These amazing, intelligent creatures need formal protection from fisheries and the likes of entertainment companies. But then again, all animals deserve dignity and care.

An amazing story! As a diver, I've heard many incredible stories, but have yet to frolic with them myself. A long-held dream; might just get lucky!

I have long believed that it serves as sort of a video card, to process all the echolocation data. This may well hold the key to dolphin language; I suspect that the clicks and squeaks we hear are not syllables, but sort of like the sound a fax or dial-up modem makes when connecting, that is, the data is encoded in the click-squeak stream.

The way we measure intelligence shows our own biases and frankly, stupidity. I've heard some argue that because animals don't have the technological achievements we do, they are "dumb". It's been proven they have language, all the hallmarks of societal relationships, emotions and yes, understanding and self-realization. As we see the result of all our wonderful achievements end in the ruination of our environment, one has to wonder who's the stupid one? I believe animals experience the world wholly differently and have a much closer relationship to Nature which we have completely lost since we rejected the wisdom of countless generations and went on the path of cancerous greed. And now we have poisoned their world as well. Who is the smart one?

Regardless, I also believe that we have every responsibility to cease harming creatures. This is not veganism, as the human organism has evolved to eat animal products. But there is nothing that says that this must create untold suffering and the decimation of species. I honestly wish that humans could figure that out.

I share your beliefs.

Pet people are wonderful people.

She's my baby!!!!!!

Prairie dogs have a well developed language to identify potential predators beyond just telling the rest of the town to take cover. Chimpanzees are better at basic arithmetic.

We've shared the planet with these creatures since we came down out of the trees but we're only now learning their languages.

This is something we need to do if we're ever to leave this planet. If we can't communicate with creatures we share a planetary point of reference with, how the hell could we communicate with intelligent creatures we share nothing with?

I do know our bias that we are somehow superior has put off communication for far too long. We're still debating whether animals can think or feel pain with some stalwarts. Science is trying to interpret their behavior into something we can understand, but that surely doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

I often wonder at how little we know about the ocean on our own planet. Don't get me wrong, I think our exploration of space is probably humanity's greatest achievement. But you are correct, any intelligent life should see us as a hostile species because we destroy our own home.

I read it again and still thought you meant we need to communicate with other beings on our planet before we hope to communicate with others.

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.


This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”


Albert Einstein

It hurts my heart to know what humans do to other beings all the time.

Greater surface area=more area for firing nerves to send messages to the dolphin brain

Is that the proper explanation?

This is an amazing story. The dolphins knew to swim 3 miles (!) to rescue the weakened, helpless girl. I am gobsmacked.

I would love to find out how they knew. They must have the same ability as sharks to sense electrical disturbances in the water. Or how a polar bear can smell carrion nearly 50 miles away. But one would think that with everything going on in the ocean, it would be so hard to pick something out. Absolutely incredible!

This whole thread with all the interesting info and stories wins DU for the day.

corporate persons?

I do believe the ruling made it illegal to keep them in shows for that very reason. It was seemed to be a return to the ways of compassion for living beings that is part of India's history. Unfortunately, fundagelicals have spread this insane idea that we can do whatever we want to the planet and it's animals because we have some special place in heaven. I'm sure they'll have no problem waiting in line behind Georgia Pacific, Goldman Sachs, and Walmart.

dolphins and whales get more protection in India than do the women.

I'm certainly not defending India in the slightest. I have visited more than a few times, and there are two things to note: a) it is a HUGE country and b) their backward cultural traditions have not died out even in the most modernized areas. There is still so much poverty and lack of communications, that you can have a modernizing city like Mumbai or Delhi, and then the most primitive culture out in the countryside. The caste system was supposed to be abolished ages ago, but it is alive and well to this day. There are mob murders in the countryside for any number of incidents. It is a rather lawless, strange place.

The treatment of women varies greatly by class. On the one hand, my 4 upper class aunts were all highly educated with three holding PhDs and one a world-renowned expert in her field. Then you can have a woman on the other spectrum, the Untouchable, who is only allowed to enter a house by a special door in order to clean the toilet and can not enter any other part of the house. As a girl, I created quite a lot of havoc by walking through that door.

