As if dolphins weren’t already amazing and adorbz enough, recent research shows they might be even smarter than scientists already thought! This video shows that, in addition to being inquisitive, dolphins have thought processes that are similar to human thought processes when it comes to interpreting and understanding new information.
Man, now I just wanna go to an aquarium and play with a dolphin for hours. I think I need a waterproof laptop so I can keep blogging while doing so…
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I guess Douglas Adams was right about Dolphins after all…
I hate to be the one pointing this out, but dolphins have been known to kill young porpoises, and also their own young offspring, and play with the corpses. There are also plenty of documented incidents of dolphins attempting to forcibly mate with humans. They may LOOK happy and cute and playful with the way their mouth is shaped, but in reality that is anthropomorphism. They are highly intelligent creatures, but for all their cheerful and playful mannerisms, they are still wild animals and should be treated with the utmost restraint, respect, and caution.
Wow, thanks for the completely inconvenient post.
You’re just doing this because you’re a troll and want to ruin the whole thing for all. Why don’t you get a life?
I wonder if dolphins go around telling each other to get a life?
Probably not… they are more intelligent than that.
If you read a bit more about dolphins you’d know the reason male bottlenose dolphins practice infanticide is the same as that of lions (to be able to breed with the female), and that the “forcibly mating with humans” thing is a retarded gossip.
How does dolphins practicing infanticide for the same reason as lions make it less awful? The babies are still dead, whether or not dolphins think of it as wrong. Also, they do kill baby porpoises for no reason, porpoises don’t eat the same things as dolphins, so it’s not competition. Dolphins are just (like most other wild animals) kind of cruel.
Because humans AREN’T cruel? Oh please. I don’t see any reason to even point this out at all! Sure, animals have some ‘cruel’ habits, but I would say that humans have FAR more! We kill for no reason too, you know! Humans are JUST if not MORE cruel to each other.
Any species that can think at all is going to have a bit of a cruel streak. Also, I found nothing about dolphins mating with humans, please provide a legit link or book reference.
Most books about dolphin behavior do mention the fact that they frequently attempt to initiate sexual contact with humans. I don’t know about it being “forcible”, and to be fair, there are some humans who are more than willing to participate…. in fact, on one documentary about Botos (Amazon River Dolphins), it was revealed that men working on the river occasionally had sex with female Botos “for good luck”. Truth is stranger than fiction!
Wow, thanks for three more completely inconvenient posts.
It’s very inconvenient to read people’s posts about other people’s posts being inconvenient.
It’s also inconvenient to read posts by people who need to get a life telling other people that they need to get a life when they should use that energy towards just getting their own life.
Read this far? See what I mean…
Now go get a life and stop being mean to other people.
Well, he started it.
Your response was to bluelagoon1980, is that right? What did they “start” and why was their post “inconvenient”?
Hate to burst your bubble, Gretgor, but your wrong about dolphins’ sexual behavior with humans, in captivity and in the wild. Also, bottlenose dolphins in particular are extremely sexually aggressive, groups have coercive cross-speices sex with young females, and adult males generally form lifelong bonds established through homosexual acts. Animals are animals. That’s all. Nature is red in tooth and claw. Get over it.
For only a few of the publications documenting human-dolphin sexual encouters in captivity and in the wild please see:
Samuels & Spradlin, Marine Mammal Science, Vol. 11 Iss. 4
Frohoff & Packard, Anthrozoos, Vol 8 No 1
Orams, Tourism Management, Vol 18 Iss 5
Dudzinski et al. Aquatic Mammals Vol 21 Iss 2
Funnily, if you exchange dolphin with human and ‘young porpoises’ with ‘every other lifeform’ it would still be readable and quite logic.
Nevertheless, respect for animals would be appreciated, we could learn so much from them about ourself if we wouldn’t be so arrogant and selfcentered, but alas, we had to take the hard road..
Which… makes them a whole lot like humans, actually. If you’re gonna condemn them, condemn your own species as well.
Yeah, and it’s also so nice to pretend that humans never practice infanticide themselves.
There’s so many stories about people killing babies, for instance, because of Farmville.
Plus, in Sparta, the great apes known as Homo Sapiens used to throw disabled or deformed babies from a cliff, and that’s not fiction, it’s history. Porpoise kinda look like deformed dolphins, who knows, that could be the reason why dolphins kill them.
Oh, and in India, to this day, many great ape (homo sapiens) families try to kill female babies, because they only bring monetary loss in the indian society.
Also, THIS. We’d done a fair share of infanticide ourselves.
