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Subscribe to RSSScientists have known for a long time that chimps and crows teach their pals survival tricks. Dolphins do likewise, by showing other dolphins how to use sponges to protect themselves from injury. But how about tricks that don't seem to have survival value? Tricks like walking on your tail backward over the surface of the sea?
A couple of years ago, marine biologists noticed that dolphins in the wild were walking on their tails after spending some time with another dolphin, named Billie. Billie apparently learned tail-walking on her own while spending three weeks in an Australian water park called Marineland, and the scientists assumed that she showed the others how to do it.
Billie passed away last year, but her legacy continues. Last week, the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society reported that a growing number of dolphins in Port Adelaide have picked up the fad.
"As far as we are aware, tail walking has no practical function and is performed just for fun -- akin to human dancing or gymnastics," WDCS researcher Mike Bossley said in a news release. "As such, it represents an internationally important example of the behavioral simillarities between humans and dolphins."
That's one reason why we ranked dolphins among the world's 10 smartest animals (along with chimps, crows and, um, humans). Check out the video above and the links below for more about animal intelligence:
- Dolphins: Second-smartest animals?
- Inside the mind of a 'killer whale'
- iPad to help humans speak with dolphins
- Good times of the animal kind
Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," Alan's book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.
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I'm not at all surprised. We live 70 miles from the nearest town and 10 from our closest neighbor. We had a pair of ravens that also ehibit this kind of behavior. We have seen the parent pair teach each of their broods to play with sticks, hiding them, snatching them away, even apprently brandishing them at each other. They also play a game very much like musical chairs. They line up on a cross arm of the telephone pole, shoulder to shoulder, and one flys around in a circle and then comes in for a landing, knocking one of the sitting ravens from his perch. That raven will circle a time or two and then come in and knock another off. As this is going on, they are making a racket I can only describe as laughter. We also witnessed altruism on the part of these birds. It was apparently the adult pair and one nestling, although all three birds were the same size, so its hard to tell. One bird had been injured and although it could fly, it couldn't fly well. Two of them landed on the telephone pole, but the third just couldn't gain that much altitude. It finally gave up and landed on the fence. The other two immediately joined it on its lowly (and dangerous perch) and remained with it for several days until it could once again fly normally. Each year, the ravens entertained us with their antics instructing their young and then flew away with their brood and were gone several weeks, then only the pair return. I assume they were settling their offspring in new territory. This year only one adult returned, and it sits high on a pole day after day calling to it's mate. It is so obviously heart broken!
I just watched a fascinating show on the intelligence of crows on the pbs program NATURE. It may be available online. You should look for it as I think you would appreciate the crows' intelligence even more.
It's all funny til the CHUCKLER gets hurt.......then it's hilarious....
Here in the Tampa, FL area the dolphins make mud rings to fish for mullet as a group. One or two dolphins swim fast in a circle around a school of mullet that are in shallow water. They pump their tails downward to create a muddy ring of water. The mullet will not swim through it so they jump out of the water over the ring and there are dolphin waiting to catch them. It is amazing to see! There is alot of splashing and fish flying through the air. I have read that this is the only area that dolphin have been observed doing this.
Um...what?
Amy, don't fret. There is no subject that Daylight can't dumb down with moronic keyboard abuse.
Is it possible that the trick was not a man made invention? Could it possibly be that someone saw a dolphin do the trick and taught other dolphins to do it? Why is it that people assume things like, "There is no way (Blank) would behave like that on their own, they must have learned it from us humans!"?
'Wild' dolphins are perfectly willing to dump out of the water, it's been seen literally for millennia, so it's indeed not asking much to train them to do so on cue.
But if anyone has ever observed them doing 'tail-walking' in the wild before this, they've kept it very much to themselves...
(Note that dolphins don't normally jump over objects, either, unless trained. A reluctance that, sadly, keeps them in tuna nets. The escape scene in the first 'Free Willy' movie might be physically possible, but it took major artistic license with actual delphinidae behavior.)
So, this is something that just never seems to occur to dolphins in nature, but once they see someone else doing it...
There other examples of 'cultural' learning and transmission of behavior in whales and dolphins:
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Getting+the+gull%3A+baiting+trick+spreads+among+killer+whaleg-a0136210911
http://www.sciencenews.org/pages/pdfs/data/2000/158-18/15818-19.pdf
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-67328691.html
Well, I guess it only takes a couple of moronic posts to prove that we are not that far evolved from the great apes, huh?
I'm going to ignore chucklehead and daylight from now on, one is clearly a comedian wannabe and the other is a religious nut. I have clicked the appropriate box to ignore them in the future and encourage the rest of you to do likewise.
For the rest of you with a little more wattage in your braincase I'd like to say that I think the above information is fascinating. When we finally develop a way to communicate with Dolphins and Dogs and other highly intelligent creatures I think we will be very surprised at how smart they really are. I like to think of it this way. Do WE learn to understand them? NO. But they learn to understand us, even if verbalization is not their preferred method of communication, they learn to understand our spoken words and signals. My Bearded Collie has a vocabulary of well over 100 words that she understands. She is capable of communicating her wants and needs by pantomimes and actions. She has one behavior that clearly means "yes" when she wants something and you run down the list of things she might need, she'll respond when with a "yes", which for her is a little leap and a bark, when you get to the right answer. If you ask her if she wants to "Outside" and that is NOT what she needs, she will sit down, clearly saying "no" that's not what I want.
There is so much to learn about our fellow travelers on this earth and frankly so much mistreatment to be forgiven once we can understand each other better.