Surfing Beneath The Waves

Posted on March 31, 2006 in Browsers Creatures Strange

A biologist at Sea World taught his dolphins to surf the Internet using Opera Mini. The researcher and an Opera associate devised a ten key board which emitted a series of sounds. At first he trained the dolphins to use the board to ask for things like fish, toys, or quiet time. Then he put them on the Internet where they could ask for pictures.

“The dolphins went nuts,” Perry said. “They got very excited when they realized when they hit the right combinations of keys they could see pictures of other dolphins, tuna, squid, or people like their trainers.”

One unhappy result occured when the dolphins scored a picture of a killer whale. The whales are predators and hunt dolphins for food. When they saw the giant image of the whale on the underwater plasma screen, the dolphons fled to the furthest corner of the pool and had to be coaxed back to use the keypad again.

“The way we did it,” Perry said, is that we shrunk the image of the whale down to the size of a twinkie. That made it look like the whale was far away, and the dolphins came back from of their end of the pool and used the keypad again.”

Sea World has added a filter to prevent their dwarf ceteaceans from viewing upsetting images.

Following what some zoo-keepers have devised for pandas, is dolphin porn next?