Whale intelligence continues to amaze and dumbfound scientists

The divers and scientists lucky enough to spend time among the world’s whales often find themselves wondering what is going on in the oversized brains of the sea’s largest inhabitants.  

We know they have the biggest brains in the animal kingdom, with a sperm whale’s weighing more than five times that of an average human brain. A bottlenose dolphin’s encephalization quotient, a measure of brain to body size ratio, is second only to that of a human.

Their intelligence is part of the reason they have proven to be such successful animals. The blue whale is the largest creature ever known to have lived, weighing as much as 140 tons. The much smaller killer whale is the blue whale’s only natural threat in the sea and is an apex predator in all the world’s oceans.

We also know that their intelligence evolved long before our own, tens of millions of years earlier, making it highly likely that dolphins and other toothed whales possessed the greatest intellectual power before Homo sapiens.

But what are they doing with all that apparent brain power?

It was a question that came to the mind of American scientist and conservationist Nan Hauser during a very close encounter with a humpback whale off the coast of the Cook Islands in 2017.  

Humpbacks, a species of filter-feeding whale that can weigh as much as 40 tons, usually leave scientists and other divers alone but on this occasion, a male humpback whale took an active interest in the scientist, deliberately and persistently pushing her with his pectoral fin for about 10 minutes.

“I was prepared to lose my life,” Hauser later told National Geographic. “I thought he was going to hit me and break my bones.”

It was only when Hauser spotted the tail of a tiger shark that she realised what the whale was doing. Tiger sharks are one of the few species of shark that do attack humans, and are known to be a menace to whales as well. For whatever reason, the whale appeared to have wanted to save Hauser and was manoeuvring her out of the way of the shark.

“Maybe the shark wasn’t going to attack me… but he [the whale] was trying to save my life,” Hauser says of the encounter, which was recorded on an underwater camera, and later became a viral video.

Humpbacks are one of the most charismatic of the filter-feeding baleen whales. A favourite of whale watchers, they are often seen propelling their immense bodies out of the water, most likely to communicate with others of the same species, but possibly for other reasons. Their underwater “songs” carry for hundreds of miles.

This was not the only example of humpback whales interfering to save the lives of other species. These whales have been seen putting themselves between oceanic predators, typically killer whales, and other marine life, including the calves of other whales, seals and sunfish. Dolphins (part of the same family that includes the large baleen whales) have been known to help save drowning humans.

What motivates a whale to save a human or a sunfish is unknown. It could be a form of altruism, or the result of protective instincts towards a calf, or the protection of a wider group, or another behaviour we haven’t thought of. This kind of activity seems to confirm the whale’s position in our minds as semi-mythical beings, cruising the world’s oceans singing to each other and conducting good deeds.

Yet it wasn’t long ago that whales were appreciated more for their capacity to produce oil for a range of household products than for their apparent altruism.

We hunted whales in their tens of thousands every year, pulling back only when their populations were on the verge of extinction and the industrial hunting of whales had become less profitable. Whaling on a significant scale continued well into the 1960s and 1970s.

Part of the problem was that whales have historically been difficult to study in the wild; they were seen as being akin to giant fish rather than sophisticated marine mammals, gifted with some of the largest and most complex brains ever to have evolved.

“They have a very, very complicated brain,” Lori Marino, a renowned neuroscientist and expert in animal behaviour and intelligence, says.

“That is something we only discovered when we started to use imaging techniques. People thought their brains were large but kind of simple, now we know that is not the case.”

Marino’s work with dolphins has included the publication of conclusive evidence that bottlenose dolphins can recognise themselves in a mirror, putting themselves in the company of only a few animals, including ourselves, a few of the great apes, Asian elephants and magpies.

Adapted to an environment very different to our own, the whale brain has developed to meet different needs, in a three-dimensional world where the requirements to survive and thrive do not present a ready comparison with our lives.

Frustratingly, for anyone after an answer to the question of “how smart is the dolphin/whale?”, the answer is not only that we don’t know but that our capacity to answer that question is limited by both our current understanding of neuroscience and our own biases.

Our entire way of thinking about intelligence is skewed by our own perception of what it means to be smart, which inevitably involves comparing other animals against our own intelligence. For today’s scientists, the question is not how smart are the whales, but in what ways can we consider them to be smart and how are they using that intelligence to succeed in their environment?

“When people ask me, ‘Are dolphins smart?’ I say, ‘I don’t know, but I can tell you the ways in which they are smart,’” Janet Mann, professor of biology and psychology at Georgetown University says. “What we do know is they do X, Y and Z, and if they can do those things, there must be some brain power behind it.”

One hallmark of a whale’s intelligence is its ability to communicate and navigate underwater. A dolphin’s world view is necessarily more acoustic than our own, with echolocation (sonar) providing a 3D map of their surroundings that is incorporated into a visual image of their surroundings. It is processed and perceived in a way we find hard to fully understand.

“They have a holistic view of what they are perceiving,” Marino says. “We might hear a sound and remember a sound but the way their brain works is echolocation mixing with the visual image, producing something like a hologram.”

