Formula for Attraction
Science follows money. Money follows fame. Fame follows beauty. Which brings us back to science. Or at least to one young dolphin researcher who, for the sake of science, is discovering way too much about money, fame, and beauty.

By Tim Cahill

There were half a dozen of them, bottlenose dolphins. they swept by us like torpedoes and disappeared into the blue-gray distance. The dolphins were much bigger than I had imagined. Faster. My first impression was not that of happy squeakers or curious cuties or mystical healers on a watery mission to enlighten humanity. I thought: Whoa! These guys are great big powerful predators. And then there they were again, swimming directly toward us, slower this time, moving their heads from side to side, and I thought I could hear the sounds they made, the squeaking of a rusty hinge, a whistle, a squawk. I knew they were scanning me, bouncing the sounds off my body and reading the echo, in much the same way that submarines use sonar.

Kathleen Dudzinski, looking long and slender and sleek as a seal in her shiny wetsuit, took a deep breath and dove straight down about 20 feet. The dolphins seemed to understand the dive as an invitation to dance. They swarmed about us, swimming in slow, sinuous curves, more than a dozen of them now, and Dudzinski muscled her big audio/visual recorder about, following one dolphin — her focal animal — as it looped over backward, swimming slowly in a big vertical circle. The two of them swam, human and dolphin, belly to belly and only inches apart. Dudzinski tried to get some distance on the animal, but it wanted to dance slow and close. They surfaced together, breathing simultaneously — Dudzinski through her snorkel, the dolphin from its blowhole — as if to imply, Hey, we're all mammals and air-breathers here.

The scientist rolled over the surface, as did the dolphin, and the rolling motion sent them both back into the depths, with Dudzinski moving off to the side, getting her distance on the animal as it paired off with another dolphin. I could read, in their swirling grace, some few half-formed ideas that had been drifting weightless through the murky sea of my own intellectual and emotional life. Dolphins — intelligent, social animals that suckle their young, express their thoughts vocally, and seem inordinately fond of sex (especially after a good meal) — are the creatures humans might have been, had we evolved to live in the sea. Swimming with these bottlenoses was a revelation. It was like looking into some strange, shimmering mirror, positioned right there at the entrance to the Funhouse of Geological Time.

The naturalist and poet Loren Eiseley, reflecting on this idea of parallel evolutionary paths, wrote that had man "sacrificed his hands for flukes," he would not have the "devastating power to wreak his thought upon the body of the world." Instead, "he would have lived and wandered ... homeless across currents and winds and oceans, intelligent, but forever the lonely and curious observer of unknown wreckage falling through the blue light of eternity." Eiseley considered it "a wistful thought" that someday the dolphin may "talk to us and we to him. It would break, perhaps, the long loneliness that has made man a frequent terror and abomination even to himself." This long loneliness is the reason we aim radio telescopes at the stars; it's why we find the idea of teaching a gorilla sign language fascinating and why Jane Goodall's work with chimps moves us. We feel a certain urgency, an obligation to communicate with nonhuman but self-aware life forms. The insistent need increases according to the frequency of our terror.

Kathleen Dudzinski's work — studying dolphin-to-dolphin communication and behavior by swimming with the creatures — is done solely in the wild. Because dolphin encounters can be intense and confusing, she records them on audio- and videotape for later study. Though scientists have been observing dolphins in captivity for nearly a century, Dudzinski's field of study is a scant 20 years old. The research requires boats, long periods of idleness (while paying for the boats), and immense patience. A researcher must wait for the dolphins to approach. She never chases. Dudzinski spent four six-month stints studying dolphins for her Ph.D. thesis. In 1,981 hours of fieldwork, she gathered just 20 hours of usable recordings. This represents a 1 percent return on her effort and is the reason it is easier to study chimps or gorillas or orangutans than wild dolphins.

Seen from the water below, she was a two-legged silhouette against the light, surrounded by the flashing shapes of dolphins as they rolled and spun about. And this was the image of Dr. Kathleen Dudzinski that, for reasons she hasn't fully absorbed, the media has begun to demand: the attractive and promising young marine biologist doing cutting-edge work with wild dolphins. She was becoming, through no fault of her own, a celebrity scientist. It was distressing.

