Cetacean intelligence remains a topic of intense interest, and has been the subject of several excellent books in recent years, such as Are Dolphins Really Smart? The Mammal Behind the Myth, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins, and Dolphin Communication and Cognition: Past, Present, and Future. Ivy Press typically produces entry-level pop-science books, which is by no means intended as a disparaging qualification. I have read several of above-mentioned books, and even for a biologist coming from a different discipline, these are technical works. Ivy Press’s Deep Thinkers stands out by being both accessibly written and richly illustrated, making it a perfect entry to this topic.
marine biology
Book review – Are Dolphins Really Smart? The Mammal Behind the Myth
Based on the book’s title I was expecting a myth-busting pop-science book. There is some of that, but this book is foremost a very thorough and in-depth literature review of decades worth of research on dolphins to give an as dispassionate and impartial analysis as possible of what the science is, or is not, telling us about dolphin intelligence.
Book review – The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins
Next to intelligence, another claim to fame that whales and dolphins can make is that of possessing culture. After the authors have clarified that they, too, wish to stay far from unsupported claims of higher intelligences and pseudoscientific attempts at cross-species communication, the book kicks off with definitions. Because, as with Justin Gregg’s book on dolphin intelligence, the proverbial devil is in the definition.
Book review – Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins
Voices in the Ocean is very much a reportage; the author picks a topic, delves into it, and reports what she learns along the way. For Susan Casey it was a chance encounter with a pod of spinner dolphins while swimming in Honolua Bay, Hawai’i, that sparked a fascination with dolphins and in this book we follow her as she travels around the world for two years to explore the multitude of ways in which the worlds of humans and dolphins intersect. And in so doing this book covers a lot of ground.
The Inquisitive Biologist