CAPTIVE DOLPHIN REMEMBERS FRIENDS AFTER 20 YEARS

In an amazing experiment with a captive dolphin in Florida Dr. Bruck played a recording of the signature whistle of a 2 year old female to a 25 year old male. The male and female had been together 20 years earlier when the male was only 4 years old. The result? The captive male recognuized the whistle of his female companion after 20 years separation.

So, what does this mean for wild dolphins?

In the wild, dolphins live for about 20 years but many live as long as 45 years. That means that most dolphins are able to remember the "names and identities" through signature whistles of many of the other dolphins they build bonds with.

On the 'memory score card' dolphins rank in the top one or two non-human memory stakes. Only the elephant is said to be able to remember for periods of 20 years or so and we don't know if elephants can remember all the elephants they befriend along the way.

Why dolphins' social memories persist so long is unclear. Dr. Bruck says that dolphins exhibit sophisticated social connections that follow a "fission-fusion" model. Dolphins may separate from one group and "fuse" with other groups many times over. Such relationships could have required a growth in memory capacity to avoid social conflicts. But it's also possible that memory is just one facet of the advanced mind that evolved in dolphins for other reasons.

"Why do they need this kind of memory? I'm not sure they do," Bruck said. "The cognitive abilities of dolphins are really well developed, and sometimes things like this are carry-along traits. 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."

The emergence of advanced memory in marine mammals as well as in humans shows that in evolution, "there are lots of ways to get from point A to point B," Bruck said. "It's nice to see this kind of ability in a non-primate, as this is a great example of convergent evolution."

"So far no one has been able to test what signature whistles signify in a dolphin's mind. We know they use these signatures like names, but we don't know if the name stands for something in their minds the way a person's name does for us," Bruck said. "We don't know yet if the name makes a dolphin picture another dolphin in its head."

For his next round of research, Bruck said, "That's my goal -- show whether the call evokes a representational mental image of that individual.

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DOLPHIN MEMORY AND INTELLIGENCE

New research reveals that dolphins can recognize the whistles of old "tank mates" after a separation of 20 years.This is the longest social memory recorded for any species other than humans.

The remarkable memory  is another indication that dolphins have a level of cognitive ability comparable to only a few other species, including humans, chimpanzees and elephants. Dolphins' talent for social recognition may be even more long-lasting than facial recognition among humans. This is because human faces change over time but the signature whistle that identifies a dolphin remains stable over many decades.

"This shows us an animal operating cognitively at a level that's very consistent with human social memory," said Jason Bruck, who conducted the study and received his Ph.D. in June 2013 from the University of Chicago's program in Comparative Human Development. His study is published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B.

To establish how well dolphins could remember their former companions, Bruck collected data from 53 different bottlenose dolphins at six facilities, including Brookfield Zoo near Chicago and Dolphin Quest in Bermuda. The six sites were part of a breeding consortium that has rotated dolphins and kept records on which ones lived together, going back decades.

"This is the kind of study you can only do with captive groups when you know how long the animals have been apart," Bruck said. "To do a similar study in the wild would be almost impossible."

"Signature whistles" offer means to test memory

Other studies have established that each dolphin develops its own unique signature whistle that appears to function as a name. Researchers Vincent M. Janik and Stephanie L. King at Scotland's University of St. Andrews reported earlier this year that a wild bottlenose dolphin can learn and repeat signatures belonging to other individuals, and answer when another dolphin mimics its unique call.

Bruck played recordings of signature whistles to dolphins that had once lived with the animals that made the calls. Determining whether the dolphins recognized their old companions required a comparison of how they responded to familiar calls versus calls belonging to dolphins they had never met.

Bruck would play recording after recording of signature whistles that the target dolphins had never heard before. His initial studies showed that these "dolphins get bored quickly listening to signature whistles from dolphins they don't know." Once they were habituated to the unfamiliar calls, Bruck would play a recording of an animal that he knew the target dolphin had lived with.

The familiar calls often would perk up the dolphins and elicit an immediate response.

"When they hear a dolphin they know, they often quickly approach the speaker playing the recording," Bruck said. "At times they will hover around, whistle at it, try to get it to whistle back."

To check that the response was the result of recognition, Bruck also would play a test recording of an unfamiliar bottlenose that was the same age and sex as the familiar animal. All the behavior was scored according to how quickly and to what degree the animals responded.

A clear pattern emerged in the data: Compared with unfamiliar calls, dolphins responded significantly more to whistles from animals they once knew, even if they had not heard the calls in decades.

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DOLPHINS IN CAPTIVITY; DO THEY THINK?

When we say "think" we are talking about cognitive ability. And like just about everything else in the world, we tend to measure cognitive ability in our own terms.

In terms of brain size, dolphin brains are significantly larger than our own. If we relate brain size to body mass then we slip into the lead and dolphins come in second. The question is what do dolphins do with all that neural material?

