Snipped from Wired.com.

This is an interesting article about cetacean culture. We reported on another article that covered the breakdown of the dolphin’s dynamic and complicated language. It described the use of personal names, syntax and even grammar, but this article takes a more holistic approach and describes a sense of culture and society, much like humans.

This is an amazing thing to even contemplate. I, for one, have always thought of dolphins and whales as something a lot more special than we think. What if they are on par with our intelligence, but the lack of hands has hindered any way of constructing a physical representation of such intelligence? Who knows, but isn’t it fun to think about?

Here is a small portion of the article:

“Based on what we know, I’d guess that cetacean culture is intermediate between humans and chimpanzees. Not in material culture, but in most other respects,” said Whitehead.

Culture is an especially important measure of personhood in whales, since it’s difficult to administer the sorts of tests that have found chimpanzees to be capable of basic math, altruism, laughter and complex communication, the latter of which can be neurologically imaged in real-time.

But if cetaceans can’t take these tests, they have met one critical laboratory benchmark of higher cognition: self-recognition. With Wildlife Conservation Society cognitive scientist Diana Reiss, Lori Marino showed that bottlenose dolphins can use mirrors to investigate marks hidden on their bodies. “When they look in the mirror, they’re saying, ‘That’s me,’” said Marino. “They have a sense of self through time.”

And in a much-celebrated first documented example of tool use in marine mammals, a family of dolphins in Australia uses sponges to hunt.

Cetaceans even surpass most primates in their use of sound. “We’ve known for some time now that the communication systems of these animals is more complex than we can imagine,” said Marino. “People are starting to use some interesting statistical methods to look at their vocal repertoires, and they’re finding structural complexity that suggests there may be something like grammar, syntax, even language.”

Read Full Article Here!