Aquatic Intelligence

So while I wait for my final year of undergraduate school to start already (seriously, I'm getting very antsy here), I haven't had much to say. I already told y'all that I'm back from New York and the only big development since my last post is that I took the GRE. It's not exactly thrilling, but at least it's out of the way.

However, I did recently see a movie that made me wonder about the future of neuroscience research in other species besides humans. The movie was called "Blackfish" and addressed the issues of captivity and resulting violent behavior by orcas. It was created as a sort of expose of the practices committed by SeaWorld and other such institutions. For a documentary dealing with some pretty heave stuff, it doesn't come across as PETA-crazed or leave you feeling uncontrollably depressed. Instead, I found it both inspired by orcas as a species and melancholy that humans believe we have any control over another species. I highly suggest checking it out when you get the chance.

But how does this relate to neuroscience? Well one the professionals interviewed by the producers of Blackfish is a neuroscientist named Lori Marino. She makes the point in the movie that whales have incredibly developed brains, particularly portions of the brain often associated with emotional cognition. It was so exciting to me to hear her talk about recent MRI scans of whale brains and the findings we're just beginning to uncover.

A short literature search when I got home from the theatre showed me that we are just barely beginning to scratch the surface on cetacean intelligence. I found some pieces on complex auditory processing, a few short articles on whale cortical structure, and (my favorite subject) differing sleep patterns of cetaceans. Still, the overall picture of our knowledge about marine mammals' intelligence is highly limited. It honestly makes me wonder if the next big breakthroughs in neuroscience and cognition will come from studying whales and dolphins.

What do you think? Should we dethrone the primate as a model of study? And what does this mean for the ethics regarding our treatment of marine life (eg. our wanton pollution of the seas)?

I would personally love to study whale/dolphin intelligence, but I probably need to finish my undergraduate career first.

PS- here is another op ed in a similar vein as this piece.