Goose the Blog 2.0

I've decided that instead of my usual political whining, this week is going to be Strange Science Week on GtB. We got off to a good start yesterday with monkeys and highschoolers.

Today's entry is about dolphins that have learned to use natural sponges as a sort of snout glove for rooting around the ocean floor. They break off only the cone shaped sponges that will fit over their snouts, ignoring the more common flat sponges. This is the first documented case of tool use among cetaceans.

Most of the dolphins that do this are female, and they all share common mitochrondrial DNA, which means they are maternally related. However, scientists do not think the development is a genetic one, because the trait's pattern of inheritance doesn't fit. Instead, the researchers think that the use of sponges as tools is culturally learned, passed from a mother to her children.

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* or maybe we are humans pretending not to be animals?