pod than it is for the male dolphin. That’s why we’re releasing them as a couple, so they’ll have a choice to integrate with a pod or stay together,” O’Barry said.

Joe and Rosie have been freeze-branded with distinctive markings on their dorsal fins to help protect them from recapture and to help observers monitor their comings and goings over the next several years.

The ORCA team hopes that the project, financed with $150,000 in private donations, will provide information to help prepare other captive dolphins for release.

“We’re not advocating, ‘Turn all the dolphins free.’ That is not our function. We want to make this service available to others who want to set them free,” O’Barry said.

The recent success of captive breeding programs may soon make it necessary to have a reliable program for readapting and releasing dolphins, the project summary says.

Psychics Consulted

As for determining what Joe and Rosie want, the researchers went so far as to permit two psychics to examine them, Coyle said.

“One said, ‘Rosie is ready to go. She wants to have this baby in the wild.’ The next day another one came and said, ‘She wants to stay here,’ ” Coyle said. “We happen to be the stewards for these two. For better or worse, we’re doing this.”

When the gate is opened, Joe and Rosie may hesitate before leaving. They may not leave at all. That does not mean the experiment will have failed, Coyle said.

“Each part of the project has inspired us to learn more about dolphins. There is no ‘work’ or ‘doesn’t work’ to this. This is about building a bridge between two species.

“There gets to be a situation where the dolphins are just serving people, like a pony ride. This is an act of cooperation and an act of choice. We are letting them choose.”