![]() ![]() “We’ve always known they’re smart, going back thousands of years,” Marino says, adding that observations of their curiosity go back at least to ancient Greece. Learning to understand dolphins sometimes entails understanding our own way of thinking about things. Another jump happened again in the early delphinids, the ancestors of modern dolphins, porpoises and belugas, about 27 million years ago.īrain size alone doesn’t mark intelligence, though - and Thewissen says that he believes part of this jump in delphinids and other cetaceans likely occurred as their ancestors developed the capacity to use echolocation to hunt their prey. Hans Thewissen, a professor at Northeast Ohio Medical University who has studied cetacean evolution, says that the ancestors of modern dolphins first began to evolve a large brain size in the ancestors of all whales and dolphins in the Eocene Epoch that ended about 33 million years ago. Octopi, for example, may not be as high in the encephalization quotient as some of their competitors, but the cephalopods have excelled at a great number of problem-solving tasks researchers have thrown at them. But she adds that researchers are now trying to get away from the idea of ranking different animals based on brain size. “Their brains are oversized,” Marino says. The encephalization quotient of these dolphins weren’t that far off from Homo habilus, a close human ancestor, the study noted. They found that humans came in the highest, followed by several species of dolphins: Tuxuxi, white-sided, common, and bottlenose. They compared dolphin encephalization quotients to those of other famously smart animals like chimpanzees, humans, gorillas and orangutans. In one study in 2002, Marino and her colleagues examined the relative brain size of a dolphin compared to body mass - something known as the encephalization quotient. But sperm whales are also massive animals that require more computing power for basic tasks like movement. Sperm whales may have the biggest brain sizes of any creature living on the planet, weighing up to 20 pounds according to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Simply put, it’s about relative brain size. What leads some to believe they are the second smartest creatures? “These animals are very much like us because of their social complexities, their behavior, their level of self-awareness.” Brain Ratios “They have culture, they use tools, they have complex societies,” says Neuroscientist Lori Marino, the president of The Whale Sanctuary Project who has studied dolphin brains and intelligence for 30 years. and Russian navies and some believe they can even sense cancer tumors, though the science has yet to back up this myth. The small cetaceans have highly developed language abilities and can learn complicated tricks while acting on TV shows. ![]() Jokes aside, there are a lot of reasons to give dolphins credit.
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