When we humans use chemicals, when we harvest durians, or play baseball, what do these activities have in common? yes you've guessed it, we use gloves when we indulge in the following activities. What is its purpose?..To protect ourselves from harm of course.
We humans are not the only ones who use tools in our everyday life. The woodpecker finch uses twigs to draw out grubs from within logs, whilst our cousins, the chimpanzee, uses similar tools to fish out termites in a termite nest. How about in the sea then? This blog introduces another similar example, but it is based in the sea. This particular sea creature uses tools when foraging for food. It is less surprising, though, to learn that the innovative tool-using behavior belongs to our intelligent friends, the bottle nose dolphin (Tursiops Truncatus).
"Sometimes, when a dolphin in Shark Bay, off the coast of Western Australia, prepares to forage, she drops to the sea floor, rips a fat conical chunk of sea sponge out of it, covers her beak with the sponge cone and sets to work. After she finds the fish she wants, she drops the sponge. "Sponging," as the scientists at the Shark Bay Dolphin Research Project call this behavior, is an unusual instance of an animal using another animal as a tool, but that is not what makes the sponging interesting to biologists." (Retica, 2005).
The interesting thing about this behavior is not simply that dolphins use the sea sponge like a glove (since we know bottlenose dolphins to be extremely clever). It interests scientists more that this tool-using behavior does not have any genetic explaination, but is something that is picked up from their mothers (Krutzen, 2005).
The presence of culture within animal societies is something that is interesting and has been widely debated. In this example though, the use of tools "is almost exclusively limited to a single matriline that is part of a large albeit social network of frequently interacting individuals, adding a new dimension to charting cultural phenomena among animals" (Krutzen, 2005).
If this is indeed a case of culture among animals, there is every possibility that other dolphins could watch and learn, similar to a spread of culture in human terms. If such, we may see a great drop in sea sponges. Spongebob it seems, have lots to worry about!
Citations:
1)
Dolphin culture by Retica, Aaron.
The New York Times. Published 11 December 2005.
2) Krutzen, M., Mann. J., Heithaus, M. R., Connor, R. C., Bejder, L., & Sherwin, W. B. (June, 2005) Cultural transmission of tool use in bottlenose dolphins.
Proceedings of the national academy of sciences. 102(25), 8939-8943.
Links:
3)
Cultures in Chimpanzees