This is why we should never keep them captive in aquariums. They deserve better.
So, she’s studied dolphins for 25 years and still hasn’t figured out they don’t belong in captivity ????????????? It just goes to prove who the more intelligent species is !!!!!!!!!!
Yeah, us.
BINGO! Instead of studying how smart dolphins are, we should try and figure out why humans are so oblivious…
Please visit this website to learn more about dolphins in Captivity. I highly recommend the Oscar winning movie The Cover for more information.
http://www.savejapandolphins.org/dolphincaptivity.php
Typo – The Cove.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1313104/
The dolphins in The Cove weren’t caught primarily for the captive trade. That small portion is an aside to the real reason.
Agree… doesn’t make it any less relevant or important to watch though.
Actually what annoys me the most is the prevading assumption that humans are the only intelligent species alive. So scientists run around pointing out the obvious that this or that animal is quite clever, the other has actual real emotions and -gasp! Can feel pain and distress just like humans do! What or who are we, with our own limited senses and distorted perceptions of ourselves and the world, to impose arbitrary criteria by which we judge 99% of the other living creatures on this planet?! And we don’t stop at our own kind, just as an example, it took ages to “discover” that “primitive savages” who are enslaved actually do have emotions and free will, and elevating them to the status of human beings. Or that children actually do thrive better when treated in a kind, humane and loving manner, where their personalities and inborn intelligence are recognised, again elevating them to the status of a full human being. Who set the yard stick and ideal to that of adult humans, or more polemically: to the standard of a white adult male human?
Scientists have known for years that dolphins are self aware. This sort of mirror-experiment is not new. Not that it isn’t any less amazing or cool, not dissing on that fact, just that it is old news.
Glad somebody else said this… I was going to post the same thing. I learned about this experiment YEARS ago.
Precious!
dolphins are open water animals; keeping them confined like this makes them miserable.
LOL! Dolphins are way smarter then some people I know. Because they are so smart, then why do people lock them up like this? Imagen if they put a mirror in the water with wild dolphins! That would be so cool!
Am I the only one that noticed that the person suddenly decided we should work harder to save a species just because it’s smart to human standards…? (4:20-4:40)
Why all the arbitrary lines, indeed? They proclaim here a bunch of mammals recognizing themselves, but so do magpies. They also claim cats and dogs ignore mirrors, but that is merely the rule of what they learn to do.
Cats don’t always ignore mirrors. One of my cats used to sit on the edge of the sink and watch me brush my teeth by watching me in the mirror. We would just sit (me stand) in the mirror and watch each other. All animals have some kind of intelligence or they would have all died off. How much depends on the species. Why it’s taken humans so long to recognize that is the real mystery.
I don’t know about this… I’m not a zoologist, but how do those people know the dolphins are actually recognizing themselves in the mirror and not seeing another dolphin? Maybe the dolphins are thinking, “why can’t I get past this force feild to get to the other dolphin!?!”
By the way, my cat, Dot, uses my mirror to look at me and look around my room. Sometimes he just stares at himself.
One of the expiriments involved an attendant scrawling a bit of markings on one of the underbelly of the dolphin. Presumably in grease pencil, or some other innocuous (sp?) media. The dolphin then went to the mirror, and tried rotating him/herself to an orientation that enabled it to see it’s stomach in the mirror, where the scribblings were made. This of course implies the dolphin realized the mirror image was indeed a reflection of itself. The next true test of “intelligence” would be to devise a test that might demonstrate if a dolphin recognizes a picture or video of itself.
I’m sure being able to recognize itself in a mirror comes in real handy in helping a dolphin survive out in the open ocean.
Dolphins’ posses all the “intelligence” they need to thrive in their own environment quite well.
If you put a human out in the open ocean and he or she didn’t understand how to catch fish, would that mean they weren’t “intelligent”?
I, for one, I am amazed that the small sparrows I saw this morning were actually able to survive the freezing cold last night. I (a human) would probably half-dead and frost-bitten.
“Intelligence” cannot only be defined by what humans decide they wish it to be.
I absolutely agree with that last statement. Intelligence by human standard is measurable to what one finds familiar/understandable. Animals obviously communicate with each other in some way, it’s just for the most part we haven’t actually expanded on learning their language, just interactions. Saying any animal is unintelligent is saying that anyone that speaks a language one doesn’t understand is retarded.
It’s really a matter of semantics; substitute “self-awareness” (as opposed to mere “awareness”) for “intelligence”, and you have a pretty good description of the cognitive ability we share with dolphins, whales, great apes, and perhaps a few other species.