Human-Dolphin Partnership Reserve

ahbe writes that the Myanmar government recently established a protected reserve for partnering between fisherman and wild dolphins. From the article: "The fascinating partnership involves fishermen summoning the dolphins to voluntarily herd schools of fish toward the boats and awaiting nets. With the aid of the river-dwelling dolphins, the fishermen can increase the size of their catches by threefold, and the dolphins appear to benefit by more easily preying on the cornered fish in both nets and on the muddy banks of the river."

Comments

Changing views on dolphin sentience?

[CRCulver]

Just forty years ago Larry Niven, in his first book of Known Space, World of Ptaavs (now collected in the Three Books of Known Space omnibus) had dolphins talking with humans and handling tools by means of various technological implants linked to the nervous system. It seemed to be taken for granted that dolphins were self-aware and just as intelligent as human beings, they just couldn't tell us so.

Now, however, that idea is totally gone from speculative fiction. What research has been done in the last few decades that has removed hope that dolphins are really as smart as we once thought?

Re:Changing views on dolphin sentience?

[QuantumG]

Maybe it's the fact that chimps can do all that and more. It's just not all that exciting to have another sentient species to hang around with. Consider that although both chimps and dolphins are sentient, they're not necessarily interested in the same kind of things as humans are. Compare that to just about any "alien intelligence" that has appeared on Star Trek.

Re:Changing views on dolphin sentience?

[Inverted Intellect]

Dolphins are pretty smart, all right. They have excellent social intelligence, even to the point of being able to communicate somewhat effectively with other species, most notably us humans.

I've always found it relatively obvious why dolphins wouldn't develop very high intelligence as corresponds to that measured by IQ, which is generally called g. We humans evolved heightened intelligence because that's what we needed to be able to adapt to rapidly changing conditions and to exploit multiple sources of food. But why would dolphins really develop both the sort of intelligence, and the limbs, needed to make and handle tools (which I think is an important part of developing the g type of intelligence as that which is seen in humans)? Their only natural predators are sharks and orcas, and they've got those pretty well covered due to their excellent teamwork skills. Those lucky bastards are practically living in paradise!

But then again, maybe we'd find that dolphins have the neccessary intelligence for toolmaking, if we just gave them some manipulators. That is to say hands.

Re:Changing views on dolphin sentience?

[Anonymous Coward]

But then again, maybe we'd find that dolphins have the neccessary intelligence for toolmaking, if we just gave them some manipulators. That is to say hands.

I would add: If we gave them hands, and turned them into animals completely inept at handling their natural environment.

Fortunately, dolphins are like fish in water (pardon the pun) and I really don't think they'd need to create tools since they already pretty much master their environment.

Re:Changing views on dolphin sentience?

[MindStalker]

But then again, maybe we'd find that dolphins have the neccessary intelligence for toolmaking, if we just gave them some manipulators. That is to say hands. Many animals have the intelligence for making and using simple tools like sticks. The problem comes in the ability to use imagination. I've seen examples of simple puzzles that dolphins can't figure out and complex puzzles that they can.
Case in point, you train a dolphin that they have to put two balls into a hole within 30 seconds of eachother in order to get a treat. They can do this fine as long as the balls are close enough, but put the second ball too far away and they will never solve the problem (obvious answer is to move the balls closer before you put the first one in). But given multiple switches and levers each of which have obvious logical visible outcomes they can figure out which order to apply the levers to get inside and receive their treat. Its the ability to think logically vs creativly.

Re:Changing views on dolphin sentience?

[mdfst13]

"The idea was picked up again by the Uplift trilogies by David Brin"

Actually, Brin had a different idea. He acknowledged that dolphins (and chimpanzees) were less intelligent than humans. However, he suggested that if we (humans) wanted, we could deliberately push the dolphins and chimpanzees to evolve. The net result, tool wielding dolphins, was the same, but the path was different.

Re:Changing views on dolphin sentience?

[Memnos]

Excuse me? Chimps can do all that and more? Perhaps you only know the difference between other primates and humans at a superficial level:

- Chimpanzees are far stronger than humans (or for that matter, mountain lions), but there is no other animal that can throw a 95 mph fastball. That is not a random skill, it was a huge evolutionary advantage for us when hunting with tools such as spears and rocks. It requires demonstrably superior skills in preconscious coordination of shoulder and arm muscles. Watch ANY other animal attempt to throw. Such skill requires a lot of computational ability, cortical wetware in our case. Nothing in history matches it.

- Can Chimpanzees eat almost anything? They come close but h. sapiens comes a lot closer. Indeed, our spread throughout the world was dependent upon it, our current biology shows our ability to tolerate foodstuffs of a far greater variety than most animals. Unless of course you dispute the fact that we spread throughout the world. Countless species that dominated their time and niche did not do so well when they had to switch diets.

- On to delphinidae, they have evolutionary advantages that we lack, and are missing many of ours. I would say that the latter is foremost, because I did not discuss opposable thumbs or toolmaking in the above paragraphs.

- I also did not discuss the visual cortex of humans, which comprised a large part of our bio-computational ability prior to the neo-cortex. But then, what about the abilities of tursiops truncatis to "see" in a 3-D world and discriminate a baseball from a tennis ball at 30 meters, or sense a pregnant female at 100 meters? This requires what is called a high "cephalization index", as well as specialized wetware. Dolphins have it, and they have more abilities besides. Do not discount their intelligence.

- As importantly, do not overestimate the intelligence of a Bonobo because it shares a very high percentage of genes with us. If only .01 precent of those genes are in the homeobox system and favor higher brain development for us, as they do, it can make all the difference in the world.

Dolphins

[Bloke down the pub]

I forget the exact wording, but it goes something like: "Humans invented war, the M25 and Windows while the dolphins were just playing in the water and eating fish. On the other hand, the dolphins considered themselves more intelligent - for precisely the same reasons".

And I for one welcome our new cetacean overlords.

Re:No surprise

[zbyte64]

Reminds me of the Futurama episode where they all gathered to eat a dophin and one objected saying that the dolphin was intelligent - but then someone said the dolphin wasted his money on lottery tickets.

Joking aside...

There was this documentary about how these doplhins would use a similiar tactic just instead of a net they would use the bank of the shore line and the dolphins would temporarly bank themselves to catch fish. Scientists were baffled by how this was started. Now its obvios, doplhins are just plain smart!

Tempting to call bullshit?

[jeremymiles]

TFA is extremely short on details.

• How does one summon dolphins? How do the dolphins know that they are to 'herd' the fish into the nets?
• How do the dolphins not get caught in the same nets?
• If herding the fish means the dolphins get more to eat, why do they need to do this into the nets? Why not use a small bay to do this? If the dolphins didn't come across this in a couple of million years of evolution, well, they really are dim
• How come more respectable news sources haven't picked up on this E.g. the http://news.bbc.co.uk/ or http://www.newscientist.com/. They've both shown themselves to take a pretty relaxed line on checking the credibility of stories ( toothing or Nanniebot anyone?. Even Google News gives us only one hit.

  Nice idea though, and it would be cool if it were true.

A return to ancient ways?

[The Wicked Priest]

I've read speculation that the unusual friendliness of dolphins towards humans stems from our being fishing partners long ago. (Also, speculation that human hairlessness and "blubber" is the result of our ancestors spending a great deal of time in the water.)