Blackfin

I'm sorry, but that just gave me a really funny mental image of three lizard heads. XD

I think any animal with nervous tissue and a brain or pseudo-brain could be considered to have emotions. Fear is a good example of a complex emotion that most animals seem capable of feeling. Have you ever seen the butterflies, like a monarch, that display warning camouflage because they're poisonous and taste foul? If a young bird eats that butterfly once, they associate the color pattern with the taste and learn to fear it - and, thus learn to fear and dislike that taste and avoid eating anything with that coloration pattern. I think in terms of intelligent mammals, a most complex emotion is embarrassment. Why do we feel embarrassment, or shame? It's an emotion based solely on what we think other people think of us - one that, I assume, evolved purely in a social context. I know dogs can feel shame as well; Lord knows I've seen the expression on a dog's face after they've done something wrong, like had an accident or destroyed something. This may be an emotion solely restricted to social animals (I can't see a monitor lizard feeling shame, for example, regardless of its intelligence). To talk about emotion, I suppose you must put a specific motion in context for there to be any headway.

Um, no, actually. H. neandertalis existed alongside H. sapiens just 35,000 years ago, and they were just as human as we are. We lucked out in being more flexible and adaptable, becoming the only extant members of Hominidae. That doesn't mean that other humans never existed. Neanderthals used tools and buried their dead, too - and showed obvious signs of sentient intelligence, regardless of whether they survived or not.

reverse: I'm not even going to touch that statement. It would break all the forum's rules about polite posting. Kristy: Great idea, but tell me, when you stick a hydrophone down into the water, how are you gonna tell one dolphin's chirps from another's if there's eight of them in front of you?

If all the oceans were fresh, well, you could essentially say life would not exist - because obviously water-soluble salts could not exist on the planet or they would dissolve into the ocean and make it salty again - and about 75% of a human's body mass is a saline solution. o.O Tears, blood, anyone? Sodium/potassium pumps? ...When I first saw this question, my first impulse was to write, "They'd get salty again." XD

Instead of Phyla, plants tend to be classed under "Divisions." Otherwise, they are the same as an animal. The scientific name of a plant would be the same as the plant that it grew from, since it's just, yanno, a ripened ovary. >>' I don't think there's any fancy scientific name for a fruit itself, however.

Mokele is right on the how of this question. The lateral line organs (and in sharks, ampullae of Lorenzini - small pores that detect hydrostatic changes and electrical charges int he water - as well) are how fish sense changes in pressure and low-level vibrations, like a thrashing, injured animal. The why of this is most likely that they are sensing weather patterns - like the severe drop in pressure would be associated with an approaching tropical storm down here in Florida, and the fish would seek deeper water to stay out of the turbulence of the storm surge.

This leads me again to the conclusion ... It's not what something is that matters so much as how it compares to other things. Systematics, systematics, systematics, people!

That would be a never. Wild dolphins are just like tigers and lions, very large wild animals that have the ability to be dangerous and are ultimately unpredictable. It's also against federal law to harass a marine mammal, a la the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972. If you want, schedule a trip for your family to Discovery Cove in Cape Canaveral. Their site can be found at : http://www.discoverycove.org/ If only it were so easy. Wild dolphins and wild orcas especially have been studied in the wild seriously since the late 1970's. There's yet to be developed a safe, non-invasive recording device that can actually be attached to a dolphin, and while dolphins are incredibly intelligent, they also chatter like a pack of schoolgirls. There's been many tapes of dolphins recorded both in wild and captivity, but as of yet, there's been no real conclusions on tapes of wild bottlenose dolphins (to my knowledge). There has been some effort made in terms of orcas which was more conclusive, but still, we don't exactly have a dolphin-to-English dictionary yet.

True, Donald Johansen uncovered A. afarensis and A. africanus years ago, and we have studied some fossils much higher in quality than those previously found... but there is no absolute view on paleoanthropology. The interrelationship between A. afarensis and H. habilis are a 2 million year blank in the fossil record, unless something new's been found that I am unaware of. We still don't know what came between the two.

It's times like this I wish there was a mathematical basis for language. I know there are statistical figures for trends in language, as in, estimating numbers of words two languages have in common by virtue of relation and how long they've been seperated... but never any mathematical basis for syntax and vocabulary. While "I want to talk to dolphins" is the kiss of death for any marine biologist, it still plagues us to no end. This, like paleoanthropological family trees of hominids, is something we just don't have sufficient understanding to answer yet.

Well, apparently NASA found one, with pictures from the orbiting Mars Express. The theory goes that a catastrophic event released a great deal of liquid water at some point, which flooded the basins and formed pack ice. Later, dust drifted down and covered the pack ice, preventing sublimation. I think this is rather interesting, personally. I mean, if the first step towards life were prions, viruses, and viroids, what about endospores of primitive microorganisms in this frozen sea? Possible, certainly. There's a link below with the full article. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4285119.stm

Why do you think they won't let pregnant or menstruating women swim with the dolphins at Discovery Cove here in Orlando? The smell of hormones in the water drives the dolphins a little nutty, and they can get playful - and a swimming torpedo with a baseball bat for a nose is a bad thing to have playfully pushing and shoving you around.

Dolphins kind of have double jeopardy working against them. On one side, there are fishermen who view them legitimately as competition for their catch. Fishermen conveniently forget, of course, that apex predators like dolphins are important because they keep the catch there in the first place. No predators -> population explosion of prey -> overexploitation of resources -> massive die off. Try explaining to a fisherman that he will make a few thousand dollars less in fish so he can have fish to catch in the future, and he will tell you he has to feed his kids NOW. There is no easy solution. On the other hand, thanks our wonderful friends at Anheuser Busch, most of the public now views dolphins as Disneyfied saviours of the seas. Shamu and Flipper are gentle, happy souls put here on Earth to help people! Go swim with the dolphins. You'll learn the secrets of the universe. (This is ironic, because in 1998 a man trespassed into Sea World Orlando after dark to go swimming the orcas and was found dead and naked draped over the dorsal fin of the large male, Tillikum, the next morning. So much for swimming with whales, huh?) The truth is that trainers have not swam with the big male orcas for at least the past ten to fifteen years, due to cases of aggresion towards trainers - i.e. more than one trainer being drowned. Dolphins are smart, and as a result, dangerous. Remember the whole thing about dolphins liking eating fish and having sex with other dolphins? Well, they're also curious, and may view a floating human as an interesting, if clumsy, living toy. People either want to kill dolphins, or go up to them and give them a hug. Neither is the correct approach. But, asking people to view an organism realistically and objectively would be too much. This is why sharks are still struggling for protective legislation, because people just don't like them the way they love Shamu.

Honestly, I don't know. That's why I made this post in the first place - to see how other posters would react. So, guys, drop a word as to how you'd feel about having a seperate ecology forum. I honestly would love to see one, but I haven't been around long enough to know whether there's a great interest in it or not. I thought I'd ask anyway. Asking never hurt anyone, now did it?