Friday, January 30, 2009

Dolphins prepare their meals


(wingsofart.com)

"So long and thanks for all the fish!"
(Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

One of the 31 Planes of Existence in Buddhist cosmology is the Ani-mal Realm. This world is expansive and mindboggling, though often taken for granted as merely the mundane and visible world of cats, dogs, and maybe "edible cows."

It is, in fact, extremely diverse and difficult to fathom as this story about the smartest creature on the planet illustrates. (According to the Hitchhiker's Guide, humans are only the third smartest, based on independent observations, just behind lab mice). Even what is possible in our Human Plane is scarcely known to us (e.g., Uzbekistan discovers 128 year old woman).

CANBERRA, Australia (Reuters) – Dolphins are the chefs of the seas, having been seen going through precise and elaborate preparations to rid cuttlefish of ink and bone to produce a soft meal of calamari, Australian scientists say.

A wild female Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphin was observed going through the same series of complicated steps to prepare cuttlefish prey for eating in the Spencer Gulf, in South Australia state.

"It's a sign of how well their brains are developed. It's a pretty clever way to get pure calamari without all the horrible bits," Mark Norman, the curator of mollusks at Museum Victoria and a research team member, told the Canberra Times newspaper.

The research team, writing in the science journal PLoS One, said they repeatedly observed a female dolphin herding cuttlefish out of algal weed and onto a clear, sandy patch of seafloor.

The dolphin, identified using circular body scars, then pinned the cuttlefish with its snout while standing on its head, before killing it instantly with a rapid downward thrust and "loud click" audible to divers as the hard cuttlebone broke. More>>

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