Underwater Intelligence – Meet the Boffins of Our Blue Planet

I’m sure many of you agree that our blue planet is truly incredible but do we know just how amazing it is? We’ve rounded up the top five most intelligent underwater animals which will amaze you, inspire you and hopefully make you want to go round telling all your friends how wonderful planet Earth really is! Hopefully it will also give you that extra motivation to embrace a zero-waste lifestyle or a beach clean habit to help protect our oceans.

Let’s start with dolphins, a relatively well-known brainbox and undeniable favourite. The first of dolphins’ superpowers is echolocation. As sound travels much further underwater than light, dolphins have adapted to use sound as a way to identify food sources and their pods. They frequently send out high pitched clicks, whistles and squeaks and these noises bounce back off surrounding objects in the ocean. The time it takes for this noise to return to the dolphins’ ears, tells them how far away their favourite snack is. This astonishing superpower can also tell them how big the school of fish is, how fast they are moving and even what kind of fish it is! On days when the perfect lunch has been found, tens of dolphin pods all join together to form superpods of over 1,000 individuals. Once settled into their family feast, dolphins introduce themselves with their unique click and whistle sequence, or in human terms, their name. Dolphins are the only creature other than humans thought to use names and they are much better at it than many of us too with dolphins remembering others’ names for decades.

Dolphins like to keep their minds active too, although unlike us, they don’t turn to a crossword or a sudoku to do so. Often, they set about inventing new ways of hunting, with one dolphin pod fixing sea sponges onto the tips of their snout before burying their noses into the seabed to find food. This action disturbs hiding fish, causing them to flee their sandy hideout and land straight into dolphins’ hungry mouths. The sponge has been employed as a way for this group of dolphins to protect their snouts from bumps, cuts and stings and this trait is carefully passed on to their offspring which are very carefully raised over a number of years to ensure they inherit all the necessary life skills. All this brain power means that dolphins are relatively easy to train, with one in captivity trained to clear litter from her tank in return for fish. She quickly learned that if she tore one sheet of paper into several pieces, she would get five times as much fish than if she simply retrieved the whole sheet. Much like we see police dogs and horses, military dolphins were widely used in the Cold War by the Soviet and American Navy as they could identify underwater mines, submarines and enemy swimmers. Dolphins were sent into the ocean depths using their echolocation to find threats and, once detected, they released a small buoy which would then bob to the surface and flash, allowing officers to map potential hazards. While this use of dolphins is controversial, it remains incredible that still, in today’s world, no technology can match the power of their echolocation.

Next let’s move on to a slightly less charismatic critter; the octopus. What these creatures lack in backbone, they certainly make up for in brains as one whole section of their brain is entirely devoted to learning, something which has made them pretty impressive escape artists. Inky the octopus resides in a New Zealand aquarium, but one day he managed to slip through a tiny gap in his tank and slide 164 foot down a drainpipe into the sea in Hawkes Bay; maybe Houdini would have been a better name. Other aquarium antics include shooting jets of water at the light switch to short the circuit and cheekily descend the room into darkness while others sneak out of their tank to eat a tropical fish in the neighbouring tank before slinking back unnoticed into their own tank; something which sounds much like a teenager sneaking out of their window in the dead of night. Yet what may be most impressive is that they can open a jar. Sounds easy right, eight legs must make that a little easier? Yet when I say they can open a jar, I mean they can open a jar from the inside whilst they are trapped in it!

Next up are penguins which are a little more reluctant to showcase their intelligence in comparison to our plucky octopuses. Yet their mating rituals give away their true brains and even their romantic side. Penguins mate with the same partner year on year but once they have finished raising their chicks, they go their separate ways until next year. At the start of the breeding season, males will return to their beloved rookery and inspect the area, making sure it is up to scratch for the more fussy females. Once they have decided on a suitable spot, they set about making the perfect nest from stones, pebbles and branches. Females and males then reunite by squawking out their unique call over and over until they recognise their partner’s voice; an impressive feat in a rookery full of several thousand individuals. The female will then inspect the nest to ensure all the branches are plumped enough but funnily, the rocks are the main concern of many penguins. While female humans may lust after sparkling diamond rocks, penguins are after a much less glamourous rock, with females doing just about anything to get their hands on as many as possible. Females may often convince a male she will join him in his flipper-made nest for the night in return for his best rock, only to take the pebble and quickly waddle away before the deal is complete! Gentoo penguins further show their softer side by scouring the beach for the perfect pebble to present their partner in what many have named a ‘pebble proposal’. Clearly some of us have a lot to learn from these sweet creatures!

Another adorable critter with both brains and beauty are sea otters who are believed to be one of the first animals to use tools millions of years ago. Sea otters can often be seen balancing a clam shell on their bellies while hammering the edge with a rock in order to crack the tough shell and snack on the insides. Even pups raised in rescue centres without their mothers have been shown to display this behaviour without any guidance at all. As the human world expands around them however, they have also picked up a few more unusual traits. Some otters in captivity have been trained to throw a small ball through a low hoop on the side of their pool in one of the most heart-warming games of basketball, while others have even been caught stealing from vending machines!

Finally, we move onto orcas whose intelligence is still under some debate. We know that different groups around the world have different local languages much like us and also varying hunting techniques which are passed down through generations, with grandmothers playing a key role in raising young. A very risky hunting technique has been seen in Antarctic populations where baby whales are pushed onto the beach to grab unsuspecting seals before the mother than has to drag the almost beached baby back out to sea. Like dolphins, they also have great echolocation which helps them find their favourite fish; not just any old salmon, but chinook salmon. Recently, an orca in captivity has also started mimicking human words, being able to quite convincingly say ‘hello’, ‘goodbye’ and scarily, ‘Amy’, the name of her trainer. However, the debate comes down to whether they have the cognitive capacity to experience anger, take purposeful actions and be aware of their consequences. This is a controversial topic, yet one neuroscience researcher argues that orcas are the most cultural species after humans. The lack of cultural richness that captive orcas receive, he believes, was the cause of one male orca killing his trainer, with the researcher firmly believing that the whale knew exactly the consequences of his actions.

While this is still debated, there remain many other marvels under the sea which we are not even aware of yet. This makes protecting our oceans seem increasingly important as even these incredibly intelligent animals can’t fight back against our plastic tide. It’s up to us to save some of the planet’s most gifted species and maybe we can use them as inspiration as we embark on our quest for sustainability.

By Neve McCracken-Heywood