Dolphins learn special foraging(捕食) techniques from their mothers and it's now clear that they can learn from their buddies as well.   【小题1】 It turns out that they learn this skill by watching their pals do the job. The discovery, reported in the journal Current Biology, helps reveal how groups of wild animals can transmit learned behaviors and develop their own distinct cultures.

"Dolphins are indeed very clever animals. So it makes sense that they are able to learn from others," says Sonja Wild, a researcher at the University of Konstanz in Germany. 【小题2】 This study, however, shows that dolphins are also motivated to learn from their peers in addition to mimicking their mothers.

The bottle-nose dolphins that live in Shark Bay, Western Australia, have been studied for decades, and scientists have identified over a thousand individuals by looking at the unique shape and markings of their dorsal fins. Researchers know what families the dolphins belong to, and keep track of their close associates.

Wild and her colleagues have closely examined how dolphins learn particular strategy for catching fish---one that involves using the empty shells of large sea snails. A dolphin will chase a fish to one of these shells, and then they insert their beak into the shell, bring the whole thing up to the face. After that, they shake it up above the water surface to drain the water out of the shell until the fish basically falls into their open mouth.

Whether or not dolphins caught fish in this way didn't seem to be explained by how many shells were lying around their hunting area, nor whether a dolphin was genetically related to another dolphin that knew how to do it. 【小题3】 Previously, it's been shown that humpback whales seem to learn hunting techniques from their peers in a similar way.

The new observations of wild dolphins learning from their peers is "exciting, "says Diana Reiss, a dolphin cognition researcher at Hunter College, CUNY, "It tells us about the source of some these behaviors. It seems like they're not relying on just learning from mom when they're out there. They seem to be observing others, watching what they're doing and acquiring it from others in their social group."

Being able to learn from peers may help animal populations survive in a changing environment. 【小题4】 "In unstable environments that are changing, it's more beneficial to kind of look around and see what others are doing" says Wild, "and maybe adopt their behavioral innovations that may be more adaptive to the new environmental conditions."