Maybe I'm silly, but I can't help wondering what the dolphins feel like when they seem to hear the calls of long-lost friends that aren't actually there. Seems rather cruel to me.
NO, ELEPHANTS, it's we DOLPHINS who NEVER FORGET our best pals
Dolphins have the longest memories in the animal kingdom, longer even than the famously unforgetful elephant, say scientists: the sea-dwelling mammals remember friends' whistles after being separated for more than 20 years. Dolphins can remember each other's signature whistles after 20 years Mate! How long has it been? 20 …
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Wednesday 7th August 2013 13:12 GMT EddieD
As Sir Terry said...
Never trust a species that smiles all the time...they're planning something.
And besides, we only hear the stories of the folk escorted to shores. The other 90% were lured out into the deep sea.
And now we find that they have great memories...all the better for holding a grudge, or remembering where the other bodies are.
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Wednesday 7th August 2013 13:30 GMT Rampant Spaniel
Re: As Sir Terry said...
I have a photo somewhere of a pod of dolphins giving a shark a good whupping. For that alone I like them. There are a lot of them around here (spinners close to shore, at least during the day and spotted & bottlenose further out), they love to play with boats. If you know where to swim (and are brave enough due to Tiger sharks) you can swim with them.
I know it's a very human trait to project intelligence onto animals, but damnit, dolphins and whales just seem so intelligent, just in a different manner. Even sea turtles seem to recognise different people and take a interest in some people. Perhaps it's wishful thinking but I think there is a pretty reasonable level of intelligence in them.
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Thursday 8th August 2013 09:33 GMT NightFox
Re: As Sir Terry said...
I remember reading an article many years back about how a small number of dolphins had been removed from a pod and taught how to count objects. Once they were returned to their pod, not only did they set about teaching the other dolphins how to count, but they also taught it in a much more efficient way than the humans had thought up to teach them in the first place.
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Wednesday 7th August 2013 13:41 GMT Mephistro
"But to test whether this kind of social memory capacity is adaptive, we would need more demographic data from multiple populations in the wild to see if they experience 20-year separations"
As they have some mobility from one group to another, and the groups themselves could occasionally be separated for years, their memory could help them prevent inbreeding and genetic depletion.
Either that or they use they 'names' as part of a mechanism used in signalling an abundance of resources and/or a request for collaboration for hunting said resources to other groups. As chances are that neighbouring groups are genetically related, a mechanism like this would be very useful for aiding a group's genes to propagate.
If the last hypothesis was true, that would mean that -at least in a limited sense- dolphins are more intelligent than (most) humans.
Disclaimer: I'm not an ethologist so everything I wrote above could be catastrophically wrong. But thanks for your patience. :^)
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Thursday 8th August 2013 11:36 GMT Zombieman
So this dolphin swims up to a group and say "Hey everyone! Anything interesting going on? By the way I'm Dave." With that one of the other dolphins excitedly say "Hey! Dave! Is that really you this time? Wow I haven't seen you since you were fin length to a turtle! Well you would NOT believe what those strange looking monkeys have been doing recently..."