Do dolphins have intelligence? Dolphins: the second intelligent creatures on earth! The smartest orangutans

Perhaps the first person to spark public interest in the “smarts of the sea,” as marine biologists like to call dolphins, was the American neurophysiologist John Cunningham Lilly. He made a name for himself in the science of cetaceans with a cascade of amazing discoveries. One of Lilly's books, Man and Dolphin, was translated into Russian.

The neurophysiologist’s predilection for dolphins was influenced by the size and weight of the brains of these animals: an adult aphalphin dolphin’s brain weighs 1700 grams, that is, 350 grams more than a human’s! On this basis, John Lilly suspected that dolphins were our brothers in mind and got the idea to test this crazy hypothesis.

Having launched a sophisticated program to study the mind and language of dolphins, the neurophysiologist soon began to get the results he wanted! According to him, once in his presence a dolphin clearly said: “Lilly!” However, the neurophysiologist was ahead of the psychologist Louis Herman from the University of Hawaii (USA), who taught young dolphins two artificial languages! One consisted of whistling sounds synthesized on a computer, and the other consisted of signs formed by gesturing with fingers and hands. Each language contained 35 words, combined according to the rules of grammar into more than a thousand phrases!

Dolphin civilization?

Lilly became increasingly convinced of the special position of dolphins in the animal world. Moreover, the scientist gradually came to believe in the existence of another civilization next to us! Over millions of years of underwater evolution, she comprehended the secrets of the ocean and the laws of the universe, created a culture and a unique science. This entire gigantic array of information is stored in the vast memory of “living computers” and is passed on from generation to generation - at first it was assumed that it was orally, and now, as it turned out, in written form!

Yes, apparently, our closest relatives - monkeys - are gradually moving away from us on the scale of intelligence. And indeed, according to the conviction of Professor A. Portman from the Zoological Institute in Basel (Switzerland), the dolphin should be placed in second place in terms of intellectual level after man, followed by the elephant, and only then the monkey. But there is an opinion that the dolphin is even superior to homo sapiens in some ways!

Universal echolocator

Doctor biological sciences Boris Fedorovich Sergeev in his book “Living Ocean Locators” reports on the incredible intensity of the dolphin’s brain during acoustic sounding of the surrounding space. The animal's sound emitters continuously generate 20-40 signals per second, and in special cases- about 500 impulses! Thus, the dolphin’s brain processes such an avalanche of various signals every second that even a modern computer could not cope with. Sending clicks, creaks, whistles and hoots in different directions, the dolphin catches their reflections from the obstacles it encounters and creates a kind of mosaic of echo signals in its brain. It can be assumed that this mosaic reproduces the surrounding space with all the objects located in it with such information richness that simply cannot be achieved by visual perception!

According to the statement of John Lilly mentioned above, he came close to establishing vocal contact with these animals. While studying tape recordings that recorded all conversations and sounds in the dolphinarium, the researcher noticed an explosive and pulsating series of signals. It was like laughing! Moreover, in the tape recordings made in the absence of people, some words that belonged to the operators and were spoken by them during the working day slipped in a very compressed form! However, the process of teaching dolphins human language did not go further. Thinking about the reasons for this, Lilly came up with a stunning guess: they were bored with people!

And yet, the next important step in this direction was taken by Moscow bioacoustics V.I. Markov and V.M. Ostrovskaya. Moreover, their results can be considered simply sensational! The fact is that human speech consists of three levels of complexity: sound, syllable and word. A combination of words can, in principle, express any thought. So here it is. In the dolphin language, six levels of difficulty have recently been counted! The main thing, according to experts, is that this highest degree the peculiar signaling system is reminiscent of the archaic languages ​​spoken by the Eskimos, Iroquois and some tribes living in North America! The fundamental basis of speech among these peoples is something like a linguistic hieroglyph, which combines nouns, adjectives, and verbs. In a word, the equivalent of a whole extended phrase! So it is with dolphins: the basic element is a long whistle, and in different groups signals it differs in beginnings and endings, just as in human speech there are prefixes, suffixes and endings with a constant root! And finally, the most amazing thing is that mathematical patterns characteristic of human written texts were discovered in the dolphin signal series! In other words, they show signs of a semantic hierarchy like “phrase - paragraph - paragraph - chapter”!

