Dolphins and people are the two highest civilizations on earth. Dolphin intelligence. What can dolphins do? Mental abilities of dolphins

Recent research by biologists has led to a sensational conclusion: dolphins are the most intelligent creatures on the planet.

The dolphin is an intelligent animal. New arguments in favor of this hypothesis were provided by recent studies by scientists from the University of Pennsylvania. For quite a long time, experts have studied the language of dolphins and obtained truly amazing results. As is known, sound signals occur in the nasal canal of dolphins at the moment air passes through it. It was possible to establish that animals use sixty basic signals and five levels of their combination. Dolphins are capable of creating a “dictionary” of 1012! Dolphins hardly use so many “words,” but the volume of their active “vocabulary” is impressive - about 14 thousand signals! For comparison: the same number of words makes up the average human vocabulary. And in Everyday life people get by with 800-1000 words.

The dolphin signal, when translated into human language, is a kind of hieroglyph that means more than a single word. The fact that dolphins have a language that is more complex than that of humans is a real sensation.

Rare abilities

Nature sometimes wonders amazing riddles. And one of these mysteries, without a doubt, remains dolphins. Despite the fact that they often live in full view of humans, we know very little about them. But even the little that is known about these animals is amazing. Dolphins truly have amazing abilities. So amazing that the American John Lilly, who studied brain physiology at the University of Pennsylvania, called dolphins a “parallel civilization.”

First of all, scientists are surprised by the volume and structure of the dolphin brain. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania placed the animal in the womb of a magnetic resonance imaging scanner and saw that the nervous system of dolphins is so advanced that it sometimes seems as if it is better developed than that of humans. “The brain of a bottlenose dolphin,” says Professor Laela Sai, “weighs 1,700 grams, which is 350 grams more than that of an adult man. In terms of its complexity, the dolphin’s brain is by no means inferior to the human brain: there are even more folds, tubercles and convolutions in it.” . The total number of nerve cells in a dolphin is higher than in humans. Previously, scientists believed that the dolphin's brain was so large because its nerve cells were not as densely packed as in humans. However, we were convinced of the opposite: the brain in the cranium is located identically. True, in appearance the dolphin’s brain is more spherical than the brain of homo sapiens, which is slightly flattened. Dolphins have association cortical areas identical to humans. “This fact indirectly indicates that dolphins can be intelligent,” say marine biologists.

The parietal, or motor, lobe of the dolphin's brain is larger in area than the parietal and frontal lobes of humans combined. Why did nature gift these creatures so much? What is this - the result of centuries-old evolution or, perhaps, the “inheritance” of intelligent ancestors?

It is curious that the occipital optic lobes of dolphins are extremely large, but they do not rely much on vision. Then what do they need them for? As you know, dolphins “see” to a greater extent with their ears, emitting ultrasound. An acoustic lens on the dolphin's head focuses the ultrasound, directing it to various objects. Thanks to this, the dolphin “sees” with its ears. He “feels” the underwater object, determining its shape.

The inhabitants depths of the sea two organs of hearing: one is normal, the other is ultrasonic, says researcher Mario Etti. - The external passage is closed, which increases the ability to hear in water. The receptors of another organ are located on the sides of the lower jaw; they perceive the slightest sound vibrations. The dolphin hears his lower jaw much better than our ears. The hearing of dolphins and killer whales is 400-1000 times sharper than humans. Thanks to the many cavities in the blowhole (nasal valve), acoustic vibrations arise that spread over enormous distances in the water. Thus, blue whales and sperm whales can hear the sounds made by their fellows thousands of kilometers away!

As already mentioned, dolphins masterfully control their speech apparatus. By blowing the same portion of air back and forth, they generate such a range of sounds that their variations and quantity far exceed the sounds made by humans. Moreover, each dolphin has an individual voice, its own tempo and timbre of speech, manner of speaking and “handwriting” of thinking.

It is very interesting that the organs of hearing and speech working simultaneously create an amazing wealth of sound palette. The capabilities of the mammal's brain are so high that it is able to separately analyze spectra traveling at a frequency of 3000 pulses per second! In this case, the time interval between pulses is only about 0.3 milliseconds! And therefore, for dolphins, human speech is a very slow process. They're talking at high speed. In addition, they are able to isolate details in the speech of their fellow humans that people are not even aware of, since our ears cannot catch them.

