Finishing up our mirror theme, we promised one last very special animal (or animal group) that is the last of the currently known animals that can recognize themselves in a mirror. (All of the others are mammals, with the exception of magpies. We started off with extinct mammoths, who are closely related to elephants, then went through magpies and great apes, with a lot of mirror photos along the way.)
The actual animal that passed the mirror test is the bottlenose dolphin (shown here), but it is believed all cetaceans can pass the test. Cetaceans include dolphins, whales, and porpoises, known to be some of the most intelligent animals out there.
This particular leaping bottlenose dolphin is named K-Dog, and has been trained by the US Navy in mine-clearing operations. He’s wearing what looks like a camera, but is described as a locator beacon (and probably includes a camera and other aspects of a wearable computer.) We already discussed wearable computers for dolphins and others aquatic animals, with a somewhat dark humor, with our earlier Dr. Evil photo as part of the Interspecies Internet project. (We jokingly suggested wearables for sharks with laser beams, to put them on the Internet, but that’s not looking good if sharks aren’t self-aware enough to even recognize themselves in a reflection.)
Dolphins have an important connection to data science. Information theory (an aspect of data science) was used to analyze their language. At time little was known about their language, but the analysis proved conclusively that dolphin noises were information-rich and certainly not random. (It has since been learned that every dolphin has a name it responds to. We could almost quote TS Eliot here, talking about dolphins instead of cats.)
Dolphins and information theory are as good a place as any to start the story of data, the subject of our next photos.
(A version of this article first appeared on our Instagram feed as a photo post.)