The Dolphin House Experiment

Overhead pictures of the holding pools at The Dolphin House

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Have you ever looked at an animal and wondered to yourself... "What if they could speak?" Well you aren't alone in that thought.

In 1949, a young medic by the name of John Lilly came across a beached pilot whale on the coast near his hometown in Massachussets. John was fascinated with how large the animals brain was and started to imagine how intelligent the creature must have been when alive. According to Graham Burnett, professor of the history of science at Princeton and author of The Sounding of the Whale "“You are talking about a time in science when everybody’s thinking about a correlation between brain size and what the brain can do. And in this period, researchers were like: ‘Whoa… big brain huh… cool!” (Source 2)

This experience sparked John's interest in neuroscience and connecting with cetaceans.

**(Cetaceans: A cetacean is a fully aquatic marine mammal belonging to the order Cetacea, which includes all species of whales, dolphins, and porpoises.)

Following that experience, John and his first wife Mary chartered a number of boats and sailed the caribbean in search of other large brained marine mammals to study. During one of these trips in the late 1950's is when John would discover a place called "Marine Studios" in Miami. Otherwise known as The first place to keep a bottle-nosed dolphin in captivity. For the first time in his life John felt like he had finally found a good place to study the brains of live dolphins. John was mapping the cerebral cortex of the dolphins with fine probes, a method that he had developed himself during his work on the brains of Rhesus Monkeys. Although it didn't aome without challenges. Dolphins cannot be put under anesthesia due to the fact that they will stop breathing. Because of this, they had to do the mapping while the dolphins were awake and moving which usually didn't end well for the dolphins.

In 1957, one event during research would change the course of John and Mary's lives forever. Mary stated in an interview when she was 97 years old, “I came in at the top of the operating theatre and heard John talking and the dolphin would go: ‘Wuh… wuh… wuh’ like John, and then Alice, his assistant, would reply in a high tone of voice and the dolphin would imitate her voice. I went down to where they were operating and told them that this was going on and they were quite startled.” (Source 2)

This was the moment that allowed Dr.John Lilly to form the theory that dolphins could be taught to speak english. That theory would eventually lead to the creation of "The Dolphin House".The experiment started in 1965 and focused on testing dolphins and their ability to learn, understand, and speak english. At that time many people saw dolphins as nothing special, but John set out to change that. Dolphins have large brains and early researchers discovered that they could mimic human tones and seemed to interact with other dolphins in a highly evolved way. John set up a lab near the ocean on St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands.

Dr. John Lilly interacting with one of the dolphins in the lab

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The upper floors of the lab overhug a sea pool where the dolphins were housed, and it was kept clean by the tides due to a small opening on each side. This provided the perfect habitat to have humans and dolphins in close proximity, and allow the researchers to attempt to teach the dolphins to speak english. There were many donors for this experiment, but the most prominent was NASA who was interested in any insights that John's research could gain. NASA thought that the results provided by this experiment could potentially be applied to communication attempts with interstellar beings if they were found.

A few months later in early 1964, 23 yr old Margaret Howe Lovatt arrived. Margaret had grown up with stories of talking animals from her favorite book as a child. She stated in an interview “There was this book that my mother gave to me called Miss Kelly,” she remembers with a twinkle in her eye. “It was a story about a cat who could talk and understand humans and it just stuck with me that maybe there is this possibility.” (Source 2) These stories stuck with Margaret into her early 20's when she was living on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas. During Christmas of 1963 Maragrets brother in law mentioned a secret laboratory on the eastern side of the island where they were working with dolphins. She decided to visit the lab early the next year to see what they were doing. When she arrived at the lab she was greeted by a tall man smiking a cigarette. His name was Gregory Bateson and he was a well know intellectual of the 20th century, and also the lab director. Bateson was impressed by Margarets bravado and invited her to go meet the animals. Although Margaret didn't have any research of scientific experience, Bateson asked her to sit and watch the dolphins for awhile. This revealed that Margaret was a very intuitive observer. Margaret stated, "There were three dolphins,” remembers Lovatt. “Peter, Pamela and Sissy. Sissy was the biggest. Pushy, loud, she sort of ran the show. Pamela was very shy and fearful. And Peter was a young guy. He was sexually coming of age and a bit naughty." (Source 2)

Margaret and Peter during a speech lesson

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Margaret, due to her empathetic nature, quickly connected with the three dolphins. She was eager to embrace John Lilly's vision for building an interspecies connection bridge and threw herself into his work, spending as much time as possible with the dolphins and creating a program of daily lesson plans to encourage the dolphins to make human-like sounds. The lab director, Gregory Bateson, mainly focused on animal-to-animal communication, but Margaret was left alone to focuse solely on John's dream to teach the dolphins to speak english. Margaret soon learned that even at a state-of-the-art facility like The Dolphin House, barriers were in place. Margaret stated when interviewed, “Every night we would all get in our cars and pull the garage door down and drive away,” remembers Lovatt. “And I thought: ‘Well there’s this big brain floating around all night.’ It amazed me that everybody kept leaving and I just thought it was wrong.” (Source 2)

Margaret thoerized that if she was able to live with a dolphin around the clock and nurture its interest in making human-like sounds, then they might have more success. This thoery was appealing to John and he went for it. Margaret soon began waterproofing the upper floors of the lab so that she could flood the indoor rooms and outdoor balcony with a couple feet of water. This would allow a dolphin to live with her 24/7 in the house for 3-4 months. Margaret became a full time researcher at the lab and formed a close relationship with one of the dolphins in particular, Peter. Margaret chose peter because he had not had any human speech training like the other two dolphins, Pamela and Missy, had. The plan was that Margaret would live in isolation with Peter for 6 days per week, and then on the 7th day peter would be moved downstairs to spend time with the two female dolphins Pamela and Missy.

