From BBC - Science & Nature.
At the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Mississippi, Kelly the dolphin has quite a reputation. All the institute’s dolphins are trained to hold onto any litter that falls into their pools until they see a trainer, when they can trade the litter for fish. Kelly took this task one step further. When people drop paper into the water she hides it under a rock at the bottom of the pool.
The next time a trainer passes, she tears off a piece of paper to give to the trainer. After a fish-reward, she goes back down, tears off another piece of paper, gets another fish, and so on.
At Kewalo Basin Marine Laboratory in Hawaii, Lou Herman and his team have developed a sign language to communicate with the dolphins, and the results are remarkable. Not only do the dolphins understand the meaning of individual words, they also understand the significance of word order in a sentence.
Most mammals seem to enjoy play - but dolphins seem to like making their games as challenging as possible. A killer whale calf learned the trick of luring gulls to the surface of the water with fish. When the gulls landed on the water, the killer whale would then attempt to capture them in her mouth, without killing them.
Once she mastered this skill, she made the task more challenging for herself: instead of waiting for the gulls to land on the water, she tried to capture the gulls on their descent when they were more than a metre above the water surface.
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Dolphins save surfer from becoming shark’s bait. (msnbc.com)
Surfer Todd Endris needed a miracle. The shark — a monster great white that came out of nowhere — had hit him three times, peeling the skin off his back and mauling his right leg to the bone.
That’s when a pod of bottlenose dolphins intervened, forming a protective ring around Endris, allowing him to get to shore, where quick first aid provided by a friend saved his life.
“Truly a miracle,” Endris told TODAY’s Natalie Morales on Thursday.
Amazonian dolphins say it with weeds. (Physorg)
A man may bring flowers to impress women, but male Amazon river dolphins carry weeds to win over the opposite sex, British and Brazilian researchers say.
The discovery comes from a three-year study of more than 6,000 groups of dolphins in Mamiraua, a flooded rainforest reserve in the Amazonian, British weekly New Scientist reports in its next issue.