Last news

In the former USSR, almost all dolphin research was classified. The Moscow bioacoustician mentioned above, Doctor of Biological Sciences Vladimir Markov, also spoke about this. According to him, back in the 80s of the last century, he and his colleagues studied the writing of dolphins. Scientists have put tens of thousands of their signals on paper! And they realized that the dolphin’s signal is something greater in meaning and information content than our lexical unit - the word. And the vocabulary volume of these signals is huge - about 7 thousand! A person, by the way, manages with a vocabulary volume of only 800-1000 lexical units! "In my opinion. - said V.I. Markov, - dolphins - intelligent beings, capable of receiving, processing and using information, the volume of which goes beyond the limits of their biological needs..." It is a pity that John Lilly did not live to see this significant recognition!

American dolphin researchers Jack Kassewitz and his wife Donna are currently implementing the international project “Let's Talk to a Dolphin.” Enthusiasts hope to decipher the “hieroglyphs” seen in the cross-section of the sound rays with which the animals “feel” the surrounding space. According to project consultant Horace Dobbs, he has long suspected that the dolphin's brain processes auditory signals in the same way that the human brain processes visual information. Now this has been proven. Thus, the communication system of dolphins may be based on visual images that are transmitted by sound.

(Pub. In proceedings, THE 5TH WORLD MULTICONFERENCE ON SYSTEMICS, CYBERNETICS AND INFORMATICS SCI"2001,)
PERSPECTIVES OF INFORMATION
INTEGRATION OF HUMAN AND DOLPHIN INTELLIGENCES

A. G. Yushchenko

Email: [email protected]

Dolphin brain (drawing by L. Kruger and A. Bretnach) Human brain (drawing by R. Kopp)
/A.G. Tomilin, “Dolphins serve man,” M.: Nauka, 1969, 248 pp./

Introduction. Current state The global “human anthill” could be visually characterized by a picture depicting a builder who is erecting a grandiose structure, removing blocks from its foundation. Here we will not analyze the reasons for the emergence of the “dinosaur syndrome” in our anthropo-chauvinistic species, since this has been done by many researchers (our contribution to this movement is the work “Ethics of Living Matter as the Basis of Human Ethics”), but we will proceed from the fact that the thinking majority will be imbued with the spirit of the Vancouver Declaration, which declared on behalf of 24 leading experts in the world back in 1989 that “the preservation of life on Earth is one of the main tasks facing humanity.” In this study, we will try to determine, from a pantheistic position, the logic of spatio-temporal megasynthesis not only at the level of human individuals, but also at the level of the most cephalized forms of life, to which some species of dolphins must be included. The need for such interspecies cooperation is understood as a logical step in the integration of the superconsciousness of the noosphere.

1. Information and intelligence in the modern world

Our modern world, unlike previous historical eras, manages to change significantly during a single human life. The key role in transforming the world belongs to the so-called “information technologies”. Building a developed information society, in which a web of computer networks will entangle almost all spheres of human life, is a priority task of the EU. In the general case, information is a kind of microstructure connected according to a certain law with the corresponding macro-event. Information relieves us of the need for personal presence and observation of all events; Having the information, we have the opportunity to see them as many times as we want and at a convenient time in our imagination or on the computer screen. The Internet phenomenon is easiest for us to explain from an evolutionary-biological perspective. Modern views on information allow us to conclude that it is the basis of all known to us evolutionary processes on various levels structural organization: biological, mental, virtual. For the subject of our study, it will be important to consider the role of information exchange in social insects: ants, bees and termites, which established communication connections long before the appearance of humans. Comparing the role of the nervous system in multicellular organisms Based on the synchronization of the life cycles of individual organs and the language of social insects, we can conclude that they perform identical functions, and therefore consider the latter to be a kind of exotic form of a single organism, consisting of relatively separate moving parts. It is obvious: language and communication in other species, including humans, serve the same purpose at different levels of their association. Thus, the development of the Internet represents the formation of a “nervous system” in the global human anthill. Intellectual and cultural integration, due to the democratic nature of computer technology, is becoming available to an increasing number of people; the individual consciousnesses of the latter, together with increasingly complex artificial intelligence systems, tend to form a single biotechnological superconsciousness of the planet. Having understood the logic of the modern phase of megasynthesis, we must ask about the possibility of similar integration among other biological species. The tool for such consideration should be the results of an analysis of the evolutionary causes of the emergence and development of human intelligence.
It is important to note that the condition for the spiritual and moral integration of a person with other higher forms of life is his acceptance of the modern bioethical concept, set out, for example, in the work.

