At­lan­tic spot­ted dol­phins (Ste­nel­la fron­t­a­lis) ap­par­ent­ly teach their calves for­ag­ing skills, re­search­ers say. A vi­deo (MPEG for­mat) shows ac­tiv­i­ty that sci­en­tists be­lieve may rep­re­sent teach­ing be­hav­ior. (Im­age cour­te­sy NOAA)

With flu­id, some­times playful-looking move­ments, a moth­er dol­phin leads her calf to the seafloor and starts pok­ing around for a meal—fish hid­ing in the sand. The young­ster seems to watch close­ly.

The scene, cap­tured on vid­e­o, is one of many cases filmed by re­search­ers of what they de­scribe as dol­phins ap­par­ently teach­ing their young.
While a few an­i­mal spe­cies have been re­ported to “teach” their young sur­viv­al skills, dol­phins seem to dis­play some teach­ing in­nova­t­ions shown by none oth­ers ex­cept hu­mans, sci­en­tists say in a new stu­dy.

Re­search­ers are fas­ci­nated by re­ports of an­i­mal teach­ing be­cause it may re­veal an abil­ity thought to be pos­sibly un­ique to hu­mans—the ca­pacity to in­fer some­one else’s thoughts. This abil­ity, a mile­stone in ev­o­lu­tion, is some­times called “the­ory of mind.”

An­oth­er crea­ture de­scribed as hav­ing im­pres­sive teach­ing strate­gies is the meer­kat, a type of mon­goose. One study not­ed that meer­kats give their young in­jured prey, such as stinger-deprived scor­pi­ons, so the pup can fin­ish the kill and en­joy the meal. The adult looks on, pro­vid­ing more aid if nec­es­sary. As pups grow, adults grad­u­ally hike the dif­fi­cul­ty lev­el by of­fer­ing harder-to-handle prey.

Dol­phin “teach­ing” ap­pears to in­volve some dif­fer­ent tricks, ac­cord­ing to the new stu­dy. These in­clude an ap­par­ent com­mu­nica­t­ion com­po­nent: the ocean mam­mals make “point­ing” mo­tions with their snout, ac­tions pre­vi­ously do­cu­mented in cap­ti­vity but not in the wild. 

The find­ings add to pre­vi­ous re­search sug­gest­ing dol­phins have a “the­ory of mind,” ac­cord­ing to the in­ves­ti­ga­tors, but they added that more ev­i­dence may be needed.

Re­gard­less, the study shows teach­ing may be a key to how dol­phin “so­cial learn­ing and pos­sibly cul­ture are trans­mit­ted from one genera­t­ion to the nex­t,” wrote the re­search­ers, Court­ney Bend­er of Flor­i­da At­lantic Uni­ver­s­ity and col­leagues, in the stu­dy. The re­port ap­pears in the July 29 on­line is­sue of the re­search jour­nal An­i­mal Cog­ni­tion.

Bend­er and col­la­bo­ra­tors an­a­lyzed ar­chives of vid­e­os tak­en of At­lan­tic spot­ted dol­phins be­tween 1991 and 2004 from the ar­chives the Wild Dol­phin Proj­ect, a re­search group based in Ju­pi­ter, Fla. They com­pared the for­ag­ing ac­ti­vi­ties of moth­ers when they were in and out of the pres­ence of their own calves. The idea was that moth­ers might change their for­ag­ing styles in par­tic­u­lar ways to make a “teach­ing” ex­pe­ri­ence of it.

An­a­lyz­ing 38 episodes of for­ag­ing, each last­ing from an in­i­tial search to a cap­ture and eat­ing of prey, the team re­ported sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ences in the episodes with calf pre­s­ent. The most strik­ing change: when the calf was there, moth­ers stretched out the chase eight times long­er on av­er­age, re­peat­edly cap­tur­ing, let­ting go and re-cap­tur­ing the same vic­tim—as if to dem­on­strate the tech­nique. 

“These ex­ag­ger­at­ed for­ag­ing be­hav­iors may pro­vide a win­dow of op­por­tun­ity for the calves to ob­serve, and pos­sibly learn from, the ex­am­ple,” Bend­er and col­leagues wrote.

But the point­ing-like ges­tures seen dur­ing the for­ag­ing with calves were “par­tic­u­larly in­ter­est­ing,” they added. These con­sisted of “ex­ag­ger­at­ed move­ments in the di­rec­tion of the prey,” ori­ent­ing the body in its di­rec­tion, as if to point it out. This “may be an attention-directed ref­er­en­tial be­hav­ior si­m­i­lar to the spon­ta­ne­ous point­ing ob­served by dol­phins dur­ing ex­pe­ri­ments in cap­ti­vity,” Bend­er’s group wrote.

To con­firm wheth­er the ob­served be­hav­ior is really teach­ing, re­search­ers are cur­rently an­a­lyz­ing wheth­er the calfs are really learn­ing from it, the sci­en­tists added. But even with­out that da­ta, they wrote, “we be­lieve that this study de­tail­ing the al­tered for­ag­ing be­hav­ior of the moth­ers is a sig­nif­i­cant find­ing in the ar­ea of an­i­mal cog­ni­tion.”