It is believed that human beings are the most intelligent species on Earth. And while we're all wondering if there's life on the other planets from our solar system and therefore some more intelligent habitants, surprisingly there may be some creatures who live on this planet that turned out to be more intelligent than us.
A study conducted last year suggests that dolphins are some highly intelligent creatures and they may surpass human intelligence in some aspects. And one of them is self-awareness. The researchers used the mirror-self recognition, or MSR, technique which means they present a mirror to the subject in order to see how long it takes until this subject will recognize himself. And the results were quite surprising.
While human babies are unable to recognize themselves when they're younger than 12 months old, the dolphin calf exhibited behavior in accordance with self-awareness only weeks after being born. Another interesting fact the experts found out from the study was the dolphins' capacity to create personalized whistles. This is like they're naming each member of their pod. Needless to say dolphins have some incredible communication skills they use to cooperate each other.
Here's a small excerpt from the study that can be found on the NCBI website:
Mirror-self recognition (MSR) is a behavioral indicator of self-awareness in young children and only a few other species, including the great apes, dolphins, elephants and magpies. The emergence of self-awareness in children typically occurs during the second year and has been correlated with sensorimotor development and growing social and self-awareness. Comparative studies of MSR in chimpanzees report that the onset of this ability occurs between 2 years 4 months and 3 years 9 months of age. Studies of wild and captive bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) have reported precocious sensorimotor and social awareness during the first weeks of life, but no comparative MSR research has been conducted with this species. We exposed two young bottlenose dolphins to an underwater mirror and analyzed video recordings of their behavioral responses over a 3-year period. Here we report that both dolphins exhibited MSR, indicated by self-directed behavior at the mirror, at ages earlier than generally reported for children and at ages much earlier than reported for chimpanzees. The early onset of MSR in young dolphins occurs in parallel with their advanced sensorimotor development, complex and reciprocal social interactions, and growing social awareness. Both dolphins passed subsequent mark tests at ages comparable with children. Thus, our findings indicate that dolphins exhibit self-awareness at a mirror at a younger age than previously reported for children or other species tested.
Dolphins have both been here longer than us, and have much larger brains than us. We can learn a lot from these animals whether we see them as our equals or not."
