Oh, yes, Dr. Lilly and his NASA funded study. All acid, sex and other things aside, some of the stuff he did was indeed interesting, if only to get to know dolphins in a way impossible in the wild. There was one NPR interview with Margaret some time ago, she mentioned that Peter (the dolphin she worked with) was absolutely captivated by her knees. He would echolocate on them and investigate them constantly. If you think about it, dolphins must know each other's anatomy pretty well due to their echolocation abilities. So a human knee (having no analog anywhere in a dolphin's body) was the constant focus of Peter's interest. But wild dolphins do not seem to be captivated by human knees, so this difference in their motivation is very interesting. In fact, the question about curiosity and motivation to communicate is a important one, even if we do a playback and use all correct sequences, if the dolphin is not motivated to reply in any way, the experiment will fail and we will never know why.
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