An interesting report on Dolphin games includes this:
The captive dolphins “produced 317 distinct forms of play behavior during the five years that they were observed,” they wrote.
One calf became adept at “blowing bubbles while swimming upside-down near the bottom of the pool and then chasing and biting each bubble before it reached the surface,” the researchers continued. “She then began to release bubbles while swimming closer and closer to the surface, eventually being so close that she could not catch a single bubble.”
“During all of this, the number of bubbles released was varied, the end result being that the dolphin learned to produce different numbers of bubbles from different depths, the apparent goal being to catch the last bubble right before it reached the surface of the water.”
One assumes the dolphins have also figured out a better tie-breaker than the NFL.
And there’s this wise dolphin-related thought NewMexiKen read some years ago:
Mankind has always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had 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. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man — for precisely the same reasons.
Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Dolphin article link via BoingBoing.