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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'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.
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?
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.
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.
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...
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.
While elephants are also reputed to have extremely long memories of up to 20 years
"Reputed" implies that there's not much scientific evidence of this at all, with regard to either family or strangers.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.