Picture this: You are a gray creature and a powerful swimmer. You swim lazily through blue water, gliding so skillfully you barely ripple the surface. All of a sudden, you hear familiar music and snap to attention.
On cue, you jump from the water, to the delight of a crowd of humans. As you descend you hear the whistle, which means you'll receive a reward for a job well done.
You are an Atlantic bottlenose dolphin and your home is the Indianapolis Zoo. The person responsible for your care and your life is Denny Byers, an Indianapolis Zoo dolphin trainer.
Children's Express recently visited the zoo and spoke with Byers, who has always had an interest in dolphins. He used to live on the Texas coast and watched the dolphins all the time.
He has been working at the zoo for four years. He also has been working on an education degree, most recently at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis.
According to Byers, some personal characteristics of a good trainer are good communication skills, patience (it takes the dolphins a long time to learn a behavior), and working well in a group (because you don't work with one animal at a time).
In training, the first steps are getting the dolphins to eat and then to target.
It may seem strange that you have to teach dolphins to eat, but they are not used to eating the dead fish that trainers provide. The dolphin is a natural predator, not a scavenger.
Besides keeping dolphins alive, eating the fish is a symbol of trust in the trainers.
Targeting is when an animal learns to touch a trainer's hand or other target object. Targeting is used to teach many behaviors, Byers explained.
"They come up and touch the target and . . . you blow your whistle. That lets them know they've done the correct behavior, and then you give them a reward.
"You start out the reward with fish, obviously. As you get more and more advanced, you can use other things as rewards - a favorite toy, a rubdown, pouring water in their mouth. Anything a specific dolphin likes, you can use as a reward," he added.
Eventually, the dolphins will begin to associate touching the target, hearing the whistle and getting a reward. When they make that connection, the training process has been a success.
The trainers never use negative reinforcement, Byers said. If the dolphins are not going to work and are just goofing off, there isn't anything the trainers can do about it.
"It's (the dolphins') choice whether to work or not work. Hopefully we keep it interesting enough for them; we keep them guessing on what we're going to do so they don't get bored with it," Byers said.
The trainers can train the dolphins to do any behavior they can invent. ("`Tricks' is a nasty word. . . . We call them behaviors," Byers said.) Front flips, jumping out of the water, sitting up, swimming around on signal, doing bows and tail walks are some of the behaviors taught at the zoo.
One trick involves putting cups over a dolphin's eyes, then throwing a ring into the water. The dolphin will find it using echo location - the ability to navigate without eyes, using a high-pitched, sometimes ultrasonic shriek.
This shriek bounces off objects, alerting the animal to the location of the object.
The behaviors taught at the zoo are no different from dolphins' behavior in the wild. Take leaping, for example. If a 12-foot tiger shark was swimming at you, you would jump out of the water, too.
Every job has advantages and disadvantages. Byers discussed the good and bad points of being a trainer.
"The advantages are that I spend a lot of time outside; I spend a lot of time around the animals. You get a lot of physical exercise.
"The disadvantages are that the animals bite and I spend a lot of time outside in the winter. It gets cold and wet, and you get cold and wet," said Byers.
A lot of people think dolphins are really smart, and the TV show seaQuest DSV reinforces this opinion. Are dolphins really smart, or are they just dogs of the sea?
"It's hard to tell how intelligent they are," Byers explained. "You can train a pig to do the same things these guys do. But you can't train a dolphin to do some things pigs do."
Dolphins have big brains, but bigger isn't better. Byers pointed out that dolphins' brains are made up of two kinds of matter, gray and white. A large portion of their brains are white matter, and scientists think it might be used for sound, like echo location, rather than problem solving.
Dolphins are social animals. They live in a group, first with their families and then with peers. A group of male dolphins, called a bachelor pod, lives and hunts together.
The bachelor pod is formed when the dolphins are between ages 3 and 10, when they are pushed out of their family pods. The male members are close and don't let other dolphins in.
If a male is pushed out of his group, he will not be able to hunt as effectively and will slowly starve. For this reason, the zoo does not release its dolphins into the wild.
Dolphins swim together and breathe together. They also rest as a group and swim in a sleep pattern (it isn't real sleep but more of a rest time). They do this for protection and for more efficient hunting.
At the zoo, they act like they would in the wild. They sleep together at night, they come up for air together and dive back down together.
While captivity is initially a shock, dolphins seem to like it after they get used to eating what the trainers feed them and they get working, Byers said.
"I think it's a better life for them because they don't have to worry about sharks eating them and getting big, nasty infections and not being able to recover from that," he said. "They don't have to worry about hunting and chasing and killing their food. I think they're pretty happy here."
EDITED BY: Melissa Adams, 14, and Amanda Stevens, 13.