Lots of animals use instruments. Most reside on land, though a couple of aquatic species are equally resourceful. Octopuses use coconut shells as armour, for instance, and a few dolphins stick sponges on their noses to guard their pores and skin from getting scraped when foraging on the ocean ground. In all these circumstances, although, a discovered object is used unchanged. What has by no means been seen earlier than within the marine realm is the deliberate transformation of a discovered object right into a device. In a paper printed in Present Biology this week, Michael Weiss on the Centre for Whale Analysis in Washington, and colleagues, report that orcas just do that to create an exfoliant from kelp.
