Dolphins and whales are dumber than...

Dolphins and whales are dumber than goldfish and don't have the know-how to match a rat, just discovered research from South Africa point out tos

For years, humans have assumed the large brains of dolphins meant the mammals were highly intelligent.

Paul Manger from Johannesburg's University of the Witwatersrand, however, says it is not intelligence that created the dolphin super- brain -- it's the arctic

To survive underwater, these warm-blooded animals lay opened brains that have a haphazard of insulating material -- called glia -- unless not too many neurons, the gray essence that counts for reasoned thinking.

The same goe for whales because they share the dolphins' brain composition, he said.

over and above while dolphins aren't as smart as race tend to think, they are as happy as they strike one as being Manger said dolphins have a "huge amount" of serotonin in their brains, which is what he described as "the happy drug"

still measuring intelligence by glia and cortex ratios could be just as unreliable as the big-brain theory, said the head of Vancouver Aquarium's cetacean research program, Lance Barrett- Lennard.

Wading into the debate, Barrett-Lennard said the highly social networks of dolphins indicates they have mighty social intelligence.

"A dolphin could have a brain the size of a walnut and it wouldn't affect the observations they live excessively complex and social lives," Barrett-Lennard said. "They restrain account of who their friends are, with exceedingly complicated hierarchies and allegiances.

"The other thing is they have spatial maps. They know exactly where to proceed when they need to consider for certain food."

Manger's peer-reviewed research forward the subject was published in Biological Reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society.

Copyright CHICAGO SUN-TIMES 2006

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