2. Tursiops Truncatus and Homo Sapiens

Over the past decades, no animal has attracted as much attention from scientists and the public as the dolphin. For a long time it was believed that Telemachus, the son of the legendary Odysseus, was the “first mortal” to befriend the dolphin who saved him. Relatively recently discovered in caves South Africa stylized drawings depicting a man swimming next to a dolphin turned out to be much older. It is interesting to compare these findings with the original and sufficiently reasoned hypothesis about the decisive importance of the “water phase” in the formation Homo sapiens on islands near Africa. Then it is quite possible to assume that the friendship of our ancestors with dolphins could last for thousands of years, and maybe even millions of years...
The dolphin family includes about 50 species, among them the bottlenose dolphin or bottlenose dolphin enjoys the greatest fame due to its intelligence, friendly, gentle disposition, and size that is not frightening to humans, unlike, for example, the seven-meter killer whale. Humans and dolphins turned out to have a lot in common: similar brain structures (see figure), unexpected appearance in the fossil record, love of games and imitative behavior, altruistic love for offspring, etc. Ancient Greek and Roman scientists described cases known to them of cooperative fishing by people and dolphins, the latter rescuing drowning people (among them was famous singer Arion), protection from sharks; recent history fully confirmed the accuracy of such information.
Recent decades have brought another surprise - the wonderful ability of dolphins to have a beneficial effect on the nervous system of people during joint swimming sessions was discovered. The nature of the unique healing effect has not yet been revealed, despite the many advanced models from biofield to biosonar (dolphin sonar frequency range from several Hertz to two hundred MHz with a power of up to 8 Watts/cm), which does not prevent its long-term use in various countries of the world: USA, Denmark, Cuba, Japan, etc. Ukraine is also one of the pioneers in this field thanks to the work carried out at the Research Center “State Oceanarium” of the Ministry of Defense and the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Sevastopol, created in 1966 on the instructions of the Commander-in-Chief of the USSR Navy, Admiral Gorshkov). Dolphins have been trained by instructors for several decades now. Navy USA search for sunken military installations, naval protection of bases, etc. Similar work was carried out in the former USSR. In general, it seems that the achievements in this interspecies cooperation are impressive, but what are their prospects in the light of those ideas that excited the world community at one time? Let us briefly look at the most striking of these ideas, which were expressed by the head of the department of “General Studies of the Cerebral Cortex” National Institute mental health (USA) by John Lilly and Igor Charkovsky. In the book “Man and the Dolphin” (1962), based on his own research and assessments of the level of structural development of the brain of higher mammals, Dr. Lilly predicted that “in the next 10 to 20 years, humanity will establish connections with representatives of other biological species.” He considered Afalina the most suitable partner for a number of reasons. Igor Charkovsky’s idea is purely bio-evolutionary: a technocratic civilization will inevitably lead to an environmental disaster on land, and people will be forced to flee to the ocean. Together with dolphins, they will create a new civilization, the end product of which will be a more advanced creature, "homo-delphinus". It is alleged that Charkovsky's followers know how to sleep on the water and find food in the sea; that they established special, apparently telepathic contacts with dolphins. At least in Charkovsky’s group there are children born safely in the water under the care of dolphins. Well, this is the development of events, with the uncontrolled overpopulation of our planet and ignoring environmental problems- quite possible. However, will the ocean then still be suitable for the survival of higher mammals? At the same time, no one has yet managed to establish verbal contact with a dolphin, which significantly increases the already huge number of skeptics of this exciting prospect. And yet there is reason to believe that Lilly’s bold predictions have partially come true within five years! This was demonstrated by the famous chimpanzee Washoe, when in 1967 she first asked for “something tasty” in the deaf-mute language of North America - “Amslen”, i.e. in human language. Note that subsequently an entire colony of chimpanzees was organized, using this language (up to a hundred words) both for intraspecific communication and for communication with humans. The chimpanzee brain is about three times smaller than the human brain and less structurally developed; The bottlenose dolphin's brain weighs more than a human's and is even structurally superior in some respects. So why are elementary intelligent contacts established with a chimpanzee, and not with a dolphin? Next we will try to answer this question.
