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Bottlenose Dolphins Invent "Ring Feeding"

| 4 Comments

Very smart approach. Swim in shallow flats where fast-moving fish live. Begin by circling around them, beating your flukes into the seabed to raise sand clouds. When the circle closes, the fish try to jump out. And hey! Those tricks from Sea World have a real world counterpart after all.

4 Comments

Smart, yes, but what's the evidence that it's new, i.e., an 'invention'? Whales have been observed to do this with air bubbles for some time.

I didn't say it was necessarily new, though humans hadn't seen it until recently. Regardless, some dolphin must have invented it, and it has been learned and passed along.

Aside from the theory of mind aspects involved (the dolphin must not only devise the tactic, but have an expectation of how another creature will react to it, then use a non-linear attack - a step beyond the whales), the other part I liked was seeing that you don't need hands to use tools.

"...some dolphin must have invented it..."

That's a fair point. Do we know that dolphins teach their young, or does their hunting behavior come from instinct? I am thinking here of the distinction between cheetah and most other large cats (cheetah must be taught to hunt; usually it is instinctive).

I can't point to the exact research, but I believe it's generally accepted that dolphins do teach.

When we get our hands on them, they certainly learn. And we know dead-certain that they're capable of both reasoning and improvisation.

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