But that's not all. Scientists have conducted a series of experiments proving that dolphins can exchange very complex messages. Here is just one example. The dolphin was given a certain task, which his fellow dolphin, located in the neighboring enclosure, had to complete. Through the wall of the enclosure, one dolphin “told” the other what to do. For example, take a red triangle and give it to a person. Both dolphins received a fish as a reward. However, it was clear that they were not working for remuneration; they were fascinated by the process of creative experimentation itself. The researchers conducted thousands of experiments, the tasks were constantly changing, and the dolphins never made a mistake. The only possible conclusion from this is that dolphins perfectly understand everything that happens and navigate the world like people.

Biologists who conducted experiments noticed with surprise that often the experimental subjects themselves began to control the course of the experiment and its organizers - people... The energy of creative search was transferred to the dolphins, and they suggested that the experimenters complicate and modify the task, while the scientists unexpectedly noticed that they were becoming an experimental model for dolphins who tried to switch roles with them. So who studied whom?

Cousins ​​in mind?

One theory about the origin of dolphins is that they and other cetaceans descended from ancient animals that moved from land to sea. Possible ancestors are the 20-meter Basilosaurus and the fossil Dorudon. Neither of them had as many brains as dolphins have today. Why did animals that went to sea to live need brains that were superior in structure to humans? After all, sharks have been swimming calmly in the same water for hundreds of millions of years. They have a very small brain, and it is enough for them to catch prey.

There is another interesting hypothesis. Some scientists believe that in the process of evolution there was a period when the distant ancestors of humans, for some reason, were forced to leave land and live in water for some time. They had to get food by diving to great depths. Due to constant oxygen starvation, the brain volume of these creatures increased noticeably. Then, after another change in living conditions, our aquatic ancestors returned to land... But maybe not all of them returned, but some branch remained in the ocean and evolved into dolphins? And the current inhabitants of the deep sea are our “cousins ​​in mind”? Not long ago, Japanese sailors discovered and brought ashore an unusual bottlenose, which was recorded to have atavism - “hind limbs”, very reminiscent of feet...

Why do dolphins need such powerful intelligence? They do not build houses, do not create communications, they do not have television or the Internet. However, it may turn out that they don’t need it. They have had enough of the colossal opportunities they have. Perhaps dolphins already live in the virtual world of their consciousness and they simply do not need external signs of comfort and all that we call the benefits of civilization. And they look at us, people, from the height of their intellect as backward creatures, unable to understand them or be useful to them in any way, and besides, in many cases they act barbarously towards other creatures. Their community is a real parallel civilization.

And therefore it may turn out that humanity is in vain looking for brothers in mind in the depths of the Universe, while they are very close. You just need to take a closer look at them, and perhaps then the whole wealth of parallel worlds will be revealed to a person. Nearby are entire ant megalopolises, bee cities and urban bird nests. Why not other worlds - with their own laws, routines, history? But it will be difficult for a person to come to terms with the fact that there is no need to look for romantic parallel civilizations, and all previous searches are empty efforts. Although from time to time astronomers record signals in the vast expanses of endless galaxies that resemble a dolphin whistle.

Alexander Belov

OPINIONS

Brain work

Dr. Jerry Presley, marine fauna specialist from Woodshole Oceanographic Institution (USA):

There are hypotheses that explain the evolution of the brain of mammals due to their aquatic lifestyle. The brain in this case is considered as a cybernetic system consisting of neuron elements, the reliability of which can be increased by increasing the number of spare elements. In other words, if there is a weak link, then it is better to duplicate it. The reason for the enlargement of the dolphin's brain was oxygen starvation. Deep diving is an abnormal functioning of the brain. And therefore, the advantage is given to the one who can hold his breath and whose brain does not suffer. For example, the sperm whale has a larger brain than blue whale, because it dives to a depth of about a kilometer.

Olga Silaeva, doctor biological sciences, leading researcher at the Institute of Ecology and Evolution. A. N. Severtsova:

It is believed that humans differ from animals in the presence of a language system. However, it is not. Language as a means of communication between individuals exists in almost all animals and insects. Dolphin vocabulary - about a thousand words. That is, dolphins have a very developed speech culture.

