Day of the Dolphin

The film Day of the Dolphin is inspired by Lilly's work on dolphin intelligence. In the film the dolphins are trained by a 'good' scientist then 'kidnapped' to be used to kill the US President. The Simpons parody the film and undo the anthropocentrism by showing intelligent dolphins invading land and wrecking havoc on humanity. This then became a video game but which, alas, became anthropocentric as gamers play as the human characters to beat back the dolphins. When do we get to join the animal revolution?! And when do we get to undermine the head of state?

Octopus is a force to be reckoned with

Camo: "Two deep-ocean species of cephalopod, an octopus and a squid, can go from transparent to opaque in the blink of an eye, a new study finds." (active camouflage)

Smarts: despite a walnut size brain (distributed through its arms and head), the octopus displays tool use and play and some basic language skills.

Technology: manipulates stones and shells for tools.

Spy Animals

Cats, Squirrels, Hawks, Insects and more at Huffington Post.

Sample:
In the 1960’s, the CIA reportedly explored surgically inserting microphones and transmitters into cats, a project dubbed “Acoustic Kitty.” Former CIA officer Victor Marchetti told The Telegraph that the project "slit the cat open, put batteries in him, wired him up. The tail was used as an antenna. They made a monstrosity." The first wired cat was, according to the Guardian, released for spying and took just a few steps towards its target before the cat was run over by a taxi. The CIA concluded that the project was impractical for intelligence gathering.

Militarized Dolphins

These are my field notes from an excellent essay on the strange history of military dolphin experiments.

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/5503

Dolphin’s militarized

They could be very useful as antipersonnel self-directing weapons. They could do nocturnal harbor work, capture spies let out of submarines or dropped from airplanes, attacking silently and efficiently and bringing back information from such contacts. They could deliver atomic nuclear warheads and attach them to submarines or surface vessels and to torpedoes and missiles.

Dolphins and Other aliens:

dolphin laboratory could provide a model system for “breaking through” to a nonhuman mind. In the era of Sputnik this meant actual extraterrestrials, which may sound crazy now, but these issues lay on the cutting edge of national concern in those days: if we met the little green men (or, more likely, started receiving radio signals from deep space that looked to carry nonstochastic levels of information), what would we do?

One of these visionary “Dolphins” was a brilliant young Harvard astrophysicist named Carl Sagan, who made his way down to St. Thomas several times in these years to meet Lilly’s dolphins and muse about alternate forms of life in the cosmos.

If dolphins prove as intelligent as the initial studies suggest, then “for a long time presumably they will be in the position of the Negro races in Africa who are attempting to become Westernized”

see “we shall not be moved” blog entry.

Gregory Bateson visits Lilly:

Bateson laid out a sweeping theory of cross-species language development: human beings, in his view, possessed a language disproportionately preoccupied with stuff. This was our joy and our pain, since the evolution of such thing-centered linguistic abilities had gone hand in hand with the extraordinary material culture of Homo sapiens, from moldboard plows to supersonic cruise missiles. Yet in Bateson’s view this same evolution had left us with a grotesquely impoverished intelligence in the domain of social relations: those intersubjective complexities, he averred, “are very poorly represented in language and consciousness.” Homo faber was, in this sense, “stunted,” and the consequences, for Bateson, were clear: war, social conflict, pervasive psychological maladjustment.

Permit a human-sized intelligence to develop over millions of years in a highly social animal, which—on account of its aquatic evolution—possessed no hands, and thus no real capacity to manipulate a material culture, and it was reasonable to hypothesize that the cognition of such a creature would be radically, fundamentally, pervasively social. Theirs would be a language not of things but of beings. As Bateson put it to Lilly, “If I am right, and they are mainly sophisticated about the intricacies of interpersonal relationships, then of course (after training analysis) they will be ideal psychotherapists for us.”

/See in ecology of mind chapter: Problems in Cetacean and Other Mammalian Communication.

Octopus Armor

Yes, this on the heels of Lester Shubin's death... Octopuses has learned to arm itself.

techne: "The coconut-carrying behavior makes the veined octopus the newest member of the elite club of tool-using animals"

armor: "An octopus would dig up the two halves of a coconut shell, then use them as protective shielding when stopping in exposed areas or when resting in sediment."

(note: link includes cool video of this event)

Calif. aquarium blames flooding on curious octopus

Santa Monica aquarium blames the soaking they discovered Tuesday morning on one of the two aquarium's Kid's Corner resident spotted octopi, a tiny female known for being curious and gregarious with visitors. The octopus apparently tugged on a valve to the recycling water tube and that allowed 200 hundred gallons of water to overflow its tank.

Aquarium spokeswoman Randi Parent says no sea life was harmed by the flood, but the brand new, ecologically designed floors might be damaged by the water.