Photo: Adwo / Alamy via Legion Media
Dolphin Civilization
Among the definitions of civilization is the following: “The next stage of culture after barbarism, which gradually accustoms a person to planned, orderly joint actions with his own kind, which creates the most important prerequisite for culture.” By default, people believe that they are the only ones who have been able to rise to this level.
However, it is common for a person to be arrogant and judge everyone by himself, and such blindness often makes it difficult to see that there is another way. Sometimes people talk about how wonderful a civilization would be, based not on the possession of material values, but on caring for others. But for us, the indicator of intelligence is the tools of labor and the secondary, artificial world created with their help.
Dolphins took a different path: instead of inventing tools and conquering the world, they changed their own bodies and harmoniously blended into the environment. At the same time, marine mammals have everything they need to create a “normal” civilization.
These marine mammals live in the seas and oceans almost all over the world, they are not found only in the very cold waters of the Arctic and Antarctic, but they visit the ice edge every summer. Like their terrestrial relatives, dolphins breathe with their lungs and feed their newborn cubs with milk. The animals stay in packs of 2-3 to hundreds of individuals.
Speed is one of the most important characteristics of the modern world, although people can only accelerate properly with the help of various devices. They are able to swim for a long time at a speed of 36-40 km/h. Dolphins maintain their pace due to their very strong muscles, streamlined body shape and unique skin: elastic and elastic, it “dampens” the swirls of the water, preventing it from slowing down the swimmer.
Dolphins understand speed as well as humans, but they manage solely on their own. Cunning dolphins also use humans for their needs: animals are happy to ride hitchhikers in the form of ship waves that take them to the right place at speeds up to 60 km/h.
In order to properly use the space surrounding them on land, people have invented all kinds of devices: escalators, elevators, stairs and much more. Dolphins have mastered the aquatic environment to the maximum, despite the fact that they, just like us, breathe with their lungs. These animals can swim underwater for up to 15 minutes, and then rise from a great depth in a few seconds to inhale.
The secret of dolphins is to use oxygen as efficiently as possible. Even with the deepest breath, only 20% of the air in the lungs is replaced in humans, 80% in dolphins. At the same time, people uneconomically extract only 20% of oxygen from the air entering the respiratory tract, and exhale the rest back. The dolphin takes almost all the oxygen — about 80%.
Excellent eyesight and echolocation
Photo: Daniel Botelho / Barcroft Media via Getty Images
People are constantly dissatisfied with what they have, and therefore they are creating more and more complex equipment: telescopes, echo sounders, radars… Dolphins are content with what nature has endowed them with, and in fact have turned their bodies into perfectly adapted to the marine environment.
Compared to many other animals, humans have very poor eyesight, and some of us have needed glasses since childhood. Visibility in the water is much worse than on land, but dolphins distinguish the outlines of objects much better than humans. Animals use echolocation to navigate long distances.
By assessing how quickly the sound signal returned, the dolphin determines what the world around it looks like. The mammalian head serves as an echo sounder: the accuracy with which animals determine the direction of sound is comparable to the accuracy of the best human instruments. With the help of echolocation, dolphins “see” objects from a kilometer away, and in detail they can “see” from several tens of meters.
Dolphins are constantly surfacing, so they need to see equally well both in the water and above the water. Water and air have different refractive coefficients, but dolphins’ eyes do an excellent job of this complexity. Their lens has an almost spherical shape, so it refracts light well underwater, directing rays at the retina of the eye. In the air, the pupil is closed with a special “curtain”.
Dolphins communicate very actively with each other using whistles and clicks, and their signals have different meanings depending on the context: they are much more complex than simple designations of emotions and states. Mothers give their cubs personal “names” — special whistles that animals respond to when their loved ones address them.
Dolphins transmit complex messages to each other. In one experiment, two animals were taught to simultaneously press a lever when the right or left lamp came on. Then the dolphins were separated, and only one of them received the command. Once separated, the subjects exchanged whistles and continued to complete tasks together.
In other experiments, several dolphins were kept in different pools, and they could only communicate using an “underwater phone,” meaning each dolphin could hear both themselves and an invisible neighbor. The animals not only successfully interacted, they also adjusted their signals if their interlocutor was disturbed by excessive noise.
“Cultural” differences
Photo: Kevin Schafer / Alamy via Legion Media
In science fiction films, aliens always greet humanity with the message “We come in peace, people of Earth!”, but in fact, there is no single human civilization. People have formed many different cultures. Marine mammals do not have this, but scientists find that they have distinct groups that lead completely different lives.
Such “cultural differences” are especially well seen in killer whales, a type of dolphin, and the communities of these animals differ in their lifestyle and behavior. The so—called transit killer whales are rangers who hunt large mammals alone and then share the prey with a select few. Skilled killers, they sneak up on their victims without making a sound.
Resident killer whales mainly eat fish and live in large, friendly families, often including grandchildren and their great-grandfathers. Relatives hunt together and actively “talk” with each other, driving prey. The third type of killer whale, the marine killer whale, has so far been poorly studied, although these animals are genetically closer to their resident relatives.
Killer whales from each group have developed their own hunting strategy. For example, on islands near South America, animals chasing pinnipeds sometimes come ashore and grab victims who thought they were safe on land. After killing, strong animals crawl back into the water with their prey. This is a very difficult technique, and mothers specially teach their cubs it.
Another amazing feature of dolphins is their friendliness. These animals readily communicate not only with each other, but also with humans and even with dogs and cats. Stories about how dolphins rescued drowning people have been retold since Antiquity, and nowadays psychologists use dolphin therapy to treat children who have problems with socialization.
And unlike most perpetually frowning people, adult dolphins remain playful and cheerful, like baby dolphins. By the way, it is believed that it was a long childhood with the curiosity and thirst for new things inherent in this period that provided people with evolutionary success and helped create a civilization. If so, then dolphins have great prospects.
Dolphins have learned to live for their own pleasure in an ocean inaccessible to bipeds. Not least because humans can’t penetrate its depths, we don’t really know exactly how marine mammals live. And perhaps it is ignorance that is the reason why we continue to presumptuously believe that dolphins are just something like advanced fish.
By Anastasia Antonevich