(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 technology". Building a developed information society, in which a web of computer networks will entangle almost all spheres of human activity, is a priority task for 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 evolutionary processes known to us at 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 by synchronization life cycles individual organs and the language of social insects, we can conclude that they perform identical functions, and therefore consider the latter to be some 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, becomes accessible to all more 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 in 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 fairly well-reasoned hypothesis about the decisive importance of the “water phase” in the formation of Homo sapiens on the 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 has 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 many years of use in various countries world: USA, Denmark, Cuba, Japan, etc. Ukraine is also one of the pioneers in this field thanks to the work carried out at the State Oceanarium Research Center of the Ministry of Defense and the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Sevastopol, created in 1966 by order of Commander-in-Chief of the USSR Navy Admiral Gorshkov). For several decades now, dolphins have been trained by US Navy instructors in searching for sunken military installations, naval guarding 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 language of the deaf and dumb. North America- "Amslene", 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 forms of life 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 widespread opinion that such an outstanding development of the dolphin brain 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 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 a person’s intelligence is replicated by some “social operator” due to the age-related plasticity of his brain because “ nervous system man must develop under the conditions of human life in order to give rise to human consciousness." Age-related plasticity of the mammalian brain is a fundamental fact, the significance of which does not yet seem to be adequately understood. Let's take this example: in a person who has "severe damage to the left side of the brain... the brain is 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 set the task not of assessing the level of their intelligence, as has been done until now, but of finding methods for its active age formation, which, in a certain sense, model replication functions 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 both the fundamental property of “plasticity” of the nervous tissue of mammals, which is the anatomical basis of the historical development of human civilization, and the highly developed brain of the most cephalized species of dolphins. The technical support for constructing a communication channel for the practical implementation of the noted interspecies cooperation is 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 nuclear disaster created a real threat to the existence of life in its modern highly developed forms, depriving a person 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. In general, it seems that the ethical rule of survival of 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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Behind how del fina m one hundred l cr upny th and sl ozhny th mo zg?

When the German physiologist M. Tiedemann first saw the brain of a dolphin back in 1827, he was amazed. The dolphin's brain turned out to be larger than that of a monkey and almost the same as that of a human.

Professor from Switzerland A. Portman conducted research on the mental abilities of animals and found out that according to the test results, a person came in first place - 215 points, a dolphin came in second - 190 points, and the third prize-winner was an elephant. The monkey only took fourth place.

When scientists compared the brains of humans and dolphins, it turned out that the average human brain weighs about 1.4 kg (Turgenev’s largest is 2.12 kg). The brain of a dolphin pulls 1.7 kg. Moreover, the cortex has twice as many convolutions. Does this explain the amazing intelligence and incredible speed of thinking of the dolphin? He is able to absorb a volume of knowledge 1.5 times greater than you and I. In addition, dolphins have their own colloquial speech, with the help of which they can communicate with each other and transmit the necessary information.

Why does a dolphin need such a large and complex brain? Of course, not just to eat, swim deftly, or produce offspring.

This question interested scientists and they tried to establish who the dolphin’s ancestor was. Residual elements in the animals' skeletons 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. But what made the dolphin ancestor change his earthly existence to an aquatic one 65 million years ago and who, in fact, was he?

It can be assumed that the whole point is some kind of cosmic cataclysm that touched the Earth and forced animals to seek salvation in the water. After all, it was 65 million years ago that dinosaurs suddenly disappeared from the Earth. Finally, what was the land like in those days: tiny islands in the vast expanse of the World Ocean. It could happen that on this small land there was not enough space for someone.

Who knows, maybe the forerunner of man and dolphin was the same creature: having picked up a stick from the ground, it traveled the grand path of earthly evolution and became a man, and, returning to the sea, it became a dolphin.

Whether this is true or not is difficult to say with certainty. However, one thing is absolutely clear: if man is the crown of creation on Earth, then the dolphin is the crown of creation in the ocean, “the king of the sea.”

Dolphins give birth to their babies in the water. At the moment of birth, the female raises her tail high above the water, the baby dolphin is born in the air and manages to breathe before it falls into the water. For the first hours, the baby dolphin swims like a float, in an upright position, slightly moving its front flippers: it has accumulated a sufficient supply of fat in the womb, and its density is less than the density of water. There is always a mother and one or two other females nearby.

The baby dolphin initially feeds on its mother's milk. When the baby sucks, the lips are replaced by a tongue rolled into a tube: it covers the mother's nipple with it, and she splashes milk into his mouth. All this happens underwater: the respiratory canal is separated from the esophagus, and the dolphin can swallow food underwater without fear of choking. After 3 years he becomes an adult. Dolphins live up to 30 years. Cubs are born once every 2 years.

