“The pressure to remember individuals successfully may have been a push not only for dolphin cognitive evolution, but for the complex abilities found in crows, parrots, ravens, chimps, elephants and even us humans.” This is known as the Social Intelligence Hypothesis. A dolphin's long memory might offer other benefits.
DOLPHIN Out of all the animals with great memories, dolphins are one of the best. These social and playful animals use their memory to remember other dolphins they've met before and keep track of their social interactions.
Ted once told Sam that a goldfish was the happiest animal in the world, because it had a ten-second memory. He then encouraged the player to "be a goldfish".
"We soon found out that the Clark's nutcracker is the spatial memory superstar of the avian world, and possibly of the vertebrate world."
Dolphins have a remarkable long-term memory and can remember specific individuals, sounds, and even tasks they learned in the past. In fact, studies have shown that dolphins can remember things for up to 20 years or more, which is longer than most other animals.
The new research shows that dolphins have the longest memory yet known in any species other than people. Elephants and chimpanzees are thought to have similar abilities, but they haven't yet been tested, said study author Jason Bruck, an animal behaviorist at the University of Chicago.
Bees' short-term memory is quite weak, despite their unique abilities. A comparable study on chimpanzees found that bees had the worst memory, with a recall duration of just 2.5 seconds. Also earning bees a spot on the list of top 10 animals with the worst memory in the world.
Parrots and the corvid family of crows, ravens, and jays are considered the most intelligent of birds.
Cats possess excellent long-term memories. They can recall their animal companions and the people who feed them as well as those who irritate them. Memory is what allows a cat to leap into the arms of a family member returning after a semester away at college.
Wearing developed a profound case of total amnesia as a result of his illness. Because of damage to the hippocampus (an area required to transfer memories from short-term to long-term memory), he is completely unable to form lasting new memories. His memory for events lasts between seven and thirty seconds.
Echoic memory, or auditory sensory memory, is a type of sensory memory. It's the ultra-short-term memory of auditory stimuli you've just heard. For a brief time, about 4 seconds, the brain registers and temporarily stores a perfect version of the sounds around you until it's processed.
The name sperm whale comes from the spermaceti organ which is located in its head. They also have the largest brain out of any animal known to exist.
The experiments showed that the human and chimpanzee brain organoids were remarkably similar in many ways including in the mix of cell types and in how these cells were arranged.
Ravens and other members of the corvid family (crows, jays, and magpies) are known to be intelligent. They can remember individual human faces, expertly navigate human environments (like trash cans), and they even hold funerals for their dead.
Good eyes for one animal may not be so good for another. While many factors are to be considered when comparing eyesight amongst creatures, one thing for certain is that eagles take the crown for best all around eyes, primarily for their unprecedented ability to see clearly from far distances.
So what did the overall comparative review conclude? Our canine friends are not nearly as clever as chimpanzees or dolphins. They rank in a similar way to cats, goats and pigs. And depressingly, in some ways, they aren't as smart as birds like pigeons and magpies.
Pigeons have a genius for navigation that far, far exceeds our own. Mockingbirds and thrashers can learn and remember hundreds more songs than most of their fellow songbird species. Scrub jays and nutcrackers have memories for where they put things that make our capacity look meager.
The American Crow, however, is just the smartest in a whole family of whip-smart birds. They're in the family Corvidae, which consists of ravens, rooks, jays, nutcrackers, magpies, jackdaws, choughs, and treepies.
Why tardigrades are so damn tough. It's important to note: Tardigrades are basically indestructible only when they enter a special state called cryptobiosis. In harsh environments, the animals tuck in their legs and expel all moisture from their bodies. In this state, they're called tuns.
Instead of a brain, hydra have the most basic nervous system in nature, a nerve net in which neurons spread throughout its body. Even so, researchers still know almost nothing about how the hydra's few thousand neurons interact to create behaviour.
Three-toed sloths are some of the slowest and seemingly laziest creatures in the world. Instead of evolving to eat more, they evolved to do less.
Bottlenose Dolphins
For years, dolphins have been heralded as the smartest animals on Earth, second only to humans—though some would even contest that ranking. Aside from humans, dolphins have the greatest brain-to-body ratio among animal species, including primates.
The border collie, for instance, is the smartest breed, closely followed by poodles, German shepherds and golden retrievers.
Your Grumpy Pup Is a Very Smart Dog — Science Says So
That said, research has been divided on the dog/cat intelligence question, with some studies suggesting dogs are more intelligent than cats because of their social nature, while others found that cats rank higher in abilities, such as long-term memory.