I was contemplating Dudzinski's dilemma when one of the other dolphins, a female, drifted slowly by, close enough to touch. It dove and then looked up at me, moving its head from side to side. The dolphin's back was covered over in long white tooth marks, called rakes, that are the result of aggressive dolphin interactions.

I moved slowly toward the surface, and as I did, the heavily raked dolphin rose with me. I needed to breathe but wasn't quite desperate, so I performed a quick backward loop while the dolphin swam by my side. We were both upright in the water, facing each other. I could see its round black eye and the jaw anatomically set in a constant smile, the smile no more expressive of the animal's mood than an elephant's trunk. Still, one feels obliged to smile back. There was something bunching in my throat, like sorrow, and it came out in a brief snort through my snorkel. A laugh.

I was doing everything right now, just the way Dudzinski had taught me. Don't touch. Don't get into a head-on-head position. Don't chase. All angles taken on the dolphin should be oblique and slanting. I wanted to roll with the dolphin, as Dudzinski had, but there were nine-foot swells on the surface. One of them washed over my snorkel, and I gulped down what felt like half a pint of seawater. The dolphin dove and moved off toward more amusing pursuits as I treaded the waves, coughing and spitting. We were about 150 miles south of Tokyo, and 45 minutes by boat from Dudzinski's office on the nearby island of Miyake Jima. She rose beside me.

"They're gone," she said. Her lips were blue, and she was shivering in the manner of children playing too long in the water. Slender folks get colder than those of us wise to ways of gluttony. "Was that long enough to be an encounter?"I asked.

She laughed. "Nearly 15 minutes," she said. In her scientific studies, Dudzinski has defined a dolphin encounter as three minutes or more. I honestly thought we could have been swimming with them for less time than that. "What about you?" she asked. "How was your first dolphin encounter?"

"Christ," I said, and then corrected myself: "Cripes." Dudzinski is a person who actually says "cripes" and "yikes" and "for heaven's sake."

"Cripes?"

"Yeah, cripes."

Two years ago, Dudzinski was not a scientist who had to worry a lot about celebrity. She was a scientist who happened to be working as a waitress in a sports bar in Connecticut. The owners of the bar knew she'd just gotten her Ph.D. at Texas A&M — it was on her application — but nobody else did. What was she going to say? "Hello. My name is Kathleen, and I'll be your waitperson today. I also have a Ph.D. in marine biology."

It would be like an episode of Cheers.

She was 29 years old, back living with her folks for the first time in 10 years, and working in a relative's orchard as well. Picking apples. Selling apples.

And then she'd come home to her little room and sit down at her computer and type out another application for some postdoctoral fellowship, and E-mail her scientific colleagues about various issues, and wonder how on God's green earth she was ever going to finance what she knew was her life's work. Because the tips a waitress makes don't add up to quite enough to purchase a research vessel. Or even buy an appreciable amount of boat time. Cripes.

The cost was the thing. If you wanted to study, say, chimpanzees, sure, it's expensive, but once you were in Tanzania or Burundi or wherever, research was mostly done on foot. Walking's free. You could follow the chimps 24 hours a day. Take notes. Watch behavior. Draw conclusions. But a young scientist studying wild dolphins had to have a talent for writing grants, had to convince corporations and governments that there was some benefit in sponsoring her work; she had to have a con man's expertise in the art of bumming boat time.

And then, out of the blue, the movie people called. Hi, we're making an IMAX film about wild dolphins, they said. Our researchers have told us that you're doing some of the most interesting work in the scientific community. Want to come out to California and talk about it?

Dudzinski thought: Right, like this was really going to happen.

And then the tickets came in the mail. Bang, there she was, out in Laguna Beach, sitting at this big table, all dressed up in her scientific symposium suit, with all these other folks in their California casuals — Hawaiian shirts, jeans, T-shirts — talking about "her work." It wasn't like they didn't understand, exactly.

Dudzinski could tell them about her mobile audio/video invention, an array, she called it, and they seemed to get the principle. On land, she explained, a person hears sound moving at 1,100 feet per second. If the sound is coming from the left, a person will hear it in the left ear first and then, only a fraction of a second later, in the right ear. That slight delay is all the brain needs to know the sound came from the left.

