The Names They Give Themselves

It turns out dolphins give themselves names:

The evidence suggests dolphins share the human ability to recognise themselves and other members of the same species as individuals with separate identities.
The research, on wild bottlenose dolphins, will lead to a reassessment of their intelligence and social complexity, raising moral questions over how they should be treated.

The research was carried out by Vincent Janik of the Sea Mammal Research Unit at St Andrews University in Scotland, who has found bottlenose dolphins to be among the animal world's quickest learners of new sounds.

"Each animal develops an individually distinctive signature whistle in the first few months of its life, which appears to be used in individual recognition," he said.

The research has its origin in the 1960s when dolphin trainers first noticed captive animals each had their own repertoire of whistles.

Which of course reminds me of the following Larsen cartoon:


Guess you had to be there.