Sushi for lunch and something to wash my hands and face after. Seriously though im not surprised by this either, though im glad its been observed. Some research has been done and I beleive is ongoing with the use of healing terminal illness with dolphins. The initial idea was to provide a positive emotional experience, for terminally ill people by going in the water with the dolphins. However it was found that the Dolphins advanced sonar abilities allowed it to scan their bodies internally. The Dolphins could see where any tumour was and then they seemed to focus their sonar on that area. Speculation is as to wether they are using their sonar to destroy the tumour. I think they are .
On the emotional healing level there are many people who claim some amazing experiances and results with dolphins.
DolphinTherapy
Dr. Ken Marten at Sea Life Park in Hawai'i recently demonstrated that dolphins recognize themselves in mirrors, which shows dolphins are self-aware, a trait shared with only humans and great apes. Dolphins were also taught to recognize some 40 spoken Hawaiian words by Dr. Wayne Batteau, and were taught to imitate English by Dr. John C. Lilly, M.D. Dolphins currently working with Dr. Louis Herman in Hawai'i can recognize some 300 hand signs in some 2000 combinations.2 Dolphins have done better at language tasks than any other creature. Research in Russia by Markov and Ostrovskaya concludes that dolphins have their own language with up to a trillion "words" possible.
Dolphins, Therapy and Autism
Dolphins are very intelligent animals, officially the Bottlenose dolphin is the next most intelligent animal after man. As a result of this intelligence dolphins are naturally curious animals and will instinctively investigate anything that is unusual to them, including us. Their intelligence has also allowed them to develop language to an extent, so far scientists have had little success in deciphering delphinic language and there is sum debate as to whether it could be defined as a real language. However the research in delphinic communication has revealed one important thing, dolphins have names; every dolphin studied was found to a special sound that represented it's name, called a callsig. Other members of the pod would use this sound to attract the dolphin or simply call it out just to see where it was. This may not sound like much but it proved one important thing, dolphins have a concept of self, to understand the concept of individual names they must first understand (or as the very least be aware of) individuality and all of the things which go with it.
General Behaviour of Dolphins
I know its on my to do list in life to go and swim with the dolphins, always been a bit worried though that I wouldnt want to come back!
My favourite quote on dolphins
"The voice of the dolphin in air is like that of the human, in that they can pronounce vowels, and combinations of vowels" - Aristotle
[edit on 7-6-2005 by MischeviousElf]
