Ahh, the joys of Plastic Bag Catch - it brings back such fond memories.
Imagine the loss these dolphins would feel had we all heeded the advice of those Greenpeace loonies and stopped dumping our trash in the ocean.
What would the dolphins play with then?
Bubbles?!?

ahahahaaa!

I would imagine "Plastic Deflated Balloon Catch" is right up there, too.

Interesting - we noticed a similar phenomenon with children: when they invent games for each other, they make them hard-but-not-too-hard, i.e., challenging but not insurmountable. And giving someone a good learning experience is appreciated by the receiver. So, I guess Vygotsky's ZPD applies to Dolphins as well...

Urgh. I wanted to follow up on this one, and ran a few searches on "dolphin culture". Got some great stuff, but then this came up:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0044-8486(77)90177-6

Tell me its my English. Tell me I misunderstood this. Tell me these guys aren't really suggesting farming Dolphins for food.

One interesting finding there:
"Dolphin fed readily on a variety of cut fresh fish but rejected dolphin flesh."

Yish, excellent dolphin links for the game stuff! But holy moses yes -- the dolphin-farming is creeeeeepy.

>re: animal cognition, there's
The Cognitive Animal, Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition

Edited by Marc Bekoff, Colin Allen and Gordon M. Burghardt

And if you go to:
http://grimpeur.tamu.edu/~colin/TheCognitiveAnimal/Ch/
you can get the full text online.

yish, the "dolphins" referred to on that page are actually fish (also known as mahi-mahi or dolphinfish), not Flipper's posse. I don't think Americans would tolerate Flipper farming (might be a different case here in Japan).

Thanks, Justin. I'll sleep better tonight! ;)

Johannes Merkel contends that games are the matrix out of which children develop language and social relations. Games are not epiphenomena of either language or social practice. His book "Spielen, Erzaehlen und Phantasieren" documents the ways in which children create game situations with others, especially adults. Children wreak unbelievable aggression on each other until about age two, at which time they start engaging in constructive and considerate play. But they begin by setting up games with their parents first.

So yish, I think that one of the ways parents affect the later development of children is the way in which parents prepare them for play -- or, how they make them into good players.

Vygotsky's ZPD could be used to describe the way in which any power-holding group establishes learning conditions for subordinate groups: give the learners just enough space to stretch their capabilities. Don't allow them to repeat their old successful routines but don't alter so many conditions and boundaries that none of their routines work. Think of agents as loci for a number of learning strategies. Changing the environment puts immense selection pressure on those strategies and those adaptations or mutations that best fit the new environment will propagate themselves.

One of the great powers of the human mind is to create wild new mutations DELIBERATELY. No animal can turn on its genetic structure and say "eenie-meenie-miney-mo" and shuffle its constiutent parts at random. We can, however, dismantle our playing and learning strategies and see, experimentally, how well they fit in the new situation.

In other words Vygotsky's theory of education could encompass Dolphins and computers as well as human children.

These words are on my blog's intro page.

Dashiell Hammett
From "Red Harvest:" "Plans are all right sometimes ... and sometimes just stirring things up is all right -- if you're tough enough to survive, and keep your eyes open so you'll see what you want when it comes to the top."

Rocking posts, folks! Vygotskian educational theory and dolphins, mmmmm.