Two dolphins were recorded having a conversation using an underwater microphone developed by scientists to distinguish the different voices of animals. Dolphins have been known to have an advanced form of communication with distinct clicks and whistles to show different emotions such as excitement, happiness and stress. Now scientists have discovered that dolphins have different volumes and frequencies of pulsed clicks which they use to communicate. Researchers believe that dolphins are communicating with “words” strung together into sentences, much like humans. This new advancement in dolphin communication has hit many newsstands such as the Telegraph, Huffington Post and the International Business Times.
 
Research Findings
 
At the Karadag Nature Reserve in Feodosia, Russia/Ukraine, Dr. Vyacheslav Ryabov and his team recorded two Black Sea bottlenose dolphins, Yasha and Yana, talking to each other in the pool via non-coherent pulses (NPs). They’ve found that each of the dolphin’s pulses is “different from another by its appearance in time domain and by the set of spectral components in the frequency domain.” From this they’ve made the assumption that each pulse is a word, or phoneme, in the dolphin language. They’ve also found that when one dolphin was talking, the other one would pause and only reply after the other dolphin was finished speaking, giving them reason to believe that the dolphins would first listen to each other before responding. Yasha and Yana were able to create sentences with up to five “words”, however, the researchers are still unable to decipher the content. The full published article can be found in the journal of Physics and Mathematics.
 
Call for Further Research
 
Even before this study dolphins have been known to be highly intelligent and conscious beings. For more than 25 million years they’ve had brains that are more complex and larger than human ones. Studies have found that dolphins produce over a thousand types of distinct whistles to communicate with each other. In 2007 Australian scientists found that dolphins produced distinct whistles with different meanings, interpreted as “I’m here, where is everyone”, “Hurry up” and “There’s food over here”. Another study done earlier this year found that when dolphins are trying to solve a difficult task together they tend to chatter more. However, we can’t fully assume that they communicate the same way humans do. It’s important to assess their own means of communication as a species.
 
From Dr. Ryabov’s recent findings in dolphin communication, he believes that more research needs to be done to figure out how to communicate with dolphins directly. He also believes that humans must start “creating devices capable of overcoming the barriers that stand in the way of using languages and in the way of communications between dolphins and people”.
 
The language of dolphins has similar design features to the human spoken language. Their means of communication can be considered to be a highly developed spoken language. With the resemblance in structure of the human and dolphin language, the hope is to find a way for inter-species communication. It would be quite the advancement among scientists if a device was created to translate their language and vice versa. This way we’d be able to understand and communicate with dolphins; we could learn more about how they live, their mannerisms, and even what they think about humans.
 
Dolphin Intelligence and Conservation Issues
 
Other than their complex communication skills, dolphins are phenomenal creatures in other respects. When dolphins sleep they rest only half of their brain at a time, and they don’t breathe automatically like humans do. Their sonar allows them to navigate the seas with precision since they can “see” objects from a hundred feet away, whether metal, plastic or wood. They can also tap into the echolocating clicks of other dolphins to find out what their fellow dolphins are seeing. Scientists have also found that dolphins emit burst pulses (loud broadband packets of sound) to teach and discipline their young and chase away sharks.
 
Dolphins are highly revered for their intelligence, but their intelligence wields a double edged sword. Dolphins continue to battle a number of conservation issues. They’ve been sought out by humans and taken into captivity. In captivity they are trained by humans to perform tricks for audiences in marine adventure parks. The demand for captive dolphins is threatening dolphin populations and marine ecosystems. Swim-with dolphins programs also cause a big concern because females are preferred since they tend to be less aggressive towards humans. This causes potentially detrimental effects on dolphin populations in the long term.
 
The people who set out to find “the best dolphins” not only harm the individual captured, but many other dolphins in the group. Groups of dolphins are harassed in order to have a roster to choose from. The dolphin hunting in Taiji, Japan has also gained international scrutiny because they now use tarps and tarpaulins to conceal their selection and slaughter process. Although the town has become known for its horrendous dolphin hunting, the slaughter still occurs and they continually attempt to conceal the injustice.
 
Maybe with this new advancement in dolphin communication, humans can begin to second guess their harmful actions. Maybe it fill finally sink in that dolphins are sentient beings who also deserve respect. Just because they don’t understand our language and we don’t understand theirs, doesn’t mean that we have the upper hand to hurt them and keep them in captivity. And hopefully we don’t have to wait until a device is created for dolphins to tell us this before we change our attitudes on wildlife.