Akeakamai was the dolphin in Louis Herman's studies whose Hawaiian name means “philosopher” or “lover of wisdom.”
Akeakamai was a female Atlantic bottlenose dolphin associated with the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory in Honolulu. Her name combines Hawaiian elements commonly glossed as a desire or love of wisdom, giving it the philosophical meaning reflected in the question.
Herman and his colleagues used Akeakamai and Phoenix in pioneering research on dolphin cognition and artificial languages. Akeakamai learned a visually based system in which a trainer’s gestures represented objects, actions, and relationships. The experiments tested whether dolphins could understand not only individual signals but also changes in word order and sentence structure.
The other names are genuine dolphins connected with the same broader research program, which makes this question easy to confuse. Phoenix was another major language-study subject, while Elele and Hiapo were later tankmates and research dolphins. Akeakamai is the one whose name itself carries the “lover of wisdom” meaning.