For an American, it was very difficult to understand the culture at all. Servants were boys sometimes younger than I. Neither my sister, mother nor I would allow him to wait on us and created more havoc by buying him shoes and toys. The head servant literally cut the soles out of the shoes without prompting because he said that servants should learn to never expect new things. It made us all cry, and it cemented that somehow I would never completely understand the way they viewed the world.

Purdah (separation of men and women) was still recognized by some of the beautiful upper class women that we visited. This was in the 80s. They were dressed very smartly in designer western clothes, but had a separate section of the house for the women. So the old ways were still followed. My widowed grandmother felt openly guilty for not becoming a suttee, or throwing herself on her husband's funeral pyre. There is a very long and sad history of the subjugation of women in India. I do see positive changes though, with more and more women getting educations and autonomy. I only hope that these changes speed up as they seep out into the countryside so those horrible crimes can be stopped.

Indian Official Says Rape Is ‘Sometimes’ Right

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014819765

Words of wisdom.

because if the woman is really unwilling then her body has ways of shutting it down. Wait that was the U.S.

with the point that Jenoch was making about women in not being as protected as dolphins. I was intending my link to drive the point home.
But you're right. Indian officials don't have a monopoly on stupid comments regarding rape.

You fish with live sardines off this pier. The dolphins will grab the sardine and take off straight out from the pier peeling line off your reel.

They never get hooked.

i occasionally get to what dolphins feeding of the coast of LI when out for stripers...

don't get to close...

eom

For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”


Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

I was looking for this. If I didn't find it, I was going to post it here.

Thanks for the thread Ichingcarpenter! I'm off to read more about dolphins!

Beautiful quote!

These animals should be released tomorrow.

Dolphins in Brazil help fishermen, they nod their heads when the fishermen should cast their nets.

He was on a swing over the side of a big navy ship painting the side. When he went to grab another area, it was wet as it had been painted by his buddy.
Off he fell. All the way down!!! And he said it was a LONG way down.
It took quite a while for the ship to turn around. As he was in the water he noticed the dolphins that showed up.
They occasionally would bump him from underneath and stayed with him until the little boat from the ship came to get him.

And they mean it.

If you ever saw the Navy "pens" in San Diego, there is no way to keep the dolphins in those pens if they don't want to be there (unlike Sea-World's pens), and the Navy doesn't capture dolphins to train and work with; they'll get dolphins that have been rescued or found injured and try to establish an bond with them during the rehabilitation process. If the bond takes, they start training the dolphins using play. If not, the dolphin leaves as soon as it's able. There's no fencing above water, just a 4ftw x 1.5 fth catwalk/berm. I've been told that approximately 75% that the Navy gets sent to them will hang around for a while, even though only 20% of the dolphins decide to stay for the training, free food, and health care. Pretty much all the dolphins in the area know they will be able to get help if they get injured, as the trainer I know talks about injured dolphins being lead to the Marine Mammal facility by dolphins that are currently playing with the Navy. There's always a couple dozen dolphins that voluntarily "work" with the Navy at any one time.

Navy Dolphins have agreed to the concept that when they're wearing equipment, they're working with divers or handlers; other than that, they're free to come and go as they please. There's no tethering to keep them from leaving, and it's been recorded that only a handful of dolphins have taken off during training and exercises over the 20+ years the system has been in place. If a dolphin decides it doesn't want to go out on a mission, it will just disappear from the site for a while (if it were a human, it would go AWOL), then come back when it feels like it.
Occasionally, a older dolphin has disappeared for a day or so, then come back with another young or injured dolphin - apparently to take it's place, because it will just not come back as soon as the other dolphin begins to train.

Most of the Navy marine mammal trainers understand that to the dolphin, it's a game, and that they want to make the game interesting and attractive to the animal. No one wants to deal with a 500+lb marine mammal that can easily break bones and drown you should it get pissed because you want it to do something it doesn't want to do, and no sailor wants to work with a psycho shipmate.

