Beguiled by a smile? (Image: Flip Nicklin/Minden Pictures)
They have been hailed as the second most intelligent animal on the planet, but could a soft spot for dolphins have led us to terribly misjudge them?
EVERY day, regular as clockwork, the bottlenose dolphins of Shark Bay swim to the shallows to be hand fed and beamed at by a gaggle of tourists. Meeting them was to be the highlight of my trip around Australia. I was expecting to commune with nature. Instead, I got a rude awakening. As dolphin after dolphin swam past my legs, excitement overcame me and – against the orders of the ranger on duty – I chanced a stroke. In response, I got a flick of the tail so hard it gave me a dead arm. I looked at the dolphin. Black eyes glared back at me. “She’s telling you ‘no’,” said the ranger with barely concealed fury.
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Seventeen years later, I still can’t recall this encounter without regret. It’s not just the guilt – I should have known better than to invade a wild animal’s space. There is also shame. Decades of research have revealed dolphins to be remarkably intelligent, empathic and self-aware, and I imagined myself forming some sort of meaningful contact with one of these extraordinary sentient beings. Instead, I had been rebuffed. My one chance to befriend a dolphin and she had told me to stick it.
You may laugh, but many people share my preconceptions about dolphins. Why else would they flock to Shark Bay, or even SeaWorld? Why would they believe that “dolphin therapy” can cure everything from depression to paralysis? And why on earth would anyone contemplate a ““? No other species generates such an overwhelming emotional response. Now there are suggestions that even dolphin researchers may not be entirely objective. So what is really going on here? Are dolphins just average mammals with good PR, or thinking, feeling people of the sea?
Tuning in
The dolphin’s special place in popular culture can largely be traced to the 1960s and the work of one man, physiologist John Lilly. Although , he is probably best remembered for his attempt to communicate with dolphins by giving both them and himself LSD. (Intriguingly, it had no noticeable effect on the cetaceans.) His work is responsible for dolphins bursting onto the alternative scene, touted as peaceful, loving geniuses and spiritual healers, but it also encouraged a boom in dolphin research.
Over the years, this has revealed a pretty impressive range of abilities. Among the dolphin’s greatest hits are tool use, – which is shared by an elite group of species and considered a sign of self-awareness – and based on simple grammatical rules. These talents, along with flexible problem-solving and complex social lives, underpin their reputation as one of the most cognitively complex animals on Earth.
But could a lingering soft spot for dolphins be leading some researchers to read too much into their results? Neurophysiologist Paul Manger at Witwatersrand University in South Africa thinks so. In a paper published last year he issued a scathing takedown of the idea that dolphin intelligence is something special (). They can follow a pointing finger? So can dogs, he says. They can pick up an artificial language? Well, it takes them years of intensive training and even then they are no better than sea lions. What about imagining the future? Scrub jays have it covered, he says. As for distinguishing between “few” and “many”, even mealworms do that. And when it comes to tool use then take your pick of animals, many of which use them with a lot more finesse.
In a recent commentary on the argument, Onur Güntürkün at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany reassesses the evidence for two of the best-known examples of advanced dolphin intelligence (). Of mirror recognition he says: “They perform the same behaviour when the mirror is there and when it is not. It is interesting but in my opinion lacking in clear evidence of mirror recognition.” Neither does the evidence for tool use convince him. Covering one’s snout with a marine sponge while foraging on the seabed is pretty basic as tool use goes, he argues, and it seems to provide no advantage. Also, while parrots, primates and crows can all adapt a tool to tackle new challenges, there is no evidence that dolphins have this ability.
“Nobody doubts that dolphins are able to find many complex solutions to experiments and to natural challenges,” says Güntürkün. “But some of the data are overinterpreted. Why? Because it’s a dolphin.” And that brings some emotional baggage. Manger goes even further. “Their brains aren’t doing anything that’s beyond the capabilities of every other mammal and in fact most other vertebrates,” he says. In other words, dolphins aren’t the brainboxes everyone thinks they are.
Cue uproar among dolphin researchers. “It is not so much that we love dolphins and we want to put them on a pedestal and then find the evidence for it. It’s the other way around,” says Lori Marino at Emory University in Atlanta, one of the researchers who discovered mirror recognition in dolphins. “The special status is completely driven by the science of who cetaceans are.”
All at sea
While Manger may be ruffling some feathers, his ideas do reflect a changing approach to dolphin research. The drive is on to understand these animals in their own habitat, solving their own problems, using their own measures of success rather than those more suited to humans. But studying a marine mammal on its own turf is both expensive and difficult. They live far out at sea where researchers often can’t keep up with them or see what they are doing, and even when they can, they have trouble decoding the dolphins’ gestures and clicks. “I think there are things that we will never know,” says Marino.
Meanwhile, there are still hundreds of dolphins in captivity, and controversial drive hunts regularly take place in the Faroe Islands and Japan. Whatever the nature of dolphin intelligence many people think they need greater protection. Marino is .
Manger is also in favour of conservation, but on the dolphins’ terms. “We need to preserve them for what they are not what we would like to think they are,” he says. “Then we can come up with far more appropriate management and conservation strategies. But if we think there is some magical, mythical beast under the oceans then we are not going to think constructively about the effect of humans on their environment.”
This article appeared in print under the headline “Just like us?”
Article amended on 1 January 1970
When this article was first published, it stated that dolphins enjoy legal personhood in some countries. This is not so.