Dolphins move easily and quickly in the water. With a sudden jump, he throws his body out of the water in order to take a breath. Their shiny bodies amaze with their perfectly streamlined shape, reminiscent of a drop or a torpedo. The muzzle is elongated into a narrow beak, the nostrils are fused into one “blowhole”, from which the animal can release a fountain of spray 1-1.5 m high.

An adult dolphin can reach speeds of over 50 km/h. This speed is facilitated not only by the streamlined shape of the body, but also by the special properties of the skin. The outer layer is approximately 1.5 mm and is extremely elastic. The inner layer is about 4 mm thick and consists of dense fabric. The interesting thing is that inner part the outer layer is penetrated by many passages and tubes filled with a soft fatty substance. By the way, artificial cladding for submarines its quality resembles that of dolphin skin.

Dolphins have complex sound signaling. They are capable of creating and receiving ultrasounds. An accurate sonar makes it possible for them to detect objects the size of an acorn in water at a distance of up to 15 m. Thanks to echolocation, dolphins find food and avoid collisions with obstacles even in completely muddy water.

Examples

One day, a passenger ship crashed. Several people survived. None of them believed that they could survive. And when they saw a school of sharks approaching them, they said goodbye to each other. But suddenly a miracle happened. A school of dolphins quickly rushed from the open sea, fearlessly dispersing a school of sharks. And she helped people stay on the water until help arrived.

An even more striking incident occurred with fishermen in the Black Sea. A school of dolphins surrounded the longboat and swam nearby, making sounds and clearly trying to attract the attention of people. The dolphins circled around the ship until people realized that the animals were worried about something. Following them, they discovered a captured dolphin. Having lost his way from the flock, he became entangled in a fishing net. The cub was rescued and released.

The fate of the famous dolphin Taffy, an honorary member of the American underwater expedition, is interesting. The dolphin worked as a postman and guide, bringing instruments and tools. If one of the aquanauts swam too far into the sea and lost his bearings, Tuffy always came to the rescue and led the lost person to the house on a nylon leash. After such a brilliant debut, Taffy was recruited to serve at one of the US missile sites. He searched the sea for electronic devices of spent rocket stages. All the equipment was stuffed with miniature ultrasonic transmitters. It was their “call signs” that the dolphin hurried to.

The dolphin Polorus Jack, so nicknamed by English sailors, guided ships through a dangerous strait in New Zealand for 25 years as a seasoned pilot.

Not long ago, a completely amazing incident occurred at a marine aquarium near Miami. Several dolphins caught in the ocean were brought here for training. Not far from the recruits were already trained dolphins. They didn't see each other. And yet, a conversation immediately began between them. All night long strange sounds and noises were coming from the pool. This morning the incredible happened. The new dolphins immediately began to perform all the tricks that people intended to teach them. It seems that their brothers who had been living in the pool for a long time told them about this.

V. Avdeenko.

The distant ancestors of dolphins lived on land. Only about 70 million years ago did they go to live in the ocean. Why? Because during difficult periods of history, only aquatic organisms can survive on Earth. The longer people study dolphins, the less incredible the hypothesis seems that these mammals created their own civilization, indistinguishable in the complexity of its organization from ours.

Level mental development dolphins are very high. The person has not yet been able to determine exactly how much. Perhaps this species is in no way inferior to Homo sapiens in terms of intelligence. The brain of dolphins surpassed the human brain both in weight and in the number of convolutions and nerve cells in the cortex.

Dolphins have their own communication system, which is in no way inferior to human language. The language of dolphins includes both gestures (turning the head, tail, fins, various poses, jumping) and a variety of sounds, which are sound and ultrasonic impulses.

Researchers have counted 32 varieties of whistles alone in the language of dolphins. Each of them carries certain information - a greeting signal, a call to relatives, an expression of alarm, etc. Interestingly, some native tribes of the Canary Islands and Mexico also communicate over long distances using whistles.

Having scanned the tongue of dolphins using the Zipf method, scientists have received indisputable evidence that it serves to transmit information, just like human speech. The Zipf method allows you to determine whether sounds carry informational meaning. Its essence is to determine the frequency of repetition of identical letters in speech. Speech in the form of a mathematical graph intelligent beings has the shape of an inclined line, and random noises are located strictly horizontally. So, the speech of dolphins had the same slope coefficient on the graph as the language of people.

