Scientists amazed by how dolphins communicate: “I kind of thought I was going a little bonkers”

If you’ve ever watched a documentary, or have had the chance to see a dolphin up close then you know that they like to make noise. They use an assortment of sounds including buzzy burst pulses, clicks and whistles.

These are used to “help them navigate, locate food, [and] glean information about the environment,” according to the Dolphin Research Center in Marathon, Florida. Additionally, they use them to communicate with other dolphins. But just what kind of information are they sharing?

Researchers recently announced that they “have built a unique library of sounds.” Studying a group of wild bottlenose dolphins in the waters off Florida in a non-invasive way, they were able to obtain recordings that allowed them to identify the name-like signature whistles of most of the 170 pod members.

The real success though was being able to identify 22 ‘non-signature whistles’ (NSW), that could potentially “function like words of some kind, with specific meanings,” said the study’s lead author Laela Sayigh, a marine biologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Hampshire College in Massachusetts. Two of those have sparked special interest.

“I kind of thought I was going a little bonkers”

Dolphins are known to imitate each other’s signature whistles, ones that identify them by name, a discovery made in 2013. However, sifting though over four decades of recordings Sayigh came across a strange whistle.

Then to her surprise, it was used by another. “I kind of thought I was going a little bonkers,” she recalled to National Geographic. The sound, designated NSWB, researchers discovered was being used by over 35 of the dolphins in the pod. They believe that it is used as some kind of question.

The other sound, NSWA, they have found at least 25 members of the resident community using is believed to be an alarm call. When the “punchy combination of up-and-down sweeps” was played during a series of trials, the NSWA whistle seemed to make most dolphins avoid where it came from.

“That doesn’t absolutely mean it’s an alarm type call, but it seems like a reasonable starting point as a hypothesis,” Sayigh explained.

Dolphins are good candidates for two-way conversation with humans

Other discoveries that the researchers in Sarasota, Florida have made is the discovery that female dolphins communicate with children using a higher frequency, similar to how human parents speak to their young children. While much research still needs to be done, it could indicate that it’s a way to establish a shared set of sounds in a ‘language-like communication system’.

Sayigh thinks that if there is a species that humans “might be able to kind of try to engage with in some kind of two-way communication, these guys are really good candidates.”

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