Underwater, sound moves faster — 4.5 times faster — and the slight delay becomes even slighter, which makes it seem as if the sound is coming from everywhere at once. So, if you were studying wild dolphins and they were making all these squawks and whistles and rusty-hinge sounds, you couldn't tell which animal was squawking and which was whistling.

The solution to the problem that Dudzinski devised was elegant in its simplicity. Since sound moves 4.5 times faster underwater than in the air, she would record dolphin vocalizations with a pair of underwater microphones, called hydrophones, set on a bar exactly 4.5 times wider than the distance between her own ears. The delay produced by that distance allowed her to localize the sounds. With the hydrophones so placed, and with a high-tech video camera in a waterproof housing, she could tape the dolphins visually while recording their vocalizations. Later, studying her films and listening to the tapes, she was able to identify which animals were vocalizing and which were reacting to the vocalizations. It was a big step toward cracking the dolphin communication code.

Dudzinski could tell the filmmakers a lot about dolphin vocalization and behavior. Like how a vertical posture is aggressive and a rounded posture is playful, and how you could analyze the sound waves of concurrent vocalizations. The filmmakers asked her if dolphins had an actual language, and she said the answer to that question would be a long time coming. She didn't even expect it to be answered in her lifetime. The research was just beginning.

And then they started asking a lot of questions about Kathleen Dudzinski. Was it true she lifted weights? they asked. Well, yes, but only because the audio/video array weighed about 25 pounds and she had to carry it around all the time, cradling it carefully like an infant. Did she really in-line skate? And paraglide behind a boat? What about her office? Did she have, like, hamsters or something in her office? Was it funky and visual?

And it occurred to Dudzinski that they were going to make a movie about dolphin vocalization and behavior in which the scientist would be depicted as an in-line-skating paraglider who allowed hamsters to run all over her important paperwork, none of which would exactly earn her the respect of her peers. She came right out and said what she was thinking: "I thought this was supposed to be a movie about dolphins."

Dudzinski was driving us around Miyake Jima, her new home, a lushly vegetated island about 22 miles in circumference and dominated by a central mountain about 2,700 feet high. She had just been awarded a postdoctoral fellowship by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and named manager of the Tatsuo Tanaka Memorial Biological Station on the island. We were on our way to her Japanese lesson, which would be videotaped for a symposium on Marine Day, a Japanese national holiday celebrating the sea. Following us were cars containing the video crew, a photographer, a writer, and an executive from a large corporation which was sponsoring a pamphlet about swimming with dolphins, a popular tourist activity in Japan. Some scientists feel that dolphin-watching — and swimming with dolphins — can disrupt the animals' feeding patterns, stress them when they should be resting, and sometimes separate mother from calf. (It's been illegal to swim with dolphins in the United States since passage of the Marine Mammal Protection Act in 1972.) Dudzinski believes that worldwide interest in dolphins is expanding exponentially and that the best thing is to teach people how to swim with the animals responsibly. The Marine Day video, the IMAX movie, and my own magazine story all were, in Dudzinski's mind, mixed bags when it came to promoting dolphin research. But the pamphlet — produced by several Japanese scientists, boat captains, and local dolphin guides — was a no-nonsense informational tool, and Dudzinski had put a lot of work into it, pro bono.

I'd seen the pamphlet. It was beautifully designed. However, the executive whose corporation was funding the project wanted to put a striking photo of Dr. Kathleen Dudzinski on the cover.

"It's totally inappropriate," Dudzinski said. The pamphlet was supposed to be a collaboration. Plus, the photo in question had been taken off the Bahamas, with Atlantic spotted dolphins, which don't exist in Japan. But the sponsor was adamant; he wanted Dudzinski to be the star.

"Jack thinks people, the public, like to personify an issue, especially conservation issues. They relate to personalities," Dudzinski said. Jack was Jack T. Moyer, a 69-year-old scientist who runs the field station where Dudzinski now works. In many ways, Moyer is her mentor.

"Like Goodall and the chimps," I said.

"Oh, please."