Homo sapiens and higher species of dolphins, including Tursiops truncatus (Bottlenose Dolphin) are the most cephalized life forms in terrestrial and aquatic environments, respectively, which determines the fundamental feature of their interspecific position. A strictly scientific explanation of the reasons for the evolutionary necessity of superior dolphins There is still no such a complex and large brain, just as there is no clear evidence that they have highly developed speech and higher forms of rational activity. However, the common belief about what is outstanding development the brain of dolphins is caused mainly by its orientation-location abilities, is refuted by the fact that the bat “has an extremely weakly cephalized brain and in terms of differentiation of the temporal lobes it is in one of the last places among mammals,” despite its known echolocation abilities. It seems to us that the emergence of such a perfect brain in dolphins could be due to an information function aimed at socialization in their evolution. The presence of information exchange between dolphins is confirmed by the consistency of their actions, both during group hunting and in extreme situations, as well as experiments on the exchange of information (via an acoustic channel) between dolphins in isolated pools, conducted by scientists of the American and Soviet naval departments. However, a clear correlation between frequency-modulated signals and dolphin behavior has not yet been established. Scientists from the National Research Center “State Oceanarium” recently discovered the subtle harmonic composition of communication signals and substantiated the position on the informational significance of multiple higher harmonics, which had not been previously studied. The results of their work allow us to conclude that for communication in the near-surface non-stationary marine environment dolphins use test information signals. In this case, using the test signal, it becomes possible to determine the law of distortion of multiple harmonics in each specific traffic and, by applying an inverse transformation to the distorted information signal (which requires a highly developed brain), restore it quite completely. Note that the Research Center "GO" has also developed the design of a modernized transposing device that converts the harmonic spectrum of dolphin signals into the frequency range perceived by humans. Overall, it appears that modern telecommunications technologies make it possible to overcome technical problem significant differences between the natural communication systems of humans and dolphins. However, this is not the only problem. It is very important to understand that the formation of the intellect of a single human individual in a specific historical phase is organically connected with the corresponding level of culture, determined by the state of scientific and technological progress of all human community. To form the intellect of an individual in human society, the institution of the family is used and a multi-stage education system has been created, which actually plays the role of a replicator of the cultural mime fund. Particular attention should be paid to the fact that the ability to form a person’s intelligence radically depends on his age. The numerous cases known to us of long-term upbringing of children outside human society, for example, in a family of wolves, show that when they return back to people, they are practically not amenable to training. Apparently, the neurons in their brains lose the ability to establish additional connections. Fundamental experiments conducted by Mark Rosenzweig showed that “rats raised in “enriched” laboratory conditions (i.e., in large cages where they were housed with other rats and had a wide variety of objects to play with) had developed cortices. better than rats raised in empty, cramped cages. Increased social and physical experience leads to greater neural development, which makes rats faster and better at solving various problems, such as maze problems." In other words, the intelligence of highly organized animals depends to a large extent on education and training, i.e. from their information environment. It is obvious that the higher the biological organization of the brain, the greater the importance in its active formation by the environment. This means that human intelligence is replicated by a certain “social operator” thanks to the age-related plasticity of his brain, since “the human nervous system must develop under the conditions of human life in order to give rise to human consciousness.” The age-related plasticity of the mammalian brain is a fundamental fact, the significance of which seems to be even greater. not fully realized. Let's give this example: in a person who has “serious damage to the left side of the brain... the brain turns out to be plastic enough to transfer control of speech to the intact left hemisphere. In an adult, this plasticity is not preserved." (emphasis added). Essentially, our goal is to come to an understanding that in relation to the most cephalized species of dolphins, it is correct to pose the task not of assessing the level of their intelligence, as has been done so far, but about the search for methods of its active age formation, in a certain sense modeling the replication functions of social institutions of the human community!
The main expected results in the case of successful implementation of such a research project could be:
(1) confirmation of the fundamental possibility of intellectual development of higher species of dolphins, corresponding to the “outstanding size of the neocortex” of their highly differentiated brain to the information perception of the achievements of human culture and, based on it -
(2) new form interspecies cooperation in the practical and spiritual spheres, corresponding to the evolutionary trend of the formation of planetary superconsciousness.
Naturally, only further research can determine the true physiological capabilities of the dolphins’ brain and their readiness to perceive the achievements of human intelligence. Of course, a priori we cannot say anything about the dolphin’s thinking mechanism; even in humans, it is predominantly left-hemisphere (speech) or right-hemisphere (imaginative). In this regard, it would be appropriate to recall Norbert Wiener, who “noted that he happens to think both with words and without words” and Albert Einstein, who remarked on this matter the following: “Words, written or spoken, apparently do not play the slightest role in mechanism of my thinking. The mental elements of thinking are some, more or less clear, signs or images that can be reproduced and combined “at will.”

