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Article: Deeply moving: a dolphin communication study inspires a Seattle inventor to create an underwater pool toy. (People).
- Article from:
- Pool & Spa News
- Article date:
- February 28, 2003
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2003 Hanley-Wood, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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In the early 1980s, Wink Thorne wasn't your typical high school student.
While many of his classmates in Belmont, Calif., were hanging out with their pals at football games, Thorne spent most of his time working with dolphins. As an intern at Marine World Africa USA, he participated in a communications study conducted by John Lilly, one of the leading researchers of dolphin intelligence.
"We were using computers to analyze dolphin whistles and create a simple language of tones that we taught the dolphins to understand," said Thorne, now president of Aquatoy Inc. in Seattle. "They could understand simple sentence structure and perform tasks based on a ...