Animal intelligence is an oft-disputed and highly subjective topic. The discussion sometimes revolves around the smartest dog breeds, just how capable chimpanzees are of acting like humans or what kind of problems an octopus can solve. But dolphins come up again and again as one of the most gifted species on the planet.
In fact, they are sometimes cited as being the second sharpest animals on the planet after ourselves, though it should be noted that Douglas Adams clocked humans just after the marine mammals at third place.
“Man has always assumed that he is more intelligent than dolphins because he has achieved so much — the wheel, New York, wars and so on — while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time,” the science fiction writer wrote in his book So Long and Thanks for all the Fish. “But, conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man — for precisely the same reasons.”
Jokes aside, there are a lot of reasons to give dolphins credit. The small cetaceans have highly developed language abilities and can learn complicated tricks while acting on TV shows. Dolphins have served the U.S. and Russian navies and some believe they can even sense cancer tumors, though the science has yet to back up this myth.
