Dolphins teach their children to uses sponges

[struggle4progress]

22:00 06 June 2005
NewScientist.com news service
Rowan Hooper

Dolphins in Australia have been observed using tools, and they seem to pass on their specialist knowledge to others. This is the first time cultural transmission has been confirmed in a marine mammal.

Lacking hands, dolphins are limited in what they can do with a tool, but some bottlenose dolphins in Shark Bay, Western Australia, have devised a way to break marine sponges off the seafloor and wear them over their snouts when foraging.

“We believe that they use sponges as a kind of glove to protect their sensitive rostrums when they probe for prey in the substrate,” says Michael Krützen, formerly of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and now at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.

Most sponges are flat, but tool-using dolphins select conical ones that will not fall off their snouts. The majority of dolphin “spongers” are females. <snip>

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7475

[MisterP]

1. well, then we'd better kill the last of them and carve them up for our

bottomless appetites!
hurry!
On a lighter note, they're apparently spongeworthy!

[rzemanfl]

2. Dolphins are smart animals, just last week one swam up to me

while I was landing a fish (I was standing in about three feet of water) and waited patiently for me to unhook it and feed it to him/her. This is the third time this has happened to me in the past few years. I have never felt the slightest bit threatened by them, but know that the fish should be tossed, not dangled, to avoid being accidentally hurt.

[bobbieinok]

3. how cool

[jedr]

4. will they do windows?

[prole_for_peace]

5. "so long and thanks for all the fish"

i think that dolphins are the most advanced of all the mammals on the planet. humans included

[democrat in Tallahassee]

6. no, mice are

[jedr]

7. Plus mice are receiving the benefits of stem-cell research;

That's more than the rest of we mammals are receiving!