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Dolphin Memories Span At Least 20 Years
sciencehabit writes "A new study reveals that bottlenose dolphins can remember each other's signature contact whistles — calls that function as names — for more than 20 years, the longest social memory ever recorded for a nonhuman animal. 'The ability to remember individuals is thought to be extremely important to the "social brain,"' says Janet Mann, a marine mammal biologist at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., who was not involved in the research. Yet, she notes, no one has succeeded in designing a test for this talent in the great apes — our closest kin — let alone in dolphins."
we can always check the oldest entry in his journal
...we'd be in so much trouble. It seems like there's a never ending list of surprises from these creatures.
If computers were people, I'd be a misanthrope.
How is this surprising?
If my cat can remember the sound of my car I would hope a dolphin could do this.
1. Don't eat dolphin
2. Don't eat pigs
(...2500 years of science passes in which the level of consciousness of various animals is "discovered", leading to the ethical stipulations...)
1. Don't eat dolphin
2. Don't eat pigs
We could have saved a lot of time here. Just sayin'.
can they remember where they left their keys?
I should probably apologize for a few things, then.
Dolphins don't use personal names.
See "Dolphin naming?" by Mark Liberman
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003127.html
And "Dolphins using personal names, again" by Geoffrey K. Pullum
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=5453
A choice quote:
Why can't dolphins do intelligent and interesting things without people applying unfounded anthropomorphic qualities to their behavior?
What the fuck?
Has the study revealed it, or hasn't it? If the study has revealed it, how did it do so without testing it?
Don't borrow money from dolphins. They will never let you forget it.
Don't ask bed bugs to help you move. They end up crashing at your place.
Don't hold hands with the armadillo. He's got leprosy.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Social memory lasts at least five years in gorillas.
Damian Aspinall's reunion with wild gorilla, Kwibi
They hate us.
With the conservative life span of current magnetic media at between 10-20 years, and (average) optical CD/ DVDs considerably less, the NSA has begun a pilot program code named "Faa love Pa" While the acronym is not clear, the Senate Intel Cmte. lauded this as a "green" initiative, and is encouraging tuna fisheries to collect living dolphins for use in the project. Dolphin memory lasts 20 years or more, reducing the need for additional rare-earth metals and greatly reduced electricity consumption. Dolphin memory is self-replicating, tolerant to mild EMF and power fluctuations, and primarily only requires renewable resources such as salt water and baitfish. The only technical hurdles researchers see are effectively encoding/decoding the massive amounts of illegally gathered data into dolphin-discrete packages, and the bandwidth needed to read/write operations. Researchers have not yet determined the optimal facility size, nor how the pods will best perform in cohesive groups. Dolphins are also ill-suited for complex elliptic-curve cryptography, opting instead for elliptic-curve swimming. Dolphin computing is not new. Natural behaviors include computing standards like PUSH and JUMP, and many have been trained to perform parallel operations. Those animals sourced from Chinese waters will be culled from the "pool" for security reasons. Another feature is the reduced disposal requirements. When the new dolphin media is replaced, old media is effectively rendered useless to forensic recovery techniques, and can be disposed of to feed other animals or in simple 'compost' rather than more costly recycling efforts.
... and thanks for the fish.
Link is to random bullshit.
Does having an ARP Cache mean that my switch is a highly sophisticated social animal?
Timmy! Timmy, Timmy!
I could be wrong about this, but if I remember correctly, elephants can remember other elephants and humans for longer than 20 years. So I don't think this is "the longest recorded..." anything.
That means, that I'll have to return those herrings after all.
In my experience, parrots never forget people they associate with (that's easiest to show when they have a certain call they make for a given person; I've known parrots to make such calls after years of separation).
Alex the parrot lived 31 years. I bet he never forgot a grad student, and that data showing that are buried in Pepperberg's work.
I think it's been demonstrated that elephants have long memories. I recall a story about two elephants greeting each other like old friends when they hadn't seen each other for over 20 years.
I remember Flipper, and that was on in the 60s!
When a wee pup in yon '70s of yore, my family would sometimes go down to Key West where we would stay at a hotel with a mini golf course and an enclosed lagoon with a trained dolphin.
As a whelp, (yes, that's the correct spelling) I would do nothing else but stand by the dolphin pool watching, or play mini golf.
After I had become a regular by the edge of the pool, every so often Sugar the dolphin would come up to me and click and wave a little and bob her head back, as if she was saying, "come on in!" I was simply entranced to be there and that a dolphin was paying attention to me.
The next year after we showed up and I took my place on the edge of the lagoon, it only took 1/2 an hour before Sugar stopped, turned around in the water, swam over to me and greeted me as if she actually remembered me from the year before. Honestly, I'd expected her to have remembered "me" sooner, but I was happy none the less that a dolphin seemed to know and remember me.
Sadly, we weren't able to go back the next summer, but the year after that we did. Eager to see if my friend Sugar remembered me, I stood by the pool for about an hour or two, knowing that she would come over when she realized it was me.
No dice.
No reaction at all.
I was a sad panda. An ignored sad panda.
This totally was a downer for me, and I realized that I might be wrong, that dolphins don't remember and aren't able to make out specific people. This was still on my mind the next morning when my parents and I walked off to breakfast and neared Sugar's lagoon.
Before I could even get close to the pool, I could see Sugar turn towards me, zip over to the side of the pool near me clicking and bobbing her head, making quite a fuss, telling me "I can't believe that was you yesterday and I didn't even remember you! Welcome back! It's great to see you again little monster! Come on in!"
One hell of a great creature she was.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
I clearly recall seeing a documentary about an elephant taken to the Tennessee Elephant Sanctuary. She instantly recognized another elephant that she had not seen in over twenty years. The keepers had planned to keep her in an isolation cage for a few days, but they had to let her out early because she was damaging the cage in an effort to be reunited. She did not have the same reaction to elephants that she had never previously contacted. I wish I could find a link. Hold on, here it is.
What a great life - get grants to hang out in Bermuda every year. Soak up some sun, play with dolphins. Publish a scientific paper every now and then.
That's loads better than my job. : (
Arctic bowhead whales live 150-200 years. One of the reason they're so shy around humans is that THEY REMEMBER BEING WHALED. Obviously these are the ones who got away, but over a century later these things are still swimming around.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
There was a documentary a couple years ago about the 1970s seminal work done with Nim when he was just chimpling. Nim was discarded when (1) he became an unruly adolescent and (2) the principal investigator decided chimps werent really using language (contaversial). After several intermediate owners they tracked down Nim, now a gray-haired middle age. And seemed to recognize his human friends from the 1970s.
Only smart people wage war
I'm guessing that doesn't wouldn't have much (if any) a sense of smell. Hearing somebody outside of water might be a bit harder too. Looks, especially when one is young, could change a lot.
Sounds like, given what she had to work with, this dolphin had a better memory than I do :-)
Is it not already inherent that ALL forms of life communicate and form memories? Seems that every year we get more "scientists/biologists" discover that animals can do this or that!
How is it that we come to self glorify ourselves while ignoring the obvious that animals can do everything socially that we can, yet with their own form of language?
DERP
How would they remember being killed?
They could remember being hunted.
Esli epei etot cumprenan, shris soa Sfaha.
They recognize themselves in mirrors, give themselves names, know each other's names... So they're fully self and other aware! That is so cool! We have another sentient race to hang out with!! Shit. Now we know that, I think that means they have rights. This will be a hassle. But cool!