Neuro scientist, Dr Lori Marino, says that some dolphin brains exhibit features correlated with complex intelligence. They have a large expanse of neo-cortical volume that is more convoluted than our own, extensive insular and cingulated regions, and highly differentiated cellular regions.

Dr. Marino went on to say, "Dolphins are sophisticated, self-aware, highly intelligent beings with individual personalities, autonomy and an inner life. They are vulnerable to tremendous suffering and psychological trauma."





While presenting information at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference (AAAS) in San Diego, she spoke against keeping dolphins in captivity. "Our current knowledge of dolphin brain complexity and intelligence suggests that these practices are potentially psychologically harmful to dolphins and present a misinformed picture of their natural intellectual capacities," Marino says.

Because we are unable to communicate with dolphins, it is difficult to assess their cognitive or thinking ability. Instead scientists use indicators of 'levels' of ability. One indicator is self awareness.





Dr. Marino found that dolphins were able to recognize themselves as distinct from other dolphins in a mirror. This ability is found in higher primates like ourselves and in elephants.

Can dolphins think?

The answer is a definite yes. We don't know what they think about but can guess that their thought processes are complex and relatively sophisticated.

If they think about their social group, hunting, and navigation then they might not spend a lot of time thinking about confinement versus a life in the ocean.

If they have sophisticated thoughts and can compare an aquarium with the ocean then they could be quite miserable in captivity.

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DOLPHINS KEPT IN CAPTIVITY; DO THEY HAVE FEELINGS?

I spent several years working from an island field station on the Great Barrier Reef. Although most of my time was spent working long hours with fish along the reef slope, I came to recognize a group of three bottlenose dolphins that regularly passed through my study site. They never came close but seemed interested in what I was up to. I found that if I ignored them and hammered small steel pins into the bottom (used as markers), the dolphins would come up behind me and look over my shoulder. If I turned, they were gone in a flash.

I’ve also spent hours cleaning windows in an oceanarium when I was going through university. Lots of things swam around behind me then but I feel that the dolphins were either bored or had little interest because of the regularity of my job with the brush.

Now I am working in Datai Bay and often see Chinese Humpback or White Dolphins. Again they are curious but incredibly shy.

The Chinese White Doplhin

Let’s look at a single question based on what we know about dolphins today;

Do dolphins have emotions and feelings like our own?

If we look at dolphins anatomically, we see that they have a well developed limbic system. The limbic system is a collection of neural material that is part of the ancient mammalian brain. It is common to mammals.

The limbic system supports a number of functions including emotion, behavior, motivation, long-term memory and olfaction. In humans it has a lot to do with our emotional life and is vital to the formation of memories.

But as a scientist, I have to ask the question, “Do we know if the limbic system in dolphins performs the same role as in humans?” The answer is we don’t know.

We do know that memory for dolphins are very important since they live in a world with only visual and olfactory clues for navigation. We might assume that as long lived animals, the amount of memory stored would be large.

A pod of wild dolphins must use a good memory map for navigation.

We also know that dolphins ‘express’ emotion. I say this because we can’t really know what they are feeling; we can only imagine our feeling in the same situation.

An example would be the loss of an offspring. More advanced mammals seem to behave as we do and mourn. Again this is an interpretation. Less advanced mammals and even many non-mammals may seem to do the same.

Do dolphins enjoy human contact?

Unfortunately, the scientific facts just aren’t in yet. From my perspective dolphins have emotions but not at the human level. They show curiosity similar to other advanced mammals but again from my perspective they are not as emotional or curious as monkeys and apes (just my opinion!).

My next post will look at what we know about dolphin intelligence and ask;

“Do dolphins think?"

 



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DOLPHIN INTELLIGENCE AND CAPTIVITY

Emory University neuroscientist Lori Marino  spoke about  dolphin intelligence at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference (AAAS) in San Diego, on Feb. 21, 2010.

"Many modern dolphin brains are significantly larger than our own and second in mass to the human brain when corrected for body size," Marino says.

Some dolphin brains have features related with complex intelligence in other mammals including a large expanse of neocortical volume that is more convoluted than our own. 

"Dolphins are sophisticated, self-aware, highly intelligent beings with individual personalities, autonomy and an inner life. They are vulnerable to tremendous suffering and psychological trauma," Marino says.

This raises lots of questions for the aquarium industry where dolphins are kept for entertainment and educational purposes.

 

"Our current knowledge of dolphin brain complexity and intelligence suggests that these practices are potentially psychologically harmful to dolphins and present a misinformed picture of their natural intellectual capacities," Marino says.

Marino worked on a 2001 study that showed that dolphins can recognize themselves in a mirror -- a finding that indicates self-awareness similar to that seen in higher primates and elephants.

 

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