HOST: Hallo, gentle viewers, and welcome to Animal World: Our Co-Inhabitants. One of the world’s most widely loved animals of the sea is the dolphin. On today's program we’ll visit with Dr. Lori Marino, an expert on cetacean intellect and a senior lecturer in neuroscience and behavioral biology as well as an adjunct instructor in psychology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. A good portion of her dolphin research involves studying the brains of wild dolphins who have died of natural causes.

Dr. Marino(f): For the past 15 years, I’ve been studying the intelligence of dolphins, and I’ve been mainly doing that by uh looking at their brains. I do something called Magnetic Resonance Imaging. And what that means is I look at that structure of their brain, I look at the size of their brain. I look at how their brain is put together, and then try to infer something about their behavior and their intelligence and their abilities from that.

HOST: In 2001, Dr. Marino and her colleague were the first to publish research regarding the ability of Bottlenose dolphins to recognize themselves in a mirror, an ability scientists say demonstrates self-awareness. Before Dr. Marino’s discovery, self-recognition was thought to be a characteristic unique to humans and the great apes.

For more details on Dr. Marino, please visit
www.NBB.emory.edu/faculty/personal/marino.html