The audio recordings of the progress Margaret was making with Peter was meticulously recorded on quarter inch tapes and archived at the lab. The tapes revealed Margarets enthusiasm and energy that she brought to the training sessions. However it wasn't the formal speech lessons that provided Margaret with the most insight into how the dolphin mind worked. It was simply. being together every day that opened her eyes the most to what made Peter tick. In an interview Margaret stated that Peter was very interested in human anatomy, “He was very, very interested in my anatomy. If I was sitting here and my legs were in the water, he would come up and look at the back of my knee for a long time. He wanted to know how that thing worked and I was so charmed by it.” (Source 2)

For 10-12 weeks Margaret lived alone in the house with Peter, and she spent almost 24/7 attempting to help him sound out english words instead of the clicks, whistles, grunts, and squeaks that dolphins would normall use to communicate. According to Margaret, Peter was a happy, healthy dolphin that was very engaged in the lessons and very active in the pools. However, as the weeks went on Margaret noticed that peter was in heat since he was maturing into full adulthood. Peter started being uninterested in the lessons and was constantly getting distracted and going to Margaret looking for sexual relief. Peter started out rubbing himself on Margarets feet, knees, legs, or hands, and Margaret at first would stop the lesson and transfer Peter downstairs to the pool with the female dolphins. This method however, became incredibly disruptive to the lessons, and so Margaret started to ease Peters urges in a different way. Because of Peter's almost constant state of arousal Margaret started to manually rub Peters genetalia as a solution to get rid of Peter's urges quickly. Margaret stated in an interview, “I allowed that,” she says. “I wasn’t uncomfortable with it, as long as it wasn’t rough. It would just become part of what was going on, like an itch – just get rid of it, scratch it and move on. And that’s how it seemed to work out. It wasn’t private. People could observe it.” (Source 2) Innocent as they were, Margaret's sexual encounters with Peter would soon overshadow the whole experiment when a story about it was published in Hustler Magazine in the late 1970's.

Although Margaret felt like she was making progress with Peters lessons, John was not satisfied. During that time, LSD was still legal to use in scientific experiments as long as you had procured a liscense from the government. John himself was a heavy user of LSD and used it to explore the psychological impacts/possibilities it could offer the brain. John was growing more impatient for results by the day, and decided to start using LSD on Peter in the speech study. John's theory was that the LSD would stimulate Peter's brain just like it did for John. Margaret was HIGHLY against the use of LSD on Peter, but since John was the head of the experiment Margaret didn't have much of a say in the matter. Much to John's dismay, the LSD didn't do anything other than subtle behavior changes. The continued usage of LSD started to affect Peter's behavior, and he became more aggressive and nibbled on Margarets feet/legs instead of nudging or rubbing up against them.

Once the public found out about John using the LSD on the dolphins an uproar occured which ultimately shut down the project. NASA and the other donors pulled all funding from the project and John Lilly lost a large amount of his credibility. But what happened to the dolphins?

Well... Margarets job soon became the decommissioning of the lab and she had to prepare the dolphins for transport to John's other lab which was a disused bank building in Miami. Without funding the dolphins fate was in question. Although Margaret wanted to keep Peter it just wasn't practical. The Miami lab was much smaller than the wide open pools of The Dolphin House with smaller tanks and little to no sunlight. These conditions were hard on all of the dolphins, but it was hard on Peter especially. Peter quickly deteriorated and within just a few weeks due to being separated from Margaret with whom he had formed an incredibly strong bond with. Unfortunately, the separation, continued LSD use, and the environmental change became too much for Peter and he committed suicide. Dolphins breathe differently than humans due to the fact that they are not automatic air breathers. Each breath a dolphin takes is a conscious effort, and if life becomes too unbearable the dolphin will take a breath and then sink to the bottom. They just don't take the next breath.

John Lilly himself called Margaret with the sad news of Peters passing. Margaret stated “I wasn’t terribly unhappy about it,” explains Lovatt, 50 years on. “I was more unhappy about him being in those conditions [at the Miami lab] than not "being" at all. Nobody was going to bother Peter, he wasn’t going to hurt, he wasn’t going to be unhappy, he was just gone. And that was OK. Odd, but that’s how it was.” (Source 2)

The Dolphin House experiment did not deliver of its promise of unlocking the secret of interspecies communication. However, it did provide many insights into the mental capabilities of dolphins as well as the need for ethical practices and laws to be placed regarding animal based research. In the decades that followed, John Lilly continueed to study communication methods between dolphins and humans - some of it mystical where telepathy was explored, and others more scientific with the use of musical tones. No one has ever tried to teach dolphins to speak ever again. Margaret stayed on the island and married the photographer who was capturing pictures of the experiment. Together they moved back into The Dolphin House after converting it into a family home where they raised their three daughters.

SOURCES

Source 1 - https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/dolphin-house/

Source 2 - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/08/the-dolphin-who-loved-me

Source 3 - My Own Brain