Week 3: Beginning Researching

This week, I expanded my Twitter, read about the cognition abilities wolves and other animals, updated my website, starting researching for my upcoming essay.

Reading Beyond Words: What Animal Think and Feel continues to sharpen my critical reading skills and plant research topic ideas into my mind. This week, I read about wolves — their social status, alpha male responsibilities and leadership, familial life, and instincts. The reading shed light and emphasized that animals do have feelings and choose to act upon their personality, upbringing, and thoughts. Before reading these chapters from the novel, I never thought about how animals feel and think. I just thought of them as another species that we, humans, coexist with or eat.

As with social media, I grew my pool of people that I follow. I wrote about this in my most previous blog post, but I followed numerous researchers and organizations relating to aquatic wildlife. In addition, I updated the home page of my website, adding a short biography of myself, a description of the course, and more tabs to the navigation bar.

Lastly, I began researching about aquatic animals. Early on in this course, I came across an article about the resume of whale hunting in Japan on Twitter and was fascinated by aquatic animals. I did research on cognitive capacity of whales, turtles, jelly fish, and lastly, dolphins. From that, I realized that I wanted to focus more on dolphins and their intelligence and communication abilities. Some keywords that I have accumulated: dolphins, sonar signals, communication, intelligence, cognition, Dolphinarium, signal to noise ratio, underwater acoustic communication, bioacoustics, bottlenose dolphins, bray series, information theory.

On Gale Virtual Reference Library, I typed in “dolphin” and I found a brief article titled “Biology: Dolphin Communication.” It introduced the work of neurophysiologist Dr. John C. Lilly who “talked” to bottlenose dolphins for four years. He implanted electrodes in dolphins and measured brain activity especially in the “pleasure center.” The article also touch upon dolphin stress signals, empathy, and their own sonar language that is too high in frequency for humans to hear.

From Wikipedia, I read more about Lilly’s life and academic career. Graduated from California Institute of Technology, Dartmouth University, and University of Pennsylvania, he began studying human-dolphin communication in the 1960s. He published a book called The Mind of the Dolphin: A Nonhuman Intelligence, which details his findings of dolphin cognitive abilities and current public ideas of dolphins’ intelligence. He was sponsored by NASA to build an isolated “Dolphinarium” and recruited Margaret Lovett to research with him. At one point, Lovett was able to teach a dolphin named Peter to greet “Hello Margaret” every time he saw her. A lot of Lilly’s discoveries were refuted later on but he was one of the first researchers to study dolphins and inspired future generations to continue his research.

On The Academic Search Complete, I searched “dolphin” and “acoustic communication” and came across a publication titled “Brays and bits: information theory applied to acoustic communication sequences of bottlenose dolphins." It talked about a special vocal sequence, coined bray series. There has not been extensive research on bray series, but the publication explores bray complex structures and elements.

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