Dolphins test contingencies, Learn, Play, Make Art
Scientific American has posted an article about the day when Diana Reiss discovered that a dolphin had learned to use her own disciplinary tactics in reverse, against her, giving her a very human-like ‘timeout’. Even more interesting was the information that dolphins shape and play with bubble rings, in a process that very much resembles, let’s just say it: making art. Embedded from here is the 2007 video of a dolphin doing just that. With accompanying text from the article:
Notoriously playful, dolphins have also caught scientists’ attention by creating play objects from their own bodies. In the wild, if dolphins are trapped or scared, they tense up their blowholes—the nostril on top of their heads—releasing bubbles of air. When the bubbles are big enough, water pressure causes them to collapse in the middle and form rings of air that rise slowly toward the surface like smoke rings. “We started noticing that they were producing these bubble rings in captivity,” Reiss says.
In safe aquarium settings, bubble rings are objects of play, not fear. After a quick breath at the surface, dolphins swim to the bottom of the pool and expel a long, silvery ring of air. In a graceful water ballet, they nudge the bubble ring around, make it bigger or smaller or swirl it out of shape, swim through it, or they snap it suddenly between their jaws to release a thousand tiny bubbles.
“It was the first example we saw of a nonhuman animal creating an object of play out of something out of its own body,” says Reiss, who believes the bubble rings are evidence that dolphins have an acute awareness of physical contingencies, past and future. “If [the rings] are not well formed, they’ll knock them apart right away and then go back and produce a really well formed one.”
(You can add to this evidence of intelligence the recent news of how creative dolphins can be in trapping and preparing their food.)
[Submitted by The Laroquod Experiment.]
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