It was possible to identify about 200 communication signs in the communication dictionary of these mammals. But deciphering them is slow and difficult. Dolphins' audio communication occurs in the range up to 300 kHz, while humans communicate with each other in the frequency range up to 20 kHz. Like humans, dolphin speech has six levels of organization, from sound to context. But if people begin to understand each other only from the third level (word), then dolphins communicate even with the help of monosyllabic sounds.

Humans and dolphins have a lot in common. And this applies not only to the complexity of organizing speech. Dolphins live as long as people, create families, love to communicate, and mature at the same age. Depending on the region where they live, the language of dolphins differs slightly, which allows us to draw a parallel with the national languages ​​of people.

American scientists have found that at birth each dolphin receives a name from its relatives (a certain form of whistle lasting 0.9 seconds), to which it responds throughout its life. Dolphins call each other by name when communicating.

If a dolphin is alone in the pool, then it is silent. But as soon as another individual appears nearby, it begins to reproduce a rich set of sounds.

The study shows that approximately eight of the 67 species of Odontoceti (including dolphins) went through a stage of increasing EQ approximately 15 million years ago, reaching factors of 4 and 5, although the reasons for this second evolutionary leap remain completely unclear (there is only one such case of "explosive" development "mental ability" among large animals, known to scientists today: over five million years of human history, EQ has 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, decreased.

For decades now, scientists have been trying to understand exactly how the dolphin's brain works. Capable of learning, with their own social skills and a clear understanding of human behavior, these mammals seem to have come from another planet - they are so different from the rest of the animal kingdom.

Over the past fifty million years, dolphin brains have developed to unprecedented sizes. One of the latest published studies, authored by marine biologist Laurie Marino, claims that dolphins and whales underwent a reverse evolutionary path, returning from land to the ocean depths. Here are a few facts that fully support these bold conclusions.

Dream
Sleep deprivation kills any living thing - as surely as a gunshot wound. Just twelve days without rest is enough for a highly organized brain to turn off its main functions. But dolphins have learned to deceive the system: these amazing mammals can turn off, at will, half of their brain so that it can rest.

Language
Dolphins remain the only creatures in the world (except for humans, of course) that have their own language. They communicate using a complex combination of clicks and sounds. Moreover, the language of dolphins is complex enough to accurately coordinate the behavior of the entire pod. Researchers estimate the linguistic reserve of an ordinary dolphin at 8 thousand “words” - for an average person it is only 14 thousand, despite the fact that in ordinary life only about 1-2 thousand words are used.

Logical thinking
Scientists have found that dolphins have the rudiments of logical thinking. This is the highest form of intelligence development that no one expected to find in mammals. Dolphins turned out to be able to solve various complex riddles, find answers to complex questions, and even adjust their behavior depending on new circumstances set by humans.

Dimensions
The brain of an adult dolphin weighs more than the human brain - 1700 grams and 1400 grams, respectively. In addition, dolphins have twice as many convolutions in their cerebral cortex as ours.

Self-awareness
The latest data obtained by scientists may indeed indicate that dolphins have a serious social structure. They have not only self-awareness (something other animals can boast of), but also social awareness, practiced in conjunction with emotional empathy.

Echolocation
The total number of nerve cells in a dolphin is higher than in humans. This is partly explained by the ability of mammals to echolocation: they literally see with their ears. An acoustic lens located on its head focuses ultrasound, which the dolphin uses to “feel” underwater objects, determining their shape.

Magnetic feeling
One more amazing property the dolphin's brain turned out to have the ability to feel magnetic poles. Dolphins and whales have been found to have special magnetic crystals in their brains that help these mammals navigate the vastness of the world's oceans. The same feature may also explain the reasons why whales wash ashore: guided by the readings of their GPS, they simply do not notice it.

Dolphins

Anyone who has ever met dolphins will forever remember their interaction with these unique and amazing animals. Affectionate, playful and quick-witted, they do not resemble anything dangerous predators, but that’s what they really are. But their love for people is so great that they never show us their skills as one of the most powerful inhabitants of the deep sea.

Man has been studying the habits and intelligence of dolphins for a very long time, but most likely the dolphin has managed to study humans much better. After all, he is much older than modern Homo Sapiens - his age is more than 70 million years. And by the way, the origin of dolphins, which explains the highly developed mental abilities of this species, is no less covered in legends than the appearance of humans on earth.

