We Don’t Know Sh*t About Dolphins, And What You Know Is Wrong

Rani Baker
9 min readApr 23, 2022
“Dolphin” by NOAA’s National Ocean Service is marked with CC PDM 1.0 license.

Dolphins have been a source of human fascination since pre-history. To hippies, they’re our goofy, friendly, tuna-loving genius sea cousins that are possibly psychic or something. To others, they’re deadly sex-crazed monsters literally worshiped by Neo-Nazis. But we can all agree they inspired the greatest, weirdest Sega Genesis game that ever happened.

That said, how much do you really know about dolphins? Turns out a lot of common knowledge about our rubbery underwater pals is no longer backed up by recent scientific observation. Let’s take a look.

Dolphins Are Not Extremely Intelligent

“Wait, what?” you ask. Which is understandable. This is the ultimate prima facie dolphin factoid: that they are underwater super-geniuses forming complex societies and doing secret adorable Illuminati rituals beyond the ken of mortal men. And honestly, it’s one of those things you secretly wish were true. It would be nice to know that the human race is not alone in our consciousness and just needs to find a proper mode of communication with other hyper-intelligent species to better understand the world.

A lot of these assumptions are rooted in the fact that dolphins have particularly large brains. However, like other parts of the anatomy, despite…

--

--