Whit Au served on my dissertation committee at the University of Hawaii and mentored me while I was in the Marine Mammal Research Program at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology (1997–2003). He guided me through the process of recording echoes from objects ensonified by dolphins and oversaw my first human listening study. When I became a professor, I continued to study dolphin bioacoustics. I also broadened the scope of my research program to accommodate the interests of my students, just like Whit did. In this talk, I will summarize several animal perception and cognition projects I have pursued with my graduate students. First, we explored how humans discriminate acoustically among bottlenose dolphin signature whistles with and without masking by boat noise. In another study, we investigated auditory rhythm perception in African penguins. Next, we researched long-term memory in river otters using multimodal stimuli. One of our current projects focuses on visual object perception and learning in olive baboons. I will always be grateful for Whit’s support when I was in graduate school and I will continue to follow his model for graduate student mentoring in the future.