Flipper Fail: Dolphins May be Dumber Than We Think

Der Spiegel ^ | September 27, 2013 – 01:49 PM | Philip Bethge

[Vendome]

Punk.

Dat cold man.

You heartless.

LOL!

[Rocky]

Well, it’s no wonder. The smart dolphins have all left Planet Earth. You can read about it in “So Long and Thanks for All the Fish” by Douglas Adams.

[gitmo]

I watch porpoise a lot. They are always having sex. That is all they do.

So the neuroethologist Paul Manger is wrong. They are smarter than us.

[Olog-hai]

One thing that Adams never got into was whether or not there was any diplomatic relations between the dolphins and the mice.

[hinckley buzzard]

Marineland, Flipper, Free Willy, all the liberal weenies who think animals are better than people because, well, they are cute and harmless, have conditioned the wackoes to equate porpoises with people. Height of absurdity, but stranger things may lie in wait...

[Nea Wood]

I guess those eek eek sounds from Flipper

I remember an old standup joke from Robin Williams. He said experts had finally figured out what dolphins were trying to say with those "eek eek" sounds. They're saying, "I am not a tuna!!!"

[Inyo-Mono]

the claims that dolphins have a particularly complex brain, use a sophisticated language, are self-aware and can use tools are nonsense.

No surprise to those of us who have observed and studied various forms of wildlife for a lifetime.

[nvscanman]

I don’t know what the author’s agenda is but to say cetaceans are not
intelligent merely shows the author is lacking in intellect.

Measuring cetacean intelligence is difficult because they and their
environment are so extremely different from us we have nothing in
common and no basis for measurement. Dolphins rule in their own
environment. They formulate and implement complex hunting strategies
and perform complex actions. They play.....an act reserved for higher
levels of intellect..... smart predators play, stupid prey do not.

And the “they can’t be that bright if they get caught in a net” line is just
stupid. Dolphins get caught in these MASSIVE nets surrounded by tuna
and other game fish. They can’t maneuver, they are “blind” as their sonar
is impeded by the surrounding environment and THEY DROWN before they
can escape. We only know about those that fail to escape these nets.....
we have NO way to know how often they escape because they ARE smart.

[Talisker]

Thank you for the sanity.

This article and its “reasearch” was obviously sponsored by the tuna industry.

[ogen hal]

How “smart” can dophlins be? They defacate and swim in it. They never built a sewage treatment plant. They are polluters.

[bill1952]

Right on.
Way back in/the 60s my best friend and I had this conversation:

they say dolphins may be smarter than people and have larger brains" - I don't think they have the bomb yet"

Truth. I remembered that all this time