Haele

That is just amazing. Thank you for sharing that. I never knew the dolphins were actually volunteers.

This was in the 70's. We took one of the sailing trips out into Honolulu Bay. We were a couple of kilometers out into the bay when a bad wind came up, the lines on the sails got tangled and the boat started taking on water. It was a small boat and we were definitely getting very wet. I was panicked. There was no way I could swim all the way to shore and there weren't many people around because the weather had turned quite nasty. All of a sudden, our boat was surrounded by 6-8 dolphins. They came right up to the boat and brushed against it. Of course what I first saw was just fins so I was more panicked but then they poked their heads up and I realized what they were.

We drifted in the bay for about an hour, the boat getting lower in the water all the time and the dolphins never left my side. They circled the boat and would swim right up to me. Finally a tour boat realized we were in trouble and came and threw us a line to tow us in. As soon as we got the line and started heading in the dolphins just took off. I quietly sent out "thank you my dear wondrous creatures" to them as they swam away. LOL, they didn't swim back and say you're welcome or anything. I will never forget it. I know if was my intense fear of not being able to swim that far when I was that pregnant that brought them to my rescue. Of course I kept thinking, thank God, as long as there are dolphins there won't be any sharks and I just knew they were not going to let me drown.

They do read minds!!!

There's plenty of speculation and some evidence that their language is abstracted from sonar imagery, rather like hieroglyphic writing is abstracted from drawings, or some human words are imitative of actual sounds.

Humans don't naturally "see" with sonar so it's a difficult for us to grasp what these cetaceans are saying.

Do humans intuitively comprehend what a salmon, for example, "looks" like in sonar? Or if the current dolphin word for salmon would sound to us anything like the ancient, original dolphin word for salmon? Or even if it's possible to divide cetacean language into such things as words?

More generally, it really bothers me when people deny that animals have intelligence and emotional states very similar to our own, especially animals like cetaceans, our ape relatives, elephants, the brighter birds, and so on, extending in a continuum all the way out to animals that are not especially bright.

And I can also say that even toads and ladybugs have personality. Cuz I've had pets.

Simple species like ladybugs may have some sort of "collective" personality with maybe just a few individual quirks, and some like ants or bees might belong to a collective hive mind, but once you get to cat, dog, or even rat levels of intelligence then the individual personalities always shine brightly through.

Most of my own "alien intelligence" experiences are with dogs and birds. Like humans, they are all unique spirits or souls if you wish to express it that way.

And then, some people can't even appreciate Or feel compassion towards other people.

I just love all the critters, what can I say?

and show that they understand those words, yet, we cannot manage to understand their words and communicate with them any better than we do. Are we really more intelligent? I just cannot get over how animals can understand us so easily but we don't really understand them as easily. Humans seem to have it in our minds that we are so much more intelligent and we don't bother to learn as much as we could, but animals are learning and they continue to learn. In a way, they really are the smart ones.

I once watched them encircle a school of mullet and take turns going in to feeding. The water inside the dolphin circle was boiling with jumping fish and an occasional leaping dolphin.

Camping on an island in the Everglades and waking at night to the "Huff" of Dolphins breathing right by beach where your tent was pitched. Several nights on New Turkey Key in the Western everglades they came up in very shallow water by our camp and would throw themselves almost on to the beach with a crash and splash. I guess it was a fishing technique as they did it all three nights we were there.

Paddling my Kayak on the Gulf coast and being surrounded by a large group of 20 or more swimming all around me within arms reach towards the harbor and into the sunset. And just this winter I visited the West Coast and went whale watching out of Mossy Bluff California and watched Humpback whales, two species of dolphins and sea lions and birds all feeding on the anchovies in the Monterey Canyon. Definitely a high point of my Winter travels.

Who needs to visit another planet when we have the ocean around us? Its depths are more dangerous than outer space and its inhabitants are as mysterious and wonderful as any alien species could ever be.

It's a very fun thing to see, even though they are not playing.

