Smart Dolphins

Yay! I’ve been inspired to do another blog entry. This one came to me last night when I was trying to sleep. Now “trying” might not be the operative word here - I was playing Hangman on my iPod and that’s how my story starts.

The Hangman App I have uses recent news article headings as the clue you’re trying to solve. Once you solve the puzzle, or leave your stick-figure to die as I usually do, you can “dig” which will take you to the full article to read.

So one of the puzzles, that I did not solve, at 4 in the morning was “Fish-catching trick may be spreading among dolphins”. I’m always amazed by all the smart things dolphins can do so I decided to give this article a read.

I recommend you do the same but in case this blog entry is already exceeding your “reading quota” everything will kind of get summarized below (the word summarize is bringing back horrors from high school English – apparently I wasn’t good at summarizing):

So, there are dolphins in Australia (well off the coast of Australia if you want to be technical) that have found a unique way to catch fish. They are picking up conch shells with their beaks and shaking them causing the fish inside to fall into their mouths. This intrigues researchers for several reasons.

First, it’s known already that dolphins can learn new tricks from one generation to other. A mother dolphin will teach her daughter new ways to catch fish (for example by “sponging” or briefly beaching itself). But this new phenomenon with the conch shells is spreading too quickly suggesting that the dolphins are not only passing it down to their young but also across to their ‘friends’. Some dolphins that were seen shaking the conch shells recently are known to “hang out” with dolphins that were seen doing it years ago (How the scientist knows this is beyond me!). It’s a pretty big deal if indeed the dolphins are teaching each other – very human-like.

Here are some examples of relatively new methods of catching fish dolphins have adapted. This video shows dolphins beaching themselves in order to catch fish. I found it just searching on YouTube.

I first saw the video below on TV as part of the BBC Life documentary series. The voice was Oprah Winfrey but I think I like this British dude better

Researchers are interested in these dolphins because it’s possible that they have developed the ability to use foresight and plan ahead with tools. It is not known whether the dolphins are just coincidentally finding conch shells with fish hiding in them or if they are deliberately arranging the conch shells to make them attractive for the fish. As a next step, scientists would like to place some conch shells facing down in the water and see if the dolphins come to fix them for the fish to use. If they do indeed fix the conch shells then it implies that the dolphins are capable of forward planning and that they are using the conch shell as a tool.

If this isn’t really making sense to you (as it didn’t to me initially) I found this random computer animated clip. It was posted just a couple days ago I guess it goes along with the news story.

To find an animal is using an object as a tool is a pretty big deal. Not many animals are capable of that thought process. Off the top of my head I can only think of some types of monkeys who use rocks to break shells of hard fruits to get at, and the crow, who was the star of a very intriguing experiment I saw a while back on The Nature of Things. On the episode, A Murder of Crows, an experiment done where a crow was required to use several steps and tools to attain a piece of food. If you have the time I think it's worth it to watch the full 45 minutes to see how smart crows really are. Otherwise just watch from the 10-minute mark (for about 6 minutes)

So yeah, based on all this I hope you can see how insanely smart dolphins are (well that was the intent but I went on a bit of a tangent with the crow). Maybe another time I'll talk about how smart the octopus is. But not today, I'll let you figure that one out for yourself.



D.M.