As dolphins “see” their world in sound, as well as communicating about their world in sound, it is likely that they are able to project an idea of what they are seeing at other members of their immediate group. The sound is transmitted as an “auditory image”, rather than requiring the brain to interpret the sound and imagine what the image might be.

This is likely to be an efficient and accurate way of exchanging information between members of a group, not least because it is now thought that dolphins have an enhanced capacity to process the information their brains are receiving, possibly up to 20 times faster than a human brain.

Their brains also appear to be wired up to experience a range of emotions and may have an advanced sense of self-awareness. In a killer whale, the limbic system, a part of the brain associated with emotional awareness and memory formation, is exaggerated to the point where it has formed a unique structure on the brain now known as the paralimbic lobe.

In recent years, scientists have begun to speculate that this part of the brain is also responsible for a form of collective self-awareness between members of a pod.

“They may have some sense of self that is spread out among the rest of their pod,” according to Marino. “What happens to members of the pod, happens to them.”

It is a theory that goes some way towards explaining events like mass strandings, where an entire group of whales (often the pilot whale) beaches itself, apparently due to the distress of one particular individual. They are highly dependent on their social networks for every element of their lives, and have a very keen sense of friend and foe, as well as close family bonds.

“With bottlenose dolphins, we can see a multi-level alliance structure,” says Mann.

“In bottlenose dolphins, the community is never together all at once. To determine who is connected to who and how, among hundreds or even thousands of individuals they associate with, they must sample their network to work out who is friend or foe. We also know they can identify friends and foes partly based on the cultural behaviours that are passed down.”

In the wild, examples of this “whale culture” in action includes a population of dolphins that have been seen using the body of a scorpion fish to prod a moray eel out of hiding, another puts sea sponges on their beaks to assist in the location of fish that are hiding under a rock or sand, a form of tool use.

Each of these techniques demonstrates a high level of problem-solving capability, but the capacity to hand down this behaviour to future generations is of equal interest to the people studying these animals, as this shows a form of culture has developed within particular populations.

“They are very cultural animals and have a lot of interesting cultural traditions that they follow which makes them something very familiar to us. That is true for belugas, orca and bottlenoses as well as other kinds of cetacean,” Marino says.

“They have to depend on learning to keep those traditions going, which requires intelligence.”

From the 1960s onwards, scientists started to spend significant amounts of time among whales, much of it with bottlenose dolphins in captivity. They began to realise they were dealing with creatures that possess many of the attributes we typically associate with higher levels of intelligence, namely, problem-solving, self-recognition, elements of language, complex social structures and the ability to coordinate a group in the service of hunting or the protection of young and elder members of a family.

Bottlenose dolphins in marine parks and military facilities have proved to be excellent problem solvers and are able to understand complicated commands issued to them by human instructors.

According to Mann, “They can remember the signature whistle of a specific dolphin more than 20 years after they last interacted with that dolphin.

“That suggests they have long-term recognition. Unlike with humans, dolphins don’t have visual stimuli like photographs to help them remember things in the intervening period.” 

Many of the researchers who spend time with these animals say that, far from being a one-way study, the dolphins are incredibly quick-witted and seem to be testing the intelligence of the scientists, playing tricks and games with the researchers even while they are being studied.

One of the most notable examples of this was a field trip in 1985 when a group of researchers looking into dolphin behaviour got bored at staring into at an empty sea and tried to find other ways of keeping themselves amused while they waited for their subject matter.

To entertain his fellow crew members, one of the scientists put seaweed on his head and pretended to be Poseidon, the Greek god of the sea. He then threw the seaweed into the water and turned back his colleagues. Moments later a dolphin appeared next to the boat, with the seaweed on her head.

It is possible that this was a coincidence, but dolphins are known to be excellent mimics, something that is seen by thousands of people in aquaria around the world. For scientists, this kind of playfulness, which is widely exhibited by dolphins in the wild, is also a hallmark of intelligence.

As is so often the case with our oceans, when it comes to understanding and interpreting the intelligence of marine mammals, there is still a lot we don’t know. Seemingly every major study brings up new behaviours and traits that we had not considered before, or had not thought possible.

One conclusion we can draw from our current knowledge is the practice of having large cetaceans in aquaria is likely to be causing the animals considerable distress.

Marino no longer works with whales or dolphins in captivity and is founder and president of the Whale Sanctuary Project, which aims to retire orcas and belugas in entertainment parks to naturalistic seaside sanctuaries.

“In a concrete tank they have no reason to use most of their senses,” she says “certainly not echolocation, certainly not a lot of sound as nothing is going on, there is not much to see. It is like sensory deprivation, there is nothing to do.

“It is like being in a small room with the lights off and once in a while, someone gives you a sandwich under the door. It is like someone being held in solitary confinement.”

How smart is a whale? We don’t know. But the question itself seems to miss the point.

“I don’t think we fully understand how intelligent they are or the ways in which they are intelligent,” Marino concludes. “The ways that we recognise intelligence are the ways we recognise intelligence in ourselves. There is clearly a form of intelligence above and beyond our own in these animals but that is going to be very difficult for us to determine.”