Tool Up! The Dolphins of Shark Bay by Pamela S. Turner

More than twenty-five years earlier a fisherman told one of the first dolphin researchers at Shark Bay about a dolphin that had a horrible growth on his face. But when the biologist found the dolphin, she realized the "growth" was actually a sponge.

She soon spotted other sponge-carrying dolphins, mostly females with calves. All frequented the deeper channels that gouged Shark Bay's sandy flats. It wasn't obvious why the dolphins carried sponges, since they didn't seem to be eating them.

Maybe the dolphins just liked to give the ocean floor a good scrub now and then.  Maybe there were squeegee-carrying dolphins as well.   And dolphins looking for a place to plug in a vacuum cleaner.

Okay. Maybe not.

What that dolphin scientist had observer was a novel example of a dolphin making and using a tool.

Dolphins have tender noses (rostrums), and these females had learned to protect their tender rostrums while they rooted along the rough coral- and rock-strewn channel bottom, hunting for a particularly slow and apparently not-too-bright prey called the barred sand perch. Eventually fifty-five dolphins, all related to the first sponger, were seen using the same tool, one they broke off from the sponges growing along the channel between the warm, shallow bay and the deeper, colder ocean. With this handy gizmo, Dodger, Puck, and their extended family had discovered how to shape and use a tool in the way only humans, a few primates, and a few birds had been observed to do, an example of a high-level intelligence at work. These animals had also developed a culture, a pattern of learned behavior observed to be passed down through three generations among the dolphins of Shark Bay.

That dolphins can come up with innovative tools and pass down learned behavior to their calves is more proof that dolphins are the Einsteins of the sea, and in The Dolphins of Shark Bay (Scientists in the Field Series) (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), author Pamela S. Turner follows marine biologist Janet Mann observing the dolphins of Shark Bay on the coast of western Australia as she compiles data on other dolphins with their own inventive forms of hunting:

We're looking  for Reggae and the Beachers. That might sound like the name of a steel drum band, but it's actually a group of female dolphins with a crazy talent.

Reggae's searching for small schools of fat mullet. The beach--a steep, sandy slope--is ideal for her hunting strategy.

Reggae herds her victims closer and closer to the beach.

Then without a warning, she makes her kamikaze run. Panicked mullet dart toward the beach; Reggae rockets after them, her momentum carrying her completely out of the water. There's no escape for the mullet.

Beach hunting is a dangerous method that requires a long apprenticeship. Spongers are rare; beach hunters such as Reggae are even rarer.

Shark Bay's dolphins display other unique forms of hunting with tools, such as shell-shaking--chasing small fish into a large, empty shell, and holding them above water until the dazed fish can be shaken out and snapped up. One female, Square, forages only at night, for nocturnal squid, a feeding style rarely observed in cetaceans; one named Wedges has perfected a high-speed torpedo attack on enormous fish; another has learned to echolocate sea birds floating on the surface with their prey and slam into them to grab the catch-of-the-day.

Why are these female dolphins so inventive? Janet's theory is an inversion of the old saw, "Necessity is the mother of invention:"

Among dolphins, invention is sometimes a necessity of motherhood. Clever moms eat better. Their calves survive more often.

Like others in Houghton-Mifflin's much-lauded Scientists in the Field series, Turner's The Dolphins of Shark Bay (Scientists in the Field Series) combines skillful pacing and abundant humor in her text and outstanding nature photography by Scott Tuason to raise some of the big questions in animal science: how can intelligence be observed; do animals have a "culture" like humans; and what qualities in the environment contribute to learned intelligent behavior?

Upper elementary and middle school students will find this book both entertaining and mentally stimulating, with a cast of varied dolphin characters, from "perfect mom" Puck, with many adoring daughters and grandchildren, to "welfare queen" Nicky the moocher, with only one hardscrabble surviving offspring, who lives by begging fish from tourists and fishermen.  Alternatively, there are the roving gangs of male dolphins, playfully named the Red Cliff Rascals, the Prima Donnas (whose T shirts should read "Herding Shark Bay Females Since 1990"), The Blues Brothers, and The Punks, who form herding trios to help their leader win a fair maiden dolphin. Then there are the playful kids, like Cheeky, Samu, and India, who actually take turns being "It," in a pretend game of herding through the waters of their playground in Shark Bay.  Dolphins are fascinating mammals, and young readers who love them will heartily enjoy following these personable scientists in the field with the dream job of dolphin-watching every day.

