Sasha Goldstein reports for the NY Daily News:
They’re trained to kill — but these dolphins can’t resist their animal instincts.
Three of five dolphins taught by the Ukrainian navy to attack enemy combatants are reported missing after failing to return to a Crimean port following a training exercise earlier this month, the local media reports. The dolphins are believed to be out chasing tails.
A peace offering from our aquatic brethren? Discovery reports:
On 23 occasions over the past several years, wild dolphins were observed giving gifts to humans at the Tangalooma Island Resort in Australia. The gifts included eels, tuna, squid, an octopus and an assortment of many other types of different fin fish. While these gifts might not be your choice for Christmas, some of the items that were offered to humans are highly valued food sources for cetaceans such as dolphins.
The wild dolphins that were observed giving gifts to human in Australia were regular visitors to a provisioning program at the Tangalooma Island Resort. Dolphins of diverse ages and both sexes engaged in the gift-giving behavior, and scientists are not entirely sure of what is motivating their behavior.
Picture: tolomea/Flickr (CC)
Another nightmarish future has opened up with this latest aquatic advancement…
Via Robert Beckhusen via WIRED’s Danger Room Blog:
Killer dolphins with knives and pistols attached to their heads. It might sound crazy, but that’s reportedly one element of the Ukrainian navy’s restarted marine mammal program.
The program reportedly includes training dolphins to search for mines and marking them with buoys. But Ukraine also plans to train the dolphins “to attack enemy combat swimmers using special knives or pistols fixed to their heads,” according to RIA Novosti. A source inside the Ukrainian navy told the agency that the exercises, which are being conducted at the state oceanarium in Sevastopol, are “counter-combat swimmer tasks in order to defend ships in port and on raids.”
Now they’ll be trained to kill, allegedly. If so, it won’t necessarily be the first time. Russian commandos trained to fight dolphins in case the animals were ever used against them.
I wonder if the military will discover any conscientiousness objectors using this technology with the dolphins they have been training. While it is public knowledge they are used to rescue naval swimmers and locate underwater mines, the speculation remains on how many are used kamikaze-style to attack ships. As Rebecca Boyle reports in Popular Science:
Communication with dolphins is getting better all the time — they’ve been using iPads, for one thing, and humans have been working on a type of Rosetta Stone-like two-way translation device. A new gadget could improve matters even further, by allowing humans to produce the full range of dolphin sounds. The acoustics researchers who developed it call it the Dolphin Speaker.
Plenty of work is being done with dolphin sounds, but they have mostly focused on dolphin vocalizations and their hearing anatomy. Dolphins can not only hear and produce clicks, whistles and burst pulses well outside of the range of human hearing, but they can vocalize at several different frequency ranges at once.
Earth’s most intelligent species is dying off in droves. Report from the International Business Times:
Around 877 carcasses of dolphins and porpoises were found on Peruvian beaches in two and half months. Peruvian officials and environmentalists are trying to unravel the mystery behind the phenomenon.
No concrete reasons have been figured out yet but authorities believe that it could possibly be a viral infection that may have killed the dolphins in huge numbers. Environmental groups in the country blame the sound waves generated from oil exploration work carried out by Houston-based BPZ Energy Company between February 8 and April 8 off Northern Peru.
Mass dolphin deaths have been reported globally in recent years, raising concerns about the survival of the species.
Their names, however, are whistle patterns. New Scientist reports:
Stephanie King of the University of St Andrews, UK, and colleagues monitored 179 pairs of wild bottlenose dolphins off the Florida coast between 1988 and 2004. Of these, 10 were seen copying each other’s signature whistles, which the dolphins make to identify themselves to each other.
The behavior has never been documented before, and was only seen in pairs composed of a mother and her calf or adults who would normally move around and hunt together.
The copied whistles changed frequency in the same way as real signature whistles, but either started from a higher frequency or didn’t last as long, suggesting Dave was not merely imitating Alan.
Photo: Mark Interrante (CC)
Maureen Langlois reports on the amazing healing powers of dolphins, for NPR:
Dr. Michael Zasloff, a surgeon and researcher at Georgetown University, is famous for discovering compounds in the skin of frogs and sharks that can fight disease in humans.
Now, he’s tapping another animal to mine the secrets of its immune system. It turns out dolphins have a remarkable ability to heal quickly—and seemingly painlessly—from severe shark bites. Zasloff hopes that learning how dolphins resist infection and use stem cells to rebuild missing tissue will provide some insight into how to help injured humans.
To do this research, Zasloff reviewed the “clinical histories” of a few dolphins who recently succumbed to shark bites. He also interviewed all the dolphin experts he could find. His results appeared in a letter in the online version of the Journal of Investigative Dermatology.
Shots caught up with Zasloff last week to learn more about his adventures in dolphin biology.
Assassinating enemy divers with CO2-filled syringes? Parachuting from the sky and blowing up enemy ships kamikaze-style? Acoustically detecting a 3-inch ball 200 meters away in complete darkness? All this and more as Skeptoid covers the James Bond’s of the sea, deployed first by the USSR and today by the Indian Navy and U.S. Navy Marine Mammal System:
Dolphins and sea lions have advantages that are hard for navies to ignore. They swim far faster than divers, and are much easier and cheaper to deploy than remote underwater vehicles. They can dive hundreds of meters and return, with no concern about decompression, quicker than a human diver could even get suited up. Dolphins’ underwater acuity is such that they can acoustically detect a 3-inch ball 200 meters away in complete darkness, and even discriminate between different kinds of metal. A dolphin’s brain is famously larger than a human’s, in part because so much of it is dedicated to processing sonar signals.
What secrets of the sea have dolphins been waiting to tell us? We may soon find out (hopefully not just tuna jokes). New Scientist reports:
A diver carrying a computer that tries to recognize dolphin sounds and generate responses in real time will soon attempt to communicate with wild dolphins off the coast of Florida. If the bid is successful, it will be a big step towards two-way communication between humans and dolphins.
Since the 1960s, captive dolphins have been communicating via pictures and sounds. In the 1990s, Louis Herman of the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory in Honolulu, Hawaii, found that bottlenose dolphins can keep track of over 100 different words. They can also respond appropriately to commands in which the same words appear in a different order, understanding the difference between “bring the surfboard to the man” and “bring the man to the surfboard”, for example.
But communication in most of these early experiments was one-way, says Denise Herzing, founder of the Wild Dolphin Project in Jupiter, Florida.
MNN reports:
This time last year, producers of the “The Cove” were riding high after winning Best Documentary at the 2010 Academy Awards.
Directed by Louie Psihoyos and produced by Fisher Stevens and Paula DuPre Pesmen, the film shed dramatic light on the thousands of dolphins slaughtered each year in the Japanese fishing town of Taiji. “It has the breathless pace of a Bourne movie, but none of the comfort of fiction. This is documentary filmmaking at its most exciting and purposeful,” wrote Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers in a review.
This past weekend, residents of Taiji were able to give their own verdicts after a local activist group, called People Concerned for the Ocean, delivered a Japanese-dubbed copy of the film to each home…