CONCLUSION

The moral basis of the study proposed here of the possibilities of assimilation by the intellect of the most cephalized species of dolphins of the historical achievements of human culture is man’s awareness of himself as a creation created by an evolutionary thought process and, therefore, the need for ethical compliance of his activities with the logic of general planetary development, from which it follows that scientific and technical , as well as the spiritual achievements of humanity belong to the general phenomenon of life on Earth. Let us note that the concept we have substantiated about the homology of the psychology of creativity between consciousness and nature allows us to interpret evolution as a reflective thought process. The scientific basis for the possibility of this form of intellectual cooperation is the fundamental property of the “plasticity” of the nervous tissue of mammals, which is the anatomical basis historical development human civilization, and the highly developed brain of the most cephalized species of dolphins. Technical support designing a communication channel for the practical implementation of the noted interspecies cooperation are the outstanding achievements of modern telecommunication technologies in the coding, transmission and processing of information signals, as well as in the recognition of complex images.
Unfortunately, the plasticity of human and dolphin nervous tissue can be used for inhumane purposes to ensure the selfish corporate interests of influential structures of the human community. Therefore, I would like to draw the attention of the democratic public to this problem, and in particular, of altruistic organizations in terms of monitoring compliance with both ethical standards in the field of education and mass communication, and bioethical - in the field of scientific research.
The obvious fact that human practical activity and the still remaining possibility of a nuclear disaster have created a real threat to the existence of life in its modern highly developed forms deprives man of the right to consider himself superior to other harmless living organisms. Most likely, the main reason for the genetically determined aggressiveness of man is that the main driving force in his creation was the Malthusian natural selection"due to overpopulation": numerous of a person's immediate relatives were killed, and in many cases even eaten. At the same time, the highest achievement of selection due to “increasing adaptation” to the environment are whales and dolphins. Anyone who has an elementary aesthetic sense of beauty cannot help but admire their perfection in relation to their environment; this latter makes up 2/3 of the surface of our planet, which therefore should be called the Ocean, where life originated. In fact, the exclusive morphological feature of cetaceans is the “general reduction of limbic structures,” which “perhaps determines the pronounced “gentle” character of dolphins.”
Whether an aggressive and self-righteous person is not a mistake in the evolutionary thought process, our coming generations will find out. Overall, it appears that the ethical rule of survival modern man is sensory integration with all forms of life through the adoption of the ethics of living matter and, probably, its logically complementary intellectual integration with the rest of the most cephalized creations of the earthly mind.

