I grew up with stories about elephant memories and how elephants held grudges. “If you give an elephant a stone instead of a peanut when you are little, he’ll get even next time he sees you, even years later.”
Now Megan Garber at The Atlantic says dolphins’ memories top all other animals’.
“Dolphins, it turns out, have the longest social memories of any species besides humans. And we’re learning more and more about how lengthy those memories can actually be.
“The researcher Jason Bruck, a biologist at the University of Chicago, wanted to test whether bottlenose dolphins in particular can, indeed, remember each other after a long stretch of separation. So he took advantage of something else about dolphins: the fact that they seem to have something like names. Sometime between their first 4 months and their first year of life, dolphins will develop a distinct whistle — one that will remain the same for the rest of its life. According to research published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, dolphins use these whistles in pretty much the same way we humans use names: as ways both to identify themselves and to call each other. …
“While it’s unclear what his findings might mean about dolphins’ memories overall — he was testing name recognition, not circumstantial or emotional memories — there’s some reason to think that dolphins’ memories stretch beyond rote recognition itself.
“In tests that broadcast the signature whistles of ‘extremely dominant males,’ for example, Bruck found that females responded with ‘exceptional interest.’
” ‘There was also a lot of posturing from the males,’ Bruck noted. And ‘some young ones would just go ballistic.’
“In other words, dolphins may well have the capacity for relatively complex memories — memories that associate individuals with actions.”
Read all about it here.
Photo: eZeePics Studio/Shutterstock
Suzanne's Mom's Blog 