20 thoughts on “Dolphin Seeks Help From Diver”

  4. I believe most people greatly underestimate the thinking power of animals. One way I postulate this is that as a result of how we measure intelligence we overlook the thinking power of animals. Here is an example.

    First, for the purpose of this discussion I refer to “thinking” as the ability to form thoughts, have an inner dialoge, form emotions, and view the concept of “me”.

    It is well recognized that most animals are very limited in the ability to speak, perform numerical functions, and make tools or operate them. I believe this limited ability does not fully mean that animals are not capable of “thinking” to the order we are.

    I suspect that the need in animals to develope linguistic regions of their brains was not for many reasons as important from an evolutionary standpoint as it was for humans. The necessity for tool creation is not important to a Bison because it does not have the hands and there was no reason or impetus to form that region of the brian.

    Lacking these language or tool creation part of the brains does not necessarily mean that emotion or thinking levels of the brain are not developed. Maybe MikeS or Otteray Scribe can correct me if I am wrong but it is my understanding these levels are more basic and core to the brain than the higher levels such as language or complex numerical functions.

    I believe what really could be revealing to humanity is if somehow we could use some form of genetic engineering to generate a fully capable language and vocal response in an animal such as a dolphin or dog but leaving the remaining part of the animal’s brain in its original format. Once the animal was socialized with other animals such as itself and then brought into the human world to communicate I believe it would foster an entirely new perspective and likely would break some historicly held beliefs people have of animals. I would speculate it would reveal animals are more like us than most people realize at a basic level at least.

  5. As soon as profit is in the mix you get “on” instead of “with.”

    Swimming with dolphins presumes that humans are free to swim and dolphins are free to swim with them. Humans being “given” dolphins to “swim with” is not the same thing at all. Try running with horses.

  7. Thanks, Nal. That was a very moving film. I have encountered dolphin pods many times over the years on dive trips in the Bahamas. They will frequently hang around divers, sometimes coming very close, but always staying out of arm’s length. This particular dolphin clearly sensed that the diver was not a threat and sensed as well that the diver’s efforts were helping. I have never seen anything like this in the wild. Such beautiful, graceful creatures they are.

  13. Very moving.

    To think that we think that we are the only intelligents animals on this planet. (Don’t forget whales)

    And that there are religions, beliefs, money to be made and the earth destroyed fot that—-because God or our hubris says to do so.

    The Amerindians were aware of that foolish view. Is that why we tried to kill them all?

    Hyperbole? Perhaps. We have as yet no solutions offered which are sustainable for the whole Earth?

    On the lighter side, whales ignore us. They discuss philosophy too deep for us to understand. Who knows.

  16. Dolphins are probably the closest thing on Earth we have to a advanced non-terrestrial intelligence. We’ll probably never figure out how to communicate with an alien species (should we meet them) until we figure out how to communicate with dolphins.

  18. I thought that was way cool too, and posted it too.

    This exemplifies a type of communication.

    The dolphin first sized up the scene to see if fear was warranted, then decided the divers were approachable without danger.

    Those good divers understood the body language and proved the dolphin to have been right.

  19. Great clip, Nal. I’m almost to San Diego on my annual trek to our winter destination. Surfer dudes have a great relationship w/ dolphins. The dolphins often want to play but when they do synchronized surfing alongside the dudes it is a blow to every surfers self esteem. The younger more playful dolphins will do flips while surfing..stuff surfers only dream about.

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