Animal Smarter Than Humans Discovered, Scientific Community “Stunned”
June 2nd, 2009 |…And it isn’t a great ape.
Yesterday, the National Zoological Society, NZS, released shocking results from a recent study on intelligence in aquatic life. Organisms of the family Phocoenidae, more commonly known as porpoises (see below), according to the NZS, actually surpass human intelligence in many aspects of their complex lives. Up until now, humans have been assumed to be the smartest creatures on planet Earth; we were thought to be the only animals capable of analytical thought and are famous not only for being bipedal, but also our ability to swim and fly (with airplanes/balloons). All that has changed.
Human and Porpoise Attempting to Communicate
Like many animals (such as the Virginia Jellyfish), the porpoise has enjoyed a relatively low profile. The scientific community, especially when it comes to non-human intelligence, tends to prefer more “flashy” animals, such as chimpanzees and octopi. Hence, the porpoise, for thousands of years, has lived a highly ordered and complex life without human meddling. The NZS’s Aquatic Mammal Task Force (AMTF), however, has been taking a closer look at porpoises in recent months thanks to stimulus money received from the Obama administration.
“Yeah, we got the call back in April. They said they could give us $750k, but we needed to submit a proposal,” remarked Joe “Joey” Chambers, a project manager at AMTF. “We said we’d draw something up right away and called a meeting to hash out some ideas. One of our interns, Kevin Schultz, brought up Phocoenidae; we asked him why, and he said, ‘why not?’ So, we went with it. Turns out the little buggers are smart.”
Actually, according to the groundbreaking paper publsihed in Proceedings from the 32nd Aquatic Mammal Conference, porpoises have, for all intents and purposes, replicated our success in mathematics, physics and even the arts. Although their means of expression are entirely different, observations of their hunting, social, recreational and family interactions have confirmed that humans are no longer the smartest animals on Planet Earth.
“It turns out the whales use nonlinear differential equations, even high order ones, to predict the movements of large schools of prey,” replied Kevin Schultz. We later learned that he had not been notified that the study actually had been conducted on porpoises at the time of the interview. Mr Schultz continued, “the average porpoise can pinpoint the exact location of an individual mackeral with about 200 cubic feet, about the size of a bathtub. And that’s astonishing.”
Although no human casualties have been attributed to porpoises, fishermen have observed individual porpoises swimming along side fishing boats, splashing their tail fins in patterns consistent with Morse Code, “though of course the letters were off–they’ve never learned our code, but they have they’re own. I never put two and two together, but now it makes perfect sense,” said an unidentified fisherman disembarking. “They were trying to communicate with us and we didn’t even know it.”
These results have already changed human history. Although rioting has been minimal and concentrated mostly in rural regions of the United States and several European countries, we expect extreme reactions worldwide to increase. “We just care about the science–doing it and reporting it,” said Joey Chambers, “and I’m sorry if people don’t like it. We can’t lie and we can’t keep quiet.”
