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Orcas have 2nd-biggest brains of all marine mammals http://apocadocs.com/s.pl?1268141420
Neuroscientist Lori Marino and a team of researchers explored the brain of a dead killer whale with an MRI and found an astounding potential for intelligence.... It's not clear whether they are as well-endowed with memory cells as humans, but scientists have found they are amazingly well-wired for sensing and analyzing their watery, three-dimensional environment.
Scientists are trying to better understand how killer whales are able to learn local dialects, teach one another specialized methods of hunting and pass on behaviors that can persist for generations -- longer possibly than seen with any other species except humans.... These researchers have yet to find evidence that an orca in the wild has ever killed a person.... They swim the world's oceans -- they are more widely distributed than any whale, dolphin or porpoise -- in at least three distinct populations. There are fish-eating orcas that stay in one area, flesh-eaters that wander more widely along coasts, and a third group that roams the deep-blue waters.
The three groups have starkly different diets, languages, hunting techniques and manners of behaving around other marine life, and they don't seem to interact much with one another.... Hal Whitehead, a biology professor at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, awakened the world of cetacean research in 2001 when he co-authored a controversial paper that suggested no species other than humans are as "cultural" as orcas.
"Culture is about learning from others," Whitehead said. "A cultural species starts behaving differently than a species where everything is determined genetically."
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[Read more stories about:
marine mammals, predator depletion]
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'Doc Michael says:
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If they're so smart, why did Tilly murder his prison guard?
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Sorry, I meant "his trainer."
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