I've been involved in three different Interspecies Communications projects in my life and I can say with confidence that

Cetaceans are Intelligent and understan d the concept of language. Two were private ventures I cannot discuss without a pproval. The third is Dr. Lilly's JANUS project. I have many hundreds of hours of hands on experience with Orcas and Dolphins. I've swum with both wild and c aptive Dolphins. What is really needed is a way to communicate, to be able to converse with this Intelligence and learn more about it. Sign Language, fancy keyboards, and recor ded whistles have been tried in various forms over the past thirty years with li ttle to no real breakthroughs. Technological hardware changes over the years ap pear to have made little difference in these areas. It seems clear to me from m y experiences that these are not the way to go. Especially with a species whose primary sense is sound. Humans are primarily visual. The Primary Issue is *frequency* not language. First we have to be able to hear and speak to each other properly in order to communicate. The majority of Cetacean vocal / hearing range [ 20 Khz up to 250 Khz for some s pecies ] is above the human hearing range [ tops out at 20-22 Khz ]. Humans are simply not designed to hear what Cetaceans are saying nor are Humans designed t o speak in their range as well as the reverse being true. Effectively it is the same issue as being able to communicate with a deaf/mute Human. Just because a deaf/mute Human cannot hear us or speak to us does not mean they are not Intell igent or are unable to communicate with us in some other fashion. Somehow I thi nk Sign Language or keyboards would be a bit difficult for Cetaceans, with the l ack of thumbs and all. Because of this some other type of technology is require d for effective and useful communication to take place. Some sort of device tha t can translate between the Human hearing/vocal range and the Cetacean hearing/v ocal range. Surprisingly enough such a device has been around since 1945 that could do this job. It just has never been applied to this problem as far as I'm aware, or may be it has and that fact simply is not public knowledge. It is the military devi ce called the UQC, Gertrude, or more commonly underwater telephone used for comm unication between surface ships and submarines. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_telephone You can hear this device in operation in the last half of the Haro Strait record ing here http://killerwhaletales.blogspot.com/ what they call the "Metallic Voice". Warning the Sonar pings at the beginning a re extremely loud. Turn Down Your Volume First. If you think you can make out some words in there such as SIX or ECHO or EASY you are correct. It is a Human reading a Military formatted encrypted message. You may or may not have heard of the ex military Beluga named Noc who is credite d with mimicking human speech. You can hear a recording of him here http://www.itv.com/news/2012-10-23/meet-noc-the-talking-beluga-whale/ Note the similarity of the "voice" in the the two recordings. It is my understa nd that the the aquarium uses a modern diver communication system that operates in a similar fashion to the UQC which would explain why the diver was able to pi ck up what Noc was 'saying'. I think the military may be using the UQC or a sim ilar device in their training of Cetaceans to be able to easily issue underwater commands to them.

Having been in the Military, I was fully aware of this device having heard it in operation on the ship I was on. When I heard the above mentioned recording, I knew exactly what I was listening to, as would anyone who has some radio knowled ge would be able to recognize this odd sounding voice. This is essentially the type of system Lilly was trying to create with JANUS wit h some slight differences. With a few simple modifications to it's operation it could be used to achieve Lilly's goal of Interspecies Communication. I feel th at more research should be done in this area. The hardware required for this is inexpensive and publicly available. In fact, recent developments in computer s oftware have enabled some, if not all, of what used to require hardware to now b e done in software making it more flexible and adaptable as well. Thank You. Russell Hockins. Here is a photo of me and one of my friends. http://i19.photobucket.com/albums/b171/OrcinusOrca/LJ/MeKotar.jpg