Raja Ampat (Indonesia) Scuba Diving Christmas '22 (4k)

I get asked how smart are dolphins a lot. The better question is how are dolphins smart? One thing we're interested in is how do dolphins make sense of their world? How do they perceive their world? How do they conceptualize their world? How do they represent their world? How do they communicate with one another? And that's what we're trying to look at. In terms of cognition, we're giving them tests which we think reflect cognitive abilities. Like for example, one of the projects that I'm at Dolphins Plus in Key Largo was where dolphins had to cooperate to open a device to get fish. We know that they do cooperate, but can they cooperate to solve a novel task? These animals are not accustomed to pulling ropes. These animals are not accustomed to actually opening their mouths on things in training sessions. How can we test this? So we've come up with a lot of cognitive tasks. We're trying to pair a behavior that they already know with a symbol on the board. We want to get a little bit more insight into each dolphin's cognitive process and seeing do they do the behavior that they learned first? Do they do the compatible behaviors, the incompatible behaviors one at a time? Do they go left to right, right to left? Just looking at the way we read tells us so much about our cognitive process. So that's kind of the basis of the study. Self-recognition behavior is often put into a broad category. Our populations here at Dolphins Plus and Dolphin Co. have not been exposed to a mirror at all. So what we found is that we started to see changes in their vocalizations. Well, a lot of the times the mothers would stop in front of the mirror, different squeaks and squawks and jaw pops even, where the juveniles tend to be more social with, you know, approach the mirror with other individuals. Typical behaviors in front of the mirror may not be self-recognition. It may be, why does this dolphin look so crazy in this mirror? Why is it not talking back to me? Why is it just mimicking what I'm doing? Self-recognition behavior, I think the study needs to continue on a little bit more for us to be definitive about, yes, this is exactly what we're seeing. In my opinion, I think we're just scratching the surface. We know more about the moon than we do about our oceans, let alone our species in the ocean. I believe strongly that in order to understand dolphins, we need to study wild populations and we need to study animals that are in captivity. So the advantages of working with wild dolphins is you have a great variety of individuals and natural contexts of behaviors, such as fishing and fighting or whatever, that are normal. There's no human disturbance except us in the water potentially. The Wild Dolphin Project is a long-term project I started in 1985. The goal of the project is really to track long-term the life of a group of wild dolphins. Specifically, our aim is to really look at the communication system of these wild dolphins and figure out how they communicate in acoustics and body language and how complex their society is. We've got about 40 types of vocalizations, so there's different kinds of whistles, there's different kind of click trains, which is their sonar or their echolocation, and then we have burst pulse sounds. They're actually a very frequently heard type of social sound. So we would categorize those types of sounds based on different acoustic parameters and then correlate it. This one has different measurements as I look at the data, so I might say, okay, that's clock type C. All the studies we've done in captivity, everything tells us that these guys have big brains and that they can problem solve and understand artificial languages and think in abstract terms, but how do they apply those skills in the wild? I think one of the most surprising things to me after working in the wild for almost 30 years is that the individuals are so distinct. You know, we tend to think of a dolphin as a dolphin is a dolphin, and they're not. Individuals can be bold, they can be shy, they can be the networkers in a big group, or they can be peripheral animals. And so, you know, when we lose dolphins, or we lose even a small group of dolphins, it can really matter. But it's something we need to sort of switch our brains around a little bit.