The key we camp on is tiny and there is not much room to pitch a tent. Its about a 20 plus mile paddle out of Chocoloskee on the western edge of the glades so we usually go to another key for a few days and then there. There is a deep channel that goes right by the island and sandy beaches on two sides, a shell mound on the ocean side and mangroves on the West. Very beautiful! Tents are pitched right on the beach above the tide line so the waters edge is just 10 feet or less away. Great fishing for humans and dolphins.

And there is a herd of manatee that live in that area as well. One surfaced under a friends canoe and lifted it right out of the water. (I think the manatee was sleeping and just came up to breath in his sleep) - but of course he was much bigger than the canoe and it was loaded with all their camping gear so they were very lucky not to capsize.

Free the Atlanta 11!



Seriously, the Georgian Aquarium is just a gross ... nicer decor.

Trav

to somehow fit.

It's certainly possible they actively seek to aid humans for some reason, but still unproven. They may actually only be intensely curious.

Which of course, speaks to their intelligence as well, and double-fuck SeaWorld for what they are doing to all of these creatures, not just Dolphins.

old metal shrapnel in humans and call out other dolphins to check out the human..... plus if you ever get the chance to swim with dolphins they will particularly chose the handicapped child for play and attention.

Pretty good show with examples and comments from scientists. Old but still interesting.

Thanks for the thread, Ichingcarpenter.

don't save humans is ignoring evidence. I've heard story after story my whole life that proves they do. And we really do know more about the surface of the moon than our own oceans.

And I never tried to work FUCK SEA WORLD into a conversation, or thread, but GREAT IDEA.

the petition included my wife's and my names and address (sorry for the wording there).
A week or so later, we got a piece of mail from Sea World: it was a letter from the CEO, and 2 entrance tickets to Sea World.
It pretty much said, "fuck off" with a snicker.

I wish I would have kept things like that. I will from now on.

And I agree, fuck Sea World.

and don't understand about all energy, spiritual or otherwise that permeates this world. We are NOT as smart as we would like to think we are. No coincidence. Period.

All the videos & comments are right on. Thank you.

And if I knew how to do it on my phone, I'd paste a link to my favorite onion article ever, titled "Dolphins develop opposable thumbs"

Just a taste of the article.



"They really seem to be making up for lost time with this thumb thing," said Dr. Jim Kuczaj, a University of California–San Diego biologist who has studied the seasonal behavior of dolphins for more than 30 years. "Last Friday, a crude seaweed-and-shell abacus washed up on the beach near Hilo, Hawaii. The next day, a far more sophisticated abacus, fashioned from some unknown material and capable of calculating equations involving numbers of up to 16 digits, washed up on the same beach. The day after that, the beach was littered with thousands of what turned out to be coral-silicate and kelp-based biomicrocircuitry."

"My God," Kuczaj added. "What are they doing down there?"

It is unknown what precipitated the dolphins' sudden development of opposable thumbs. Some dolphin behaviorists believe that the gentle marine mammal, pushed to the brink by humanity's reckless pollution and exploitation of the sea, tapped into some previously unmined mental powers to spontaneously generate a thumb-like appendage. However, given that 95 percent of the world's dolphin experts have committed suicide since learning of the development, the full story may never be known.

"You must believe, sleek ocean masters, that many of us homo sapiens weep with shame and disgust over the degradation to which our species has subjected our All-Mother, the Great World-Sea," read the suicide note of Dr. Richard Morse, a Brisbane, Australia, delphinologist and regular contributor to Marine Mammal Science. "If you are reading this, I estimate that it is the day we know as August 31, 2000. Please be decent and kind masters to our poor ape-race. Oh, God, I'm so sorry about the tracking collars."





http://www.theonion.com/articles/dolphins-evolve-opposable-thumbs,284/

I love that piece (and the onion) and I always enjoy sharing it with fellow lovers of dolphins and satire!

was truly something amazing.

And not only FUCK SEA WORLD, but also FUCK ANYONE WHO GOES TO SEA WORLD AND SUPPORTS THEM, selfish fucks*.



*Forgiveness for those that don't know better.

humans haven't figured out how to identify and analyze yet.