The world we share with the other animals is stranger and more wondrous than we humans have typically realized. Consider three recent scientific findings:

In 1996 a single humpback whale off the eastern coast of Australia was heard singing a new song, with a dramatically different melodic and rhythmic structure from the songs the eastern whales had been singing. Comparing notes, researchers realized that this was a song that whales off the Australian west coast were already singing. By 1997 all the eastern whales were singing the new song. Whale song, it turns out, changes rapidly, even faddishly, by imitation.

A group of dolphins in Shark Bay, Australia, were seen swimming around with what looked at first like odd appendages on their snouts. They were actually sponges, and scientists later observed the dolphins using them to scrape edible prey loose from the rough marine floor—apparently to safeguard their soft snouts. Only some of the local dolphins—mostly females—are “spongers.” They learn the technique from their mothers and use it the rest of their lives.

In a laboratory experiment at the Max Planck Research Station for Comparative Cognition on the island of Tenerife, off the coast of Morocco, both macaws and African gray parrots learned to take a nonedible token instead of food, trading it later for food they liked better. Researchers concluded that the birds understood both delayed gratification and the value of “currency.” “Parrots are capable of making a rational decision and maximizing the benefit to themselves,” said the lead researcher, Anastasia Krasheninnikova, noting that the birds performed just as well as chimpanzees in similar experiments.

Read more at The New York Review