LITERATURE

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Ecology

Dolphins are cute and friendly Marine life, which are often confused with fish. However, dolphins are intelligent and inquisitive mammals, mental capacity which surprise scientists a lot.

Dolphins have developed complex abilities, living in the harsh conditions of oceans and seas. For example, did you know that dolphins can for a long time stay awake, have unique abilities to navigate in space, have a magnetic sense and can even control blood flow in the body?

Dolphin brain

Dolphins know how to stay awake

All animals on the planet need sleep, including humans. The world record for sleep deprivation belongs to Randy Gardner who hasn't slept for 11 days. However, already on the 4th day he began to hallucinate.

If a person does not sleep, he will eventually die. The same thing will happen to any creature with developed brain functions, except for dolphins who, as it turns out, have learned to deprive themselves of sleep and still feel great. For example, baby dolphins do not sleep the same way as their parents during the first month of their lives.

The thing is that these amazing creatures can turn off half your brain for some time. Scientists continuously tested the dolphins' reactions for 5 days, and, as it turned out, their reactions did not slow down. Blood tests for signs of stress or insomnia came back negative. Dolphins can use this ability endlessly.

Another study found that dolphins can use echolocation for 15 consecutive days with almost perfect accuracy. This makes sense because it allows animals to always be on alert and notice the approach of predators.

However, the most surprising thing is that part of the dolphin's brain still sleeps. At the same time, visual information begins to be processed by another, active part of the brain. In other words, if a dolphin turns off part of its brain, its second part can take on all the functions of the first. It's like having two brains instead of one.

Dolphin vision

Amazing Dolphin Vision

It is known that dolphins use echolocation in order to navigate the world in which they live. Since in sea ​​depths visibility leaves much to be desired; it is easier for animals to use sounds to “see” objects. You might think that they have no need for vision at all, but this is not so.

Dolphin vision much better than it might seem. Firstly, their eyes are located on both sides of their heads, which allows them to cover a huge area at 300 degrees. They can see what's behind them. Second, each eye moves independently of the other, allowing animals to look in different directions at the same time.

Dolphins also have reflective layer of cells, which is located behind the retina and is called tapetem lucidem. This allows them to see perfectly in low light. Moreover, dolphins can see just as well above the surface of the water as underwater.

Dolphin skin

You might wonder why dolphins are not picked on by other sea creatures, e.g. barnacles. Whales are often covered in these creatures, but dolphins seem to be immune. Dolphins' skin always looks smooth, clean and shiny. What is her secret?

Unique dolphin skin has a lot of advantages. Firstly, the top layer of skin - the epidermis - is no rougher in dolphins than in humans; it is 10-20 times thinner than the epidermis of any land animal. However, it is growing 9 times faster than ours.

Unique dolphin lungs

Dolphins are known to be excellent swimmers. For example, the bottlenose dolphin can hold its breath while underwater, up to 12 minutes, while diving to the depths up to 550 meters! They are capable of this thanks to their unique lungs.

Although the lungs of these animals are no larger than ours, they work much more efficiently. With every breath the dolphin changes about 80 percent or more air in the lungs. We can change only 17 percent.

The blood and muscles of dolphins can accumulate and transport huge amounts of oxygen due to the fact that in the animals’ bodies more red blood cells. This means a higher concentration of hemoglobin than in humans.

However, all this cannot fully explain how dolphins manage to hold their breath for so long and dive to such depths. It turns out that dolphins are able to direct blood flow in the desired direction. For example, during deep-sea diving, blood moves from the extremities to the heart and brain, improving their functioning in extreme conditions.

Wound healing in dolphins

When injured, dolphins are able to miraculously restore health. From a scientific point of view, their ability to recover is comparable with something fantastic.

For example, dolphins can survive severe injuries and can regenerate large amounts of damaged flesh in just a couple of weeks. Moreover, their appearance can return to its original appearance. without any scars or deformities.

