Bottlenose Dolphin Research Paper

Growing up, I was always extremely passionate and incredibly involved with marine mammals, especially dolphins. I had begged my mother to take me to Sea World when I was 12 years old, and to my amazement, my mother had gone above and beyond that request just to buy me a behind the scenes pass to the amusement park. Although I no longer support Sea World, this experience only solidified my love for marine animals. My favorite exhibit, of course, was the dolphins; I was able to feed them, swim with them, and learn a lot about their intellectual capabilities. From that day forth I knew that these mammals were something special, that there is much more to them than what meets the eye. Thus, I wanted to learn about the cognition of dolphins and
Even more interestingly, there didn’t appear to be a significant effect on separation to response time. In Figure 1 it shows that dolphins that had been separated for 0-5 years had just about the same mean response level as dolphins who had been separated for 15 or more years [5]. This means that bottlenose dolphins have the ability to remember their acquaintances for up 20 years without decay which proves that they have long-term social recognition. Furthermore, the duration of association did not affect result times, either [5]. This means that dolphins do not have to know each other for a long, extended period of time in order to recognize each other’s whistles. This further proves Bruck’s hypothesis that bottlenose dolphins have
Being able to identify kin or a potentially dangerous conspecific, a member of the same species, can help identify who are their friends and who are their foes [1]. Furthermore, this allows dolphins to give resources to and to help protect others to whom they are related or to those who have helped them in the past, as well as telling them who to avoid. Since bottlenose dolphins live in large pods [2], they need to have LTSR in order to identify each other and make alliances with other members of the pod as well as other pods. This ensures survival