Channeling with Dolphins We give energy for health and development

Heirs of Atlantis

The fact that dolphins were once land dwellers has been known to scientists for quite a long time. They left the water, but over time, for an unknown reason, they returned to it again. Science is not yet able to explain exactly when and how this happened. Although, perhaps, when a person finds a common language with these amazing creatures of nature, they themselves will tell us their story, because their collective intelligence and the ability to transfer knowledge from one individual to another suggests that dolphins may have their own story.

Recent studies by Australian scientists, which compared the DNA of humans and dolphins, make it possible to claim that they are our closest relatives. Perhaps they are simply a parallel branch of evolution that separated from the main species about a quarter of a million years ago.

And on the basis of these studies, the ancient legend was continued - that dolphins are the descendants of the people who inhabited Atlantis. When this highly developed civilization sank to the bottom of the ocean, who knows what happened to its inhabitants? Maybe they turned into inhabitants of the deep sea, forever preserving the memory of past life and love for a person as his own heir?

And even if this is nothing more than a beautiful legend, the similarity of the brain, intelligence and basic DNA structures does not allow us to abandon it completely - after all, we have something in common, which means there must be a logical explanation for this fact.

BBC. Secrets of the sea depths. The magical world of dolphins

Dolphins: relatives or ancestors of humanity?

Ichthyologists who have devoted their lives to studying the phenomenon of dolphins claim that they occupy the second place in terms of intelligence development after humans. Our “Darwinian” ancestors, the apes, by the way, occupy only the fourth step in this hierarchy. The average weight of an adult dolphin's brain is 1.5-1.7 kilograms, which is an order of magnitude greater than the size of the human brain. At the same time, their body-to-brain size ratio is much higher than that of the same chimpanzees, and the high level of organization within the team and the complex chain of relationships allows us to speak of the presence of a special “dolphin civilization.”

And testing for the level of mental development showed amazing results - dolphins scored only 19 points less than representatives of the human race. And this despite the fact that the tests were developed by people and for people. That is, dolphins are characterized by excellent analytical abilities coupled with an excellent understanding of human thinking.

Thanks largely to this, neurophysiologist John Lilly, well-known in scientific circles, who worked with dolphins for a long period, argued that they would be the first representatives of the terrestrial animal world to establish conscious contact with human civilization. Communication will be facilitated by the fact that dolphins have their own highly developed language, excellent memory and cognitive abilities, which allow them to accumulate and transmit knowledge in “oral” form from generation to generation. Scientists suggest that if they had limbs adapted for writing, dolphins would easily master writing, their minds are so similar to those of humans.

All this data involuntarily gives rise to assumptions that dolphins are not just a side branch of human development. It is quite possible that it was they, and not monkeys at all, who became the progenitors modern people, first emerging from the water onto land to give birth to a new life, and then going back to the seabed to enable man to follow his own path of development.

This assumption is also supported by interesting facts about how dolphins wildlife save a person. Many seafarers who were shipwrecked or simply had the misfortune of encountering sharks tell how dolphins spent hours driving hungry sharks away from them, preventing them from approaching a person, and helping them swim to the saving shore. This attitude is typical for dolphins in relation to their own offspring - perhaps they perceive humans as their cubs in trouble?

Another scientifically established fact that speaks in favor of the unconditional superiority of dolphins over other representatives of the animal world is their monogamy. If all other inhabitants of the wild create pairs only for the mating period and easily change partners, then dolphins choose their “husband” for life. They live in real families - with children and the elderly, caring for relatives who are weak and defenseless due to age or health.

The absence of polygamy, typical of the animal world, suggests that dolphins are at a higher level of development than other representatives of the terrestrial fauna. And by the way, they are the only ones who do not confirm the popular psychological myth about the polygamous essence of human nature - after all, they, our closest relatives, live in strong families.

Laura Sheremetyeva - What do dolphins sing to us about. Body of Light. Interesting

Are the abilities of dolphins miracles of nature or a parallel to human development?