By the way, dolphins also there is no bleeding. For example, a person with a serious open injury can die only due to blood loss. When injured, the dolphin directs the blood flow in the right direction, just as it does when diving, which prevents it from bleeding to death.

Natural pain relievers of dolphins

Dolphins don't seem to care about such inconveniences as physical pain . After they suffer serious injuries that would immobilize anyone Living being on the planet, they can safely continue to play, swim and even eat normally.

When dolphins have open wounds, their nerve endings are not exposed, which causes severe pain. This does not mean that they do not experience pain at all, they are also very sensitive, just like us.

However, when seriously injured, dolphins simply know how to... ignore her. It is believed that their body is capable of producing special painkillers, such as morphine, which, however, do not cause any addiction.

Dolphins developed such abilities during evolution, which allowed them to survive in dangerous conditions. For example, if a predator is chasing you, it is better not to show him that you are injured or that you are in pain. Then you have more chances to survive and not to attract attention to yourself as weak and helpless.

Dolphins and infections

Having open wounds on their bodies, dolphins are able to swim in water infested with bacteria, and at the same time don't get any infections. It looks like they are not even afraid of wounds from the dirty teeth of sharks. A person in this situation would immediately die from blood poisoning within a few days. However, at least something for the dolphins!

It turns out that no infections attach to dolphins. It is known that the immune system of these animals is similar to ours, but how then do they manage to ward off all the infection?

In fact, no one can say for sure where dolphins have such miraculous abilities. There is an assumption that dolphins receive a kind of antibiotics from plankton and algae.

The chemicals these microscopic creatures produce have been discovered in subcutaneous fat of dolphins. If the fat layer is damaged by injury, antibacterial substances are released.

How do dolphins manages to accumulate these life-saving substances under the skin, and not process them during metabolism, remains a mystery to scientists.

Dolphins are the best swimmers

In 1936, British zoologist Sir James Gray I was amazed at how fast dolphins can swim. He began to study their anatomy in great detail and found out that the skin of dolphins should have magical properties, which would prevent friction, only then would they be able to develop such speed. This idea was called "Grey's paradox" and until 2008, scientists could not solve it.

Gray was partly right: dolphins do have anti-friction features. However, Gray underestimated the muscle strength of dolphins, which is 5 times greater than the muscle strength of the dolphins himself. strong man on the planet. Moreover, dolphins also know how to use their energy very efficiently.

A person can use only 4 percent of their energy to move in water. Dolphins, in turn, transform 80 percent of energy in traction, making them the most efficient swimmers.

Magnetic sense of dolphins

Why do dolphins and whales sometimes washed ashore? This mystery has worried the minds of scientists long years. Various theories have been proposed: strange diseases, pollution environment or testing military equipment. However, research has not supported any of these theories.

Cases of animals washing ashore have been recorded for many hundreds of years, but only recently have scientists begun to guess why main reason : It turns out that it’s all about the Sun and the magnetic field of our planet.

The brains of dolphins and whales have special magnetic crystals, which allow them to sense the Earth's magnetic field. With the help of such a built-in GPS system, they can move across the vast expanses of the ocean, without much difficulty finding their way around.

One group of researchers mapped east coast USA, where observed mass deaths of dolphins. As it turned out, these areas coincided with places where magnetic rocks reduced the levels of the planet's magnetic field.

Thus, a dolphin or whale that navigates by magnetic field, could just "not to notice" shore and ended up on dry land.

Scientists have also found that when the Sun emits too much radiation, it affects the magnetic senses of marine mammals and also confuses them. Most animals wash ashore when solar activity is strongest. This may also explain why rescued animals return to shore again.

Electroreception of dolphins

The echolocators in dolphins' bodies are truly incredible. Amazes their ability sense objects at a distance. Animals are able to send sound signals and listen to echoes reflected from objects.

If we add to this rare feeling the other abilities of dolphins discussed above, we can conclude that dolphins really have fantastic feelings and abilities what distinguishes them from other living beings.

However, Mother Nature endowed them with something else: electroreception - the ability to feel electrical impulses, sent by other living beings.

