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Video captures amazing playtime between dolphin and young boy


Scott Sutherland
Meteorologist/Science Writer

Tuesday, September 30, 2014, 5:33 PM - Seeing children and animals playing together is always a delight, but it's rare when you get to see something like this - a boy and a dolphin tossing the ball back and forth, and on 'dry' land, no less!

This video, recorded by Anton Karpinski and posted to Facebook, shows a young boy (presumably his son?) reacting with delight as one of the dolphins at the Dolphinarium Koktebel plays with him during the dolphinarium's dinner show. Perched up on the pool's deck to get the best experience with his new playmate, the dolphin not only catches the ball the young boy tosses, but also tosses it back to him, continuing the game from the deck, from in the pool and then back on the deck again. Anything to keep playtime going, it seems!

The joy of both the boy, and the dolphin, are quite obvious throughout the three-minute video, and it just goes to show how play is fairly universal for all forms of intelligent life.

Dolphin intelligence has been studied for decades now, and they've shown us that they have remarkable cognitive abilities, including memory, mimicry, problem solving, and even learning artificial language. They can even learn to use tools. They are generally self-aware (as much as we can test for such things). They exhibit signs of having a culture amongst themselves, and they can show (as the video demonstrates) inter-species cooperation as well.

The Dolphinarium, which is in the Crimean resort town of Koktebel, on the shores of the Black Sea, houses three bottlenose dolphins, one male - Dania - and two female - Mariska and Zoe - along with northern fur seals, showcasing their talents and intelligence for audiences. 

There is plenty of controversy about the practice of keeping 'captive' dolphins for entertainment purposes, but in many cases, the entertainment comes second to important research and study of these wonderful marine mammals, and acts as an educational tool and as a means to raise money for the facility and its research, when public funds are not as readily available for these programs. According to their website, the Dolphinarium Koktbebel works not only to educate the public about dolphins, but they also participate in the development of monitoring networks, and in the rescue and rehabilitation of sick and injured dolphins.

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