Actually, there are some interesting parallels between Dudzinski and Moyer, on the one hand, and Jane Goodall and her mentor, anthropologist Louis Leakey on the other. Moyer, big, lean, and raw-boned in the midwestern American manner, had a shock of thick white hair and spoke fluent Japanese. In 1952, while living in Japan, he wrote a letter to associates of Harry Truman protesting U.S. Air Force bombing of a small reef near Miyake Jima that was an important nesting site for the endangered Japanese crested murrelet. The bombing was stopped, and it was my impression that Moyer-san, like Leakey in Kenya, was one of very few foreign scientists to have earned the love and respect of those in their adopted country.

Moyer was in no way the Svengali to Dudzinski that Leakey was to Goodall, Dian Fossey (who studied mountain gorillas), and Birutë Galdikas (who studied orangutans). But his 46 years in the business of wildlife conservation had taught him about the value of publicity and the public's need to put a face with a cause. He recognized that Dudzinski could be an appealing spokeswoman for dolphin conservation.

"Jane Goodall has worked for decades with those chimps," Dudzinski said. "I just got my Ph.D., for cripe's sake."

"You feel unworthy of all this sudden attention?"

"I just wonder why people want to know about me, when the science itself is so interesting."

This was Dudzinski's quandary. "The press," I agreed, "can be very superficial."

"I've begun to notice."

"So. Do you have a boyfriend, or what?"

Dudzinski, at 31, lives, in fact, with Umi, the Mighty Sea Beagle, an eight-month-old puppy that was riding in the car on my lap. Umi means "sea" in Japanese, and the dog was pressing her nose up against the windshield. I was looking out at the charming island scenery through a series of wet smears that looked rather like some idiot's continued attempt to produce a single proper game of tick-tack-toe.

Dudzinski said she'd studied the smears intensely and that they were kanji, the complex Chinese ideographic script used to write Japanese. Umi, she said, was writing a series of haikus on the windows in "nose kanji."

"Have you, uh, translated any of these?" I asked.

"Oh, yes," Dudzinski said. "They're all very critical of me."

According to Dudzinski, I was looking at the world through a series of haikus that read: "My leash is too short / the end is always too near / that's where the smells / begin."

And: "Their feasting mocks me / Here I sit tied to a tree / only rocks to eat."

And: "No, Umi. No. No. / Umi, no. No. Umi, no. / Umi, Umi, no."

In the eighth grade, Dudzinski, the oldest and shiest of three sisters, told her parents that she wanted to attend the high school where they offered vocational agriculture courses. Her parents didn't quite get it. VoAg? Wasn't that like a trade school for farmers? The Dudzinskis lived in Meriden, Connecticut. The suburbs.

But Dudzinski was already thinking about vet school and was working part-time with a veterinarian who allowed her to sit in on complex surgeries, where most girls would be going, "Ohhh, gross!" There was an aspect of her that didn't quite understand that impulse, and one day, during a dinner party her parents were throwing, she came running in all excited because she'd just successfully completed her first artificial insemination of a cow. The guests sat over their dinners, listening to an excited 14-year-old rattle on in graphic detail about how she had reached so far inside the vagina that the instructor thought she was going to get lost in there.

Dudzinski went on to be an honors student at the University of Connecticut, then a University Scholar, and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. A nerd, in other words. In the summer of 1987, she did field research on marine mammals in the Gulf of Maine, which meant, in effect, that she was on a summerlong series of whale-watching cruises. One day a blue whale, the largest animal on earth, surfaced near her boat. The creature was as long as the boat, 100 feet; its blowhole was almost seven feet in diameter. It was like dëjÇ vu, standing there, watching this huge creature. It was like she'd been doing it all her life.

After that, it was all cetaceans: whales, dolphins, especially dolphins. There were more than 30 species of them — bottlenose and Atlantic spotted and dusky and spinner — intelligent, complex creatures with fascinating behaviors and mating rituals and hunting strategies. And so little known about them, in the wild, anyway.

In 1990 she landed at Texas A&M, where she developed her audio/video array. It cost her about $1,500, and she welded and duct-taped together the components herself. During the years that Dudzinski was in school, various organizations offered dolphin-diving trips to the Bahamas, where diving with the creatures was still legal. Hell, it was a business. So Dudzinski worked as a naturalist aboard two different tourist vessels, where her job was to make sure that both dolphins and divers had a safe, enjoyable encounter. She was also recording dolphin behavior with her new audio/visual array. It went on like that for several years: six months filming in the Bahamas; six months back in Texas, analyzing data.

