Who's teaching who the tricks?

Most people think that the next smartest animal is the chimpanzee, mostly because it is on this animal that most studies have been conducted in discovering other species intelligence. Intelligence tests are very difficult to conduct or compare different species, so when we look at the intelligence of a dolphin or other animal compared to the human's it is almost always unfair because we are testing that animal's intelligence in our environment. If we were put in their environment and put to tests of the understanding of their world, we would, I'm sure, fare very badly.
The study of dolphin intelligence is very interesting because we are still on the verge of discovery, there is much we don't understand and much we still have to learn. With each new study, remarkable results have been found that show that dolphin intelligence far surpasses what was initially believed. A recent study showed that dolphins actually recognize themselves in a mirror. This may not seem like anything important until you understand that no other species has been known to do this beside humans and chimps. Children don't have self-recognition until round the age of 3.
When compared to humans, the brain size of the dolphin is somewhat larger. Human brains have ranged in size from 1000 to 1800 grams. The bottle-nosed dolphin has a brain ranging between 1200 and 2000 grams.
Soviet dolphin researcher A. G. Tomlin in 1968 pointed out that dolphin can react very quickly to acoustic signals -- more quickly than humans do -- most probably because, in the underwater environment, sound travels about 4.5 times faster than it does in air.
But hearing is not the only sense dolphins have that appears to process information quickly.
Their vision system is also unusually fast.
Dolphins may not be as intelligent as humans, but there is not really anyway to measure it at this point, maybe, sometime in the future, we will be the ones learning the tricks...