My first real interaction with dolphins was sailing around the UK on a tall ship (STS Malcolm Miller) about 25 years ago.
As we sailed around Land's End, a pod of dolphins started playing around the boat. I want on watch, so I lay face down in the net below the bowsprit and watched them play for over an hour.
They were like surfers lining up at a breach break. There were rules. Each took their turn to ride the waves coming off the front of the ship. They were having fun. They had the time to just enjoy themselves. You could imagine one saying to the other, "gnarly dude. That drop in was sweet! You owned that wave".
At that point I saw the similarity between humans and dolphins. They are at the top of their food chain and food is plentiful. They don't have to spend the entire day hunting and eating like so many other animals. So this gives them time. Time to learn, time to play and time to socialise.
True, but but the great white shark is also hunted by killer whales, but I think you would probably consider the great white shark to be at the to of the food chain. Humans don't fair too well against a number of large predators either all things being equal.
Let's rephrase it to be "pretty much the pinnacle of the food chain".
Asimov wrote an article about that myth - that humans were some poor vulnerable mammal through history, using its wits to survive against apex predators.
Turns out, through history, humans were apex predators. We don't live in the ocean; sharks and whales are not preying upon us. In other ecosystems, humans rarely if ever met other apex predators. We were the top of the heap historically in almost every environment we occupied. Pretty much.
That said, I remember reading recently about 6 or 8 human skeletons being found in a saber-toothed tiger den, 80,000 years old, being excavated somewhere.
> Except for humans (discussed below), dolphins have few natural enemies. Some species or specific populations have none, making them apex predators. For most of the smaller species of dolphins, only a few of the larger sharks, such as the bull shark, dusky shark, tiger shark and great white shark, are a potential risk, especially for calves.[117] Some of the larger dolphin species, especially orcas (killer whales), may also prey on smaller dolphins, but this seems rare.
Thus, the answer to 'Are dolphins on the top of the food chain?' is 'which species of dolphin?'
As we sailed around Land's End, a pod of dolphins started playing around the boat. I want on watch, so I lay face down in the net below the bowsprit and watched them play for over an hour.
They were like surfers lining up at a breach break. There were rules. Each took their turn to ride the waves coming off the front of the ship. They were having fun. They had the time to just enjoy themselves. You could imagine one saying to the other, "gnarly dude. That drop in was sweet! You owned that wave".
At that point I saw the similarity between humans and dolphins. They are at the top of their food chain and food is plentiful. They don't have to spend the entire day hunting and eating like so many other animals. So this gives them time. Time to learn, time to play and time to socialise.
Awesome animals.