And then, in 1996, Kathleen Dudzinski, 29 years old, went home to Connecticut with her brand-new Ph.D. and took a job as a waitress in sports bar.

"So," I said, "you had no prospects, no postdoctoral fellowships, you were living at home, and you were very, very depressed."

"No. I was exhausted," said Dudzinski. "Also, I'm extremely close to my family and hadn't seen them much in six years. I needed a rest and a reality check."

"I'd like it better if you were depressed."

"Why?"

"Brilliant young scientist forced to work as a waitress. It's poignant."

Dudzinski stared at me, a symbol of her new status as a minor celebrity and a part of her current and continuing problem.

It had all happened at once. The documentary film people called just about the time she got the postdoctoral fellowship: two years on Miyake Jima, where she would be studying bottlenose dolphins, once again on tourist boats. Then National Geographic ran a single-page item about Dudzinski, complete with underwater silhouette shot. I called about a possible feature. The Girl Scouts of America put her on their Web site: a big picture with lots of information about dolphins and an underlying message that science can be fun and that women can be scientists. She had been a Brownie herself, and liked the idea that the Girl Scouts thought she was a good role model. Not every aspect of celebrity was totally embarrassing.

Dudzinski and I were eating dinner in the 100-year-old Japanese farmhouse where she lived. Joining us that evening was Jack Moyer. She had deftly filleted a fish, and we were feasting on sashimi while Umi, tied to a leash in the backyard, composed uncomplimentary haikus and barked occasionally. In a few months, a warm current from the Philippines would bring water temperatures up to the mideighties, and summer tourists would descend on Miyake Jima to dive with the dolphins. Dudzinski was grinding away on her Japanese because she would be working with these folks, educating them, and perhaps inspiring them, while gathering scientific data.

She and Moyer were talking about a Japanese television news program that had done a brief profile of him. It had portrayed him as a friend of dolphins and then shown footage of a fishing boat and a captain who was said to slaughter dolphins indiscriminately. The captain, in fact, ran tourists out to see the dolphins in the summer and had an economic stake in their survival. Moyer had called the station to complain, and it was explained to him that every story needs a hero — Moyer-san — and a villain. They'd picked one at random. In 1997, 20,000 dolphin tourists visited Miyake Jima, which has a population of 4,000. The tourists spent, on the average, $500 apiece. A healthy dolphin population was worth $10 million a year to the island. No fishermen killed dolphins anywhere near Miyake Jima. There were no villains here.

"Which is why," Dudzinski said, "I have this problem with publicity."

"What are you going to do about the cover of the dolphin-watching pamphlet?" I asked.

"I already faxed them in Tokyo. Told them it was inappropriate."

"The movie?" I wondered. (I had more than a passing interest in Dudzinski's doing the IMAX movie, as I was supposed to be writing the script.)

"I'll do it," she said. "We've already shot some film. Visually, it's terrific. But I still think it's too much about me. Not enough about dolphins."

"They just want to tell a story," Moyer said. "You'll be great."

"Character is important in film," I added.

"I don't think I'm all that interesting."

"Sure you are," I said. "Young scientist deals with unwanted celebrity, fears the scorn of her peers."

"You're right about that."

There was a thoughtful silence. I contemplated the philosophical ramifications of Dudzinski's work and the idea that one important aspect of the human condition might be defined as a long loneliness. And what about the dolphins? Do they approach and swim with us because they're driven by a similar emptiness? That question, Dudzinski has said, will probably not be answered in our lifetime. Precisely because there are no quick and easy answers, we tend to personalize our longing to know. The symbolic role is thrust upon some, and if that person can't honestly answer the big questions, we tend to ask her small ones.

"So," I said finally, "inquiring minds still want to know: Do you have a boyfriend?"

"There was a guy who came to visit her last month," Moyer said.

"Oh, for cripe's sake."

Tim Cahill is Outside's Out There columnist and the author, most recently, of Pass The Butterworms: Remote Journeys Oddly Rendered (Vintage).