Dolphins appear to be the first documented case of a marine mammal using tools. Bottlenose dolphins in Shark Bay, near Australia, apparently use sponges on their noses to protect them when looking for food in the sand of the ocean floor. Not only that, it looks like mother dolphins may teach this behavior to their offspring. Researchers investigated whether it could be an inherited behavior, but the evidence for genetic transmission doesn’t look promising. (The dolphins that know how to do it are all related to a recent common female ancestor, but not all the females in that family know how, which suggests that some mothers teach their young how to do it.) No one has seen any signs of one dolphin teaching another this behavior, but I expect that’s one of the next things that these researchers will look for. Depending on how you define “thinking”, I guess you could say that some thinking meat swims in the sea, which is pretty cool. (I get this image of a scene from some Douglas Adams-style book where the dolphins explain what they’re really up to with those sponges, with some laughter about the weird mistaken ideas those humans have about what’s going on.)
Tool-using dolphins