Guyanese dolphins live off the coast of South America and are similar in appearance to bottlenose dolphins. Researchers have discovered special indentations on their beaks, which are able to recognize electrical impulses sent by fish muscles.

A similar feature is found in animals such as platypuses. They use it to find fish hiding in the mud. Echolocation allows dolphins to determine the position of objects in space, but it not particularly effective at close range, so electroreception comes into play.

Over the past 47 million years, dolphins' brains have developed to sizes unprecedented in other animals. The new, most extensive study of the fossil remains of these marine inhabitants has set out to describe the dynamics of the corresponding evolutionary development. Indirectly, this may help to find an answer to the question of how people themselves became so “brainy.”

As you know, dolphins are capable of “intellectual feats” that are inaccessible to other animals. So, they can recognize themselves in the mirror, like humans and some higher primates. Of course, everything this is associated with the truly gigantic size of the dolphin brain. Thus, in some species the ratio of brain mass to total body mass can only be compared with that of humans. But at what rate the brain of dolphins developed remained a mystery until now.

Three researchers, led by American biologist Lori Marino from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, tracked the evolutionary changes in the dolphin brain using fossil remains.

After four years of working among museum collections, this team of scientists identified 66 fossil skulls of dolphin ancestors, adding to the five previously studied. The brain sizes of these specimens were calculated using methods computed tomography(computed tomography - CT), and estimates of the animals' body weights were obtained by analyzing the size of the bones at the base of the skulls.

Fossil skulls dating back up to 47 million years have been studied. They were compared with 144 modern specimens, resulting in the calculation of the so-called EQ(encephalisation quotient - “braininess coefficient”) of each such creature. This coefficient connects the brain mass of a particular specimen with the average value of a particular species of animal of similar size, and if EQ is less than one, then this means that we are dealing with an “underdeveloped” creature, but if EQ > 1, then the brain considered relatively large. In this sense, humans are “more brainy” than all other animals; they have an EQ coefficient of approximately 7.

Residual elements in the skeletons of dolphins confirm that they descended from some kind of land-based four-legged mammals.

Blood tests suggested that cetaceans, which include dolphins, and ungulates are related. Once upon a time they returned from land to the water element (perhaps this was due to some kind of global catastrophe), eventually losing their hind limbs and acquiring fins.

Approximately 35 million years ago, these pinnipeds were the size of a small whale- approximately 9 meters in length, had sharp teeth and an EQ of about 0.5.

And from this moment on, a mysterious change occurs: the old species inexplicably die out, replaced by a new group called Odontoceti (a suborder of toothed whales).

A new study shows that all these creatures were much smaller than before, had smaller teeth, but their brain size increased dramatically. Their EQ jumped to 2,5 - a phenomenon that Marino associates with the development of echolocation skills, that is, the use of sound waves to determine the location of objects under water.

The study also shows that approximately 8 of the 67 species of Odontoceti (including dolphins) went through a second stage of EQ elevation approximately 15 million years ago, reaching rates 4 And 5 , although the reasons for this second evolutionary leap remain completely unclear.

There is only one such case of "explosive" development of "mental abilities" among large animals known to scientists today: over five million years of human history, EQ increased from approximately 2.5 to 7. At the same time, the "mental abilities" of the remaining part of the "dolphin tribe" “For some reason, on the contrary, they decreased.

"There is a myth according to which the development of life forms is always accompanied by an increase in brain size,- says Marino. - However, from the point of view of animal metabolism (metabolism), mental abilities are very expensive, and therefore, according to the logic of evolutionary development, you need to have some extremely compelling reasons in order to “get” yourself a big brain.”. She adds that, according to another scientific myth, only one type of large-brained creature can evolve at the same time and in the same place. However, new work shows that for 15 million years, many different species of dolphins and whales coexisted happily in the ocean together.

Contact between humans and dolphins is one of the favorite plots of science fiction. Moreover, the intelligence of dolphins in literature has become such a commonplace that, according to a number of American authors (Larry Niven, David Brin, etc.), in the future dolphins, together with people, will even be able to explore and populate the Galaxy.