• It is very difficult to list all the talents inherent in this type of living beings - their diversity can shake the imagination of even experienced researchers of the animal world. Every year people learn more and more about what these mysterious sea inhabitants know and can do.
• First of all, their fine hearing is unique to all living nature. Having gone to live in the water column for the second time, the dolphins were faced with the fact that visibility in it was much lower than in the air. But having adapted quickly enough, they became the owners of more than just fine hearing. After all, in order to perfectly navigate in water over long distances, it is not enough just to be able to transmit sound, you need to be able to make those objects “sound” for which this is unusual.
• To do this, dolphins use a sound wave - a short click they make, which, having reached any obstacle, returns under water in the form of a kind of echo. This location pulse propagates in water at a speed of up to one and a half thousand meters per second. Accordingly, the closer the object, the sooner the “sound reflection” will return from it. The intelligence of dolphins makes it possible to estimate this period of time with phenomenal accuracy, and, consequently, determine the distance to the expected obstacle.
• At the same time, one dolphin, having received similar information about an approaching obstacle or about a large school of fish within reach, transmits this data to its fellows using special sound signals, and over quite long distances. Moreover, each dolphin in a pod is able to distinguish all its members by characteristic vocal intonations, and each of them has its own name. During the experiments, it was found that the level of language development allows one dolphin to use sounds to explain to its fellows what actions need to be performed to get food. For example, during training, they successfully shared information that if you press the left pedal, a fish will fall out, and if you press the right pedal, nothing will happen.
• At the same time, they also have very developed abilities for onomatopoeia - they can copy anything - from the sound of wheels to the singing of birds, and with such a degree of similarity that it is almost impossible to distinguish in a sound recording where the real sound is and where the “speech” of a dolphin is. Training to copy human speech also revealed the ability of dolphins to imitate it.
• If we talk about the ability of these marine mammals to distinguish colors and shapes of objects, as well as analytical abilities, then dolphins have left far behind all animal world planets. Thus, they easily distinguish three-dimensional forms from flat ones, distinguish a huge range of colors (only blue causes difficulty), and can easily determine where to look for a particular object.
• A very interesting experiment was conducted with dolphins by Soviet scientists. The animal was shown the ball and then hidden behind a screen. When the screen opened, two objects appeared behind it - a voluminous box and a round flat shield. When the rope tied to them was pulled, the ball fell into the pool. Almost all animals would pay attention to the round shape of the shield and would begin to look for the ball in it, not paying attention to the volume. But not a single dolphin made a mistake - they always correctly chose the box the first time, realizing that it was impossible to hide a voluminous ball in a flat object.
• At the same time, dolphins are not only capable students, capable of repeating even the most complex tasks after their trainer. They are also good teachers who can teach a sequence of actions or a difficult trick to their relatives. Moreover, the rest of the dolphins in the school do not adopt new knowledge under the influence of hierarchical requirements or under coercion - they do this out of curiosity and love for everything new. A lot of cases have been recorded where a member of a pod who had lived for a certain time in a dolphinarium could then teach everything he had learned there to his fellow tribesmen.

Dolphins are brave explorers

• Unlike many other marine animals, they always know how to find the optimal balance between caution and curiosity. They are able to protect themselves from the dangers posed by the inhabitants of the deep sea. So, while exploring new territories, they wear sea ​​sponge, which protects them from the electrical discharges of stingrays or the burning stings of poisonous jellyfish.
• Dolphins are also capable of experiencing completely human feelings of jealousy, resentment, and love. Moreover, they will express them quite accessible to humans. For example, a young female, feeling jealous of a new trainer or just a curious person (most often female), will try with all her might to push the “homewrecker” away from her partner, while accurately calculating the strength of her actions. She will not cause pain or injure a person, but she will definitely make it clear that the presence of this lady near her beloved is extremely undesirable.
• Neither aggression nor pain are applicable in matters of training dolphins - the animal stops communicating with the offender, turns away from him and demonstrates his indignation at such treatment. It is almost impossible to return an animal to a pair with such a trainer, which once again confirms the presence of long-term memory, capable of storing information for quite a long time.
• Well, perhaps the most amazing fact, which shows that the intelligence of dolphins is very close to that of humans, is their use of tools in their natural habitat. In order to remove fish from cracks in the rocks, they clamp some stick or dead fish in their teeth and use them to push the hidden specimen into open water. This unique ability to use “improvised” objects to perform complex actions clearly resembles the stage of human development in which he first turned to the help of primitive tools.

And who knows, perhaps soon people will learn to talk with dolphins and this dialogue will open up new knowledge about the world. And a person will learn navigation, the ability to find out the weather and escape from sea predators not from boring textbooks, but from living experts in the secrets of the underwater kingdom.