Are you as stupid as a dolphin?

How many elderly goldfish do you know who could moonwalk on water to Kylie?

This is the question with which I am wrestling as a 41-year-old bottlenose dolphin called Puck slides backwards across her six-metre-deep pool, her body upright, tail smoothly making waves to the rhythm of Can’t Get You Out Of My Head.
There is clearly something special about Puck and not just because in dolphin terms she ought really to have been pensioned off long ago. Yet according to controversial remarks made last month by a South African neuroscientist, Puck and her peers are less advanced than goldfish.
For anyone who grew up glued to Flipper on television, it’s a hard claim to swallow. But sometimes in life you have to accept that the dogmas you have long held dear might have been a great fat lie. So I have come to the dolphinarium at Boudewijn Seapark in Bruges to investigate. With the help of Puck, Roxanne, Flo, Yolta and Milo and the other supposedly dimwitted mammals, I am determined to find out the truth.
The trainers at Boudewijn, along with much of the dolphin-loving world, are deeply unimpressed with claims made by Paul Manger, a 40-year-old professor of neuroscience from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. In a weighty scientific paper published earlier this year in the Biological Reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, Manger hypothesised that “there is no neural basis for the often-asserted high intellectual abilities of cetaceans.” In other words, despite their supersized brains, cetaceans (whales, dolphins and porpoises), are profoundly thick.
This claim flew in the face of almost everything else published about the mammals recently and, indeed, ever. Which is why people are so touchy about it.
The dolphin partly owes its reputation as a brainbox to something that scientists like to complicate by calling the encephalisation quotient, which says that the relative amount of brain per unit of body size can be used as a direct estimate of the intelligence of a species. In English, this means: big brain + not too big body = clever animal. Modern humans possess the highest level of encephalisation of mammals, as our brains are seven times the size you would expect for our body size, but dolphins are not far behind.
The earliest anecdote supporting cetaceans’ supposed super-intelligence is probably the tale of Arion, the finest lyre-player of his day (c600 BC). When turfed off his ship by villains, this chap, so goes the tale, was rescued by a dolphin who was attracted by his singularly high-pitched singing.
But there is more recent evidence. In May, for example, researchers from St Andrews University reported that bottlenose dolphins adopt “signature whistles” to identify each other, just as humans use names. Another group studying dolphins in western Australia in 2005 noted that some of the dolphins used tools — bits of marine sponge foraged and attached to their snouts, to stop their noses scraping painfully against coral as they fished. Then there are the Irrawaddy dolphins in the Ayeyarwady river in Myanmar, which help local fisherman by corralling fish into their nets.
Perhaps best of all, a group of researchers allegedly recently taught dolphins to “sing” the Batman theme tune. I was pretty sceptical about that one, until I came to Belgium. In one of the highlights of Boudewijn’s twice daily live spectacle, a lucky girl is plucked from the audience and shown how to “conduct” the dolphins in a rather delightful round. She does this by wringing both hands as if opening jars, which seems to keep the dolphins time as they “sing” (OK, yelp) along.
But back to the new claims. On the off-chance you don’t fancy wading through Manger’s 46 pages, here is a dummies’ synopsis of the key points. Dolphins have bigger than average brains but this has nothing to do with Stephen Hawkingesque neurological brilliance. On the contrary, the dolphin brain is not built for complex information processing, but rather is designed to counter the thermal challenges of being a warm-blooded mammal in a cold-water world. And finally, the comment that really riled the dolphin lobby: while there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to support the theory that dolphins are exceptionally intelligent, no one has ever conclusively proved that they are.
“You put an animal in a box, even a lab rat or gerbil, and the first thing it wants to do is climb out of it,” said Manger in interviews to publicise his paper. “If you don’t put a lid on top of the bowl, a goldfish will eventually jump out to enlarge the environment it is living in. But a dolphin will never do that.”
The other major stumbling block is defining what we mean by intelligence. There is no reliable, universally accepted method to measure it in humans. A Mensa test? A-levels? Those multiple-choice quizzes in women’s magazines?
Nevertheless, contrary to Manger’s claim, there have actually been a great number of experiments that seem to indicate that dolphins aren’t just pretty creatures.
But Piet de Laender, trainer at  Boudewijn has no time for this whole debate, and especially not for anyone who tries to anthropomorphise dolphins. 
He says, “They’re [Dolphins] not humans, and trying to judge them by human standards of intelligence is pointless,” he says. “So at the end of the day, it’s a waste of time trying to say definitively whether dolphins are clever or not, and anyone who tells you they have the answer is bullshitting”.
— The Guardian