military has used dolphins in conflicts in Vietnam and the Persian Gulf. The Navy Marine Mammal Program at San Diego's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) trains dozens of bottlenose dolphins (as well as sea lions) to help the U.S. Navy/Getty Imagesĭespite dolphins' general friendliness, some of them are trained for combat. Commander Task Unit is comprised of special mine clearing teams from The United Kingdom, Australia, and the U.S. There are 44 different dolphin species.Ī bottlenose dolphin named K-Dog from the Commander Task Unit jumps out of the water in 2003. Dolphins use their signature whistles to call out to one another and may be able to remember other dolphins' whistles after decades apart. Scientists believe that dolphins use these signature whistles for life, and female dolphins may even teach their calves their whistles before they're born. Each dolphin responds to its own name.ĭolphins aren't swimming around with name tags, but every dolphin has its own unique whistle. Just like humans, dolphins seem to prefer the company of certain peers more than others. Instead of spending equal time with the dolphins around them, the animals actually segregate themselves into friend groups. After spending over six years tracking 200 bottlenose dolphins in Florida's Indian River Lagoon, the scientists discovered that dolphins have friends. In 2015, scientists at Florida Atlantic University's Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute published research in the Marine Mammal Science journal about the social networks of dolphins. Dolphins make friends with other dolphins.ĭolphins are highly social, and scientists are still discovering fascinating details about how the aquatic mammals socialize with one another. Besides helping dolphins evade predators, echolocation allows them to trap, catch, and eat fish and squid. Based on these echoes, dolphins can judge where they are in space and determine the size and shape of nearby objects. After emitting a series of high-pitched clicks, they listen for the echoes to bounce off their surroundings. To know where they are in relation to other objects and animals, dolphins use echolocation (a.k.a. By using new technologies-including algorithms and high-frequency recorders that work underwater-scientists hope to finally unlock the mystery of the dolphin language. Scientists have not yet broken down the individual units of dolphin sounds, and they're still searching for a Rosetta Stone that links the animals' vocalizations to their behavior. But dolphin language remains a mystery.Īlthough marine scientists have studied and recorded dolphin vocalizations for decades, many aspects of the animals’ language and how they communicate are still unknown. Some female dolphins also produce a burst-pulse to reprimand their offspring, called calves, for bad behavior. Dolphins also produce loud burst-pulse sounds when they feel excited or aggressive, such as when they need to scare off a nearby shark. To find prey and navigate the ocean, they make clicking sounds, and they "speak" to other dolphins by whistling. Many dolphin sounds are produced well out of the range that humans can hear.Dolphins communicate with one another underwater by making a variety of vocalizations. Furthermore, sound travels five times faster in water than in air, making sound a very efficient means of communication. This is obviously very important in the aquatic environment, where visibility is limited and dolphins join and leave each other frequently. The dolphins use these whistles to announce or identify themselves to others. The apparent function of this whistle is similar to a name. A significant portion of the dolphin’s extraordinarily large brain is devoted to acoustic processing, which suggests that communication is an extremely important feature of dolphin life.Īt other bottlenose dolphin research sites it has been shown that each individual dolphin develops a distinctive “signature whistle” during the first year of life. Scientists are still trying to work out what the variety of whistles, clicks, squawks, squeals, barks, and other sounds mean. Dolphins do have a very complex communication system.
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