Smarter Than A Second Grader? Crow Smarts: Inside the Brain of the World's Brightest Birds by Pamela S. Turner

Waaah! WAAAH!

The begging call of a juvenile gets louder. Little Feather stakes out a position at the end of the log.

The adult bird hops to the ground, picks up a dried leaf stem, hops back onto the log. Holding the stem in its bill, it probes the hole with sharp jabs. After a few seconds, it flips the stem around. Jab jab jab. Yet Little Feather's parent still seems dissatisfied. It discards the stem. Luckily the forest floor is covered in sticks, twigs, and stems. It's a crow Home Depot.

The adult returns with a different leaf stem. Jab-jab-jab-jab. Little Feather's only contribution is a stream of woooh-whoohs. After four minutes of delicate work, the grub clamps onto the crow's tool like a bulldog. Little Feather's parent hauls out its catch. It's big and lumpy: the Jabba the Hut of grubs!

What we have just seen is a crow using a tool and its greedy fledgling being homeschooled in the family trade.

For years anthropologists believed that only humans used tools, naming the first-discovered users Homo habilis, "handy man." Famed for his discoveries of early toolmaker hominid fossils, Lewis Leakey suggested that one of his graduate students, Jane, try to observe chimpanzees to see if they made any use of tools. That star pupil, Jane Goodall, came through in a big way, observing chimps not only using twigs to fish termites out of their mound holes, but also selecting and shaping those twigs into new-and-improved tools. And the science of animal tool intelligence was launched.

One early naturalist on the Pacific island of New Caledonia observed crows there dropping candlenuts onto rocks to crack them in 1882, and in 1928, another reported crows using sticks to extract insects from logs. And eventually one naturalist reported observing parent crows there persistently displaying tool-using behaviors and young crows studying and practicing the same skills until they became proficient. Then the crows of New Caledonia were observed deliberately shaping better grub catchers--breaking off one branch of a Y-shaped twig and shaping it into a hook with their bills. Other observers noted even cleverer crows shaping a strip of a long, fibrous pandanus leaf with a serrated edge, snipping it to just the right length, and graduating its width to provide a stiff end for holding in the beak, actual tool making. Animal scientists began to wonder just how smart crows really are.

Enter Betty, the valedictorian of crows. Betty was able to shape a strip of wire into a hook, using her feet and beak, and use it as a hooked probe to extract a piece of meat from a tube. Could she do it with something less stick-like? Yes! Betty could do the same with a curly strip of aluminum! Could Betty generalize that behavior into fashioning a wire to hook over the handle of a tiny treat bucket in a tube? No sweat! Betty scored 90%! Was Betty just a fluke, the Einstein of the crow community?

Not at all! Some crows may be bird brains, but many were able to pass even more complex IQ tests, such as pulling up a short stick dangling by a string from a perch, untying the stick, using it to fish a longer stick out of a barred box, and finally using that stick to retrieve a chunk of beef from a deep tube. Some even figured out how to drop pebbles into a tube with a treat floating at the bottom until the water level rose enough to lift the treat within beak reach. They even learned to choose solid metal objects instead of hollow ones to do a better job. In fact, these summa cum laude crows outdid most second grade humans at a similar task!

As Pamela S. Turner's forthcoming Crow Smarts: Inside the Brain of the World's Brightest Bird (Scientists in the Field Series) (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016) shows, crows are no dim bulbs. Animal culture, learning passed down from parent to offspring, has also been observed among apes and monkeys. Even those geniuses of the sea, dolphins, have been observed passing down tool-using hunting skills through at least two subsequent generations (see my review of Turner's amazing The Dolphins of Shark Bay (Scientists in the Field Series) here). Crows seem able to do the same.

It seems that the search for intelligent life in the universe still has a lot to discover on our own planet.

Author Pamela Turner knows how to combine carefully paced text with humor in her newest book, perfect for animal-loving and scientifically minded young naturalists. With plenty of color photos, this new study of animal intelligence in Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's award-winning Scientists in the Field series will inspire middle readers toward this exciting area on the frontiers of science and should be a first purchase for libraries and for kids who can't get enough of animals and their fascinating behaviors.