The journey toward inter-species communication
I’ve always had a natural affinity for dolphins. As a child I would interact with wild dolphins at my grandmother’s dock and I had supervised swim sessions with them in open water. I remember playing Ecco the Dolphin on Sega Genesis and even buying paintings made by dolphins at Florida’s Marineland aquarium, a quirky spot nestled between the highway and the sea. They’re incredibly attuned to reading the emotions of humans. They’re playful, charismatic, and sport a permanent grin that suggests they know something we don’t.
For decades researchers have been obsessed with the idea that these aquatic mammals might be our intellectual equals—maybe even chatty ones. We’ve hoped that Flipper is just a few vowel sounds away from discussing philosophy or at least asking for fish by name. This hopeful fascination has driven a long history of dolphin communication experiments—some rigorous, some downright bizarre—all in pursuit of an answer to the burning question: can we really talk with dolphins, or have we just been talking to ourselves?
Science, Myth, and a Mad Scientist Named Lilly
Humans have been intrigued by dolphins’ intelligence throughout recorded history—ancient Greeks spun tales of dolphin rescues, and 19th-century naturalists speculated that dolphins might be bright but “uncivilized” minds that could blossom if raised by humans. But the modern quest to actually talk to a dolphin really kicked off in the mid-20th century with one man’s bold claim. In 1961, American neuroscientist John C. Lilly announced he had made contact with an alien intelligence—not from space, but in the form of a bottlenose dolphin. Lilly had been studying dolphin brains (sometimes by inserting electrodes in unfortunate test animals) when he noticed dolphins could mimic the sound of human voices in a cartoonish, high-pitched way. This was enough to convince him that the dolphins had their own language (which he nicknamed “dolphinese”) and might even learn to speak to us.
Lilly wasn’t exactly a shy, conservative scientist—he was more of a go-for-broke sort of guy. Enamored with the idea of conversing with another species, he managed to secure funding from NASA (who figured learning to chat with dolphins might teach us how to talk to real aliens someday). Yes, the Space Race era was wild: it gave us rocket ships and, apparently, a waterlogged house in the Caribbean where humans and dolphins lived together… you know… for science. Lilly’s lab, dubbed “The Dolphin House,” was a flooded home in the Virgin Islands where a human researcher and their dolphin roommate shared quarters 24/7 for weeks on end. The researcher, Margaret Howe Lovatt, even sealed the doors and flooded the living room so her finned companion, a young dolphin named Peter, could cruise by the couch. The goal? Teach Peter to speak English.
For a while, this human-dolphin cohabitation experiment had the earnest vibe of a quirky sitcom: Margaret diligently tried to teach Peter words by repeating phrases all day, while Peter splashed around learning to make human-like sounds through his blowhole. However, things got stranger as the days turned to months. Peter, maturing as a healthy male dolphin, became interested in Margaret in ways that weren’t in the lesson plan. He started making amorous advances—apparently learning the language of love quicker than English. In perhaps the most infamous twist of the study, the researcher chose to relieve Peter’s sexual urges manually to keep him focused on the “English class” at hand.
This sensational detail often overshadows the rest of the science, but it gives you a taste of how unorthodox Lilly’s project had become—and we’re just getting started. Lilly also wasn’t opposed to pharmacological… um… enhancements. He reasoned that if dolphins had high intelligence, maybe a little chemical inspiration would break the communication barrier. So during some sessions, he gave LSD to his dolphins (and sometimes himself) in hopes of stimulating conversation. Yes, the talking-dolphin experiment briefly turned into a 1960s psychedelic trip. The dolphins did get louder—one report noted they became 70% more vocal after an LSD dose—but alas, they didn’t start spouting Shakespeare. As Lilly dryly admitted, the drug-induced vocalizations had “no meaning in the verbal sphere,” and a genuine “rational exchange of complex ideas” with a dolphin still eluded him.
By 1966, funding and patience were running out. The Dolphin House experiment had produced lots of headline-worthy moments but not much hard evidence of interspecies dialogue. The dolphins could mimic some sounds but never showed they actually understood the odd human noises they were making. Disappointed (and probably a bit relieved), the sponsors pulled the plug. The dolphins were shipped off to a smaller lab, and tragically, Peter the dolphin died shortly thereafter, apparently by his own choice—deprived of the companionship he’d formed with his human roommate, he sank to the tank’s bottom and refused to breathe, in what Lilly described as a kind of suicide.
Despite (or perhaps because of) the wildness of Lilly’s research, it made dolphins into pop-culture celebrities through films like The Day of the Dolphin, a 1973 sci-fi thriller loosely inspired by Lilly’s work. In the film, a marine scientist successfully teaches dolphins to speak English—only for them to be kidnapped by an evil group that plans to use them in an assassination attempt on the U.S. President. Yes, a movie about dolphin terrorists. The tagline? “Unwittingly, he trained a dolphin to kill the President of the United States.”
Meanwhile, TV audiences had Flipper, and the public became convinced that dolphins were not just smart, but almost magical. This led to a persistent mythos: dolphins as healers, peaceful ocean sages, and the top-of-list potential partners in interspecies communication in both fiction and new age spirituality.
Do Dolphins Actually Have Language?
In the wake of Lilly’s headline-grabbing antics, other, more rigorous, researchers entered the scene. The biggest breakthroughs came from Louis Herman in the 1980s, who showed that dolphins could understand a simple artificial language with grammar. He proved that dolphins could follow structured commands and differentiate word order—a level of comprehension similar to a young child.
Other studies have since shown that dolphins have individual names (signature whistles), understand pointing, and can recognize themselves in mirrors. But despite decades of effort, we still haven’t cracked an actual dolphin language. Some skeptics argue that dolphin communication, while complex, isn’t qualitatively different from what other animals do—dogs understand commands, birds use songs, even chickens have structured calls.
More recently, researchers have used AI to analyze dolphin sounds, hoping to find hidden linguistic structure. Some projects claim promising results, such as dolphins possibly using sonar clicks to transmit mental images. But most scientists remain cautious, emphasizing that just because dolphins are smart doesn’t mean they have a language comparable to human speech.
The Future: Will We Ever Talk to Dolphins?
So, can we actually communicate with dolphins? Probably not in the way we imagined in the 1960s. Dolphins are undeniably intelligent, but the more we learn, the more we realize they think in ways that might be fundamentally different from us. We still don’t know if their clicks and whistles contain grammar, storytelling, or abstract thought—or if their intelligence is something else entirely, something we haven’t even begun to measure properly.
Yet, the pursuit of understanding dolphins has made us rethink how we treat them. India, for example, declared dolphins as “non-human persons” and banned dolphin captivity, arguing that beings with such intelligence deserve rights. Even if we never have a full conversation with a dolphin, what we’ve learned is enough to make us question how we relate to the non-human minds we share this planet with.
The dream of talking to dolphins isn’t dead, but maybe the lesson is that we should appreciate dolphins for what they are, not just for what we want them to be. If there’s any message to take away from this whole saga, it’s that intelligence comes in many forms—and sometimes, the best way to understand another species is simply to respect them.