The Dolphin That Rescues

Greek and Roman tradition treats the dolphin with unusual warmth and consistency. Dolphins rescue the drowning and carry the dead safely across the water; in Herodotus a dolphin saves the poet Arion, thrown overboard by a ship's crew, and bears him to shore on its back. The oracle at Delphi took its name from the story that Apollo first came there in the form of a dolphin, leaping aboard a Cretan ship to bring its crew as his priests. The dolphin's evident intelligence and its habit of approaching boats made it, for the Mediterranean world, the friendliest of wild animals and a reliable emblem of safe passage and rescue.

Modern cognitive science has given the dolphin's old reputation for near-human intelligence real experimental support: bottlenose dolphins are among the very few non-human animals shown to recognise themselves in a mirror, passing variants of the mirror self-recognition test in research led by Diana Reiss and colleagues, a capacity otherwise documented mainly in great apes, elephants and magpies, and their echolocation, a biological sonar built from clicks and returning echoes, lets them build a working picture of their surroundings with a precision no human instrument matched until relatively recently.