By K. A. Laity
At the moment of Earth's destruction, Douglas Adams tell us in the course of the five part trilogy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the dolphins left the planet behind with a well-meaning and heartily kind words: so long and thanks for all the fish. The stunningly intelligent creatures were long dismissed by the hubristic humans because of their life style choices. Adams explains.
It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much -- the wheel, New York, wars and so on -- whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons.
Much were the chuckles upon reading this passage in the humourous books, but the truth of it was still discounted. Until now, because we're finally beginning to catch on that dolphins are a lot smarter than we believed.
Of course we were fooled by things like the extinction of the Baiji dolphin in China. This freshwater dolphin had a good life until pollution (both noise and the usual kind) drove them out of the rivers and into oblivion. But not that we've turned our attention to the intelligent mammals, the discoveries reveal so much more than we suspected.
A recent study at the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in
Mississippi demonstrated that dolphins can play the system and make plans for the future.
Their star pupil, Kelly, not only figured out how to get more treats by tearing litter into smaller parts in order to get a reward for each scrap, but she also discovered another lucrative prize: gulls. She may have caught the first one by accident, but she quite deliberately taught her calves and other dolphins how to lure the birds in with fish.
Okay it's not quite Pha and Bee from Day of the Dolphin, but it's about time that people got over this smug assumption of human superiority. Forget swimming skills and tool appropriation: dolphins are now watching television. Anuschka de Rohan writes:
Language-trained chimps only learned to respond appropriately to TV screens after a long period of training. In contrast, Lou Herman's dolphins responded appropriately the very first time they were exposed to television.
Does that mean they chuckled at QI or whooped at X-Factor? Let's hope they didn't see the Simpsons' Tree-House of Horror episode where dolphins extracted a terrible revenge for all those years of abuse, explaining that their apparent cavorting in the waves was nothing of the kind, but instead a horrible attempt to free themselves from a phlegmy fate. So far, we've been lucky -- they haven't been interested in ruling the world.
But what happens when someone tells them, like Lisa Simpson did, that we're the ones who have been polluting their home? They're not going to be content with watching Wossy on Friday night or trading shiny objects for fish. Good god -- they might decide to learn banking! Or television production -- picture it: 24 hour fish channels. Hake and flounder round the clock!
We better clean up our act before it's too late.
Image via Guardian Science