Dolphins Found Using Tools In The Wild

Lots of animals' communication have discrete meaning and accents -- even prairie dogs and such have that.  I'm curious if there are any experts that believe that dolphin communication is something more.  Do they communicate about the non-immediate future, etc.?

They been know to be “friendly” towards their Human keepers, too.

The female dolphins are using sponges?

Who knew dolphins used birth control.

I don’t know if dolphins use concepts that have any direct correlation to human conceptual models, but at least one group of academics have concluded that there is ‘real’ language in the clicks-n-whistles:

They’re not alone, not by any stretch of the imagination, either: The controversial late John D. Lilly was firmly of the position that there’s a definite language, while others (such as R. & G.Busnel, and J.J. Dreher) consider dolphion communications to be a 'quasi-language.

There are whole libraries of discussion on the subject. Some (few) selected titles cribbed from these papers:

  • Bastian, J. 1966 The transmission of arbitrary environmental information between bottlenose dolphins. In: Animal Sonar Systems - BioloSM and Bionics, Vol, II (Ed. R.-G. Busnel), Laboratoire de Physiologie Acoustique, Jony-en-Josas 78, France

  • Busnel, R.-G. 1966 Information in the human whistled language and sea mammal whistling. In: Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises (Ed. K. S. Norris), University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles.

  • Busnel, R.-G. and A. Classe 1976 Whistled Languages, Springer Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg and New York.

  • Dreher, J. J. 1961 Linguistic considerations of porpoise sounds. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 33(12):1799-1800.

  • Dreher, J. J. 1966 Cetacean communication: small-group experiment. In: Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises (Ed. Ks S. Norris), University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles

I actually worked in a dolphin center for a while, developing an computer system to implement a man-dolphin communication system. Currently, people interact with dolphins primarily with hand signals, and the dolphins respond by doing something.

Our big idea was to put a set of lights underwater, and program patterns based on english words. Then we were going to use a human trainer with a microphone and a voice recognition system to translate what he or she was saying into lights that the dolphins could see underwater. For going the other way, we had a series of paddles that could be pressed by the dolphin in sequences to trigger a small collection of responses.

Unfortunately, our funding was cut off while we were still putting the hardware in place.

Do dolphins have a complex language? I never saw much evidence for it. but then a dolphin’s brain evolved in a very different environment than ours, so perhaps their complex-sounding language really is complex and means a lot to them.

But bear in mind that birds are tool users, and some have complex languages consisting of hundreds or thousands of variations on their various songs, chirps, and squawks. And at least two African Grey Parrots have progressed further in language training than dolphins or apes ever have.

It’s a shame you had your funding cut, Sam… It seems that there is no current momentum in dolphin language research. Tests and studies that have been conducted under the aegis of the US Navy have failed to find an upper limit to dolphin intelligence, but that was secondary to the purpose of those tests. It also seems clear that humans and dolphins can communicate on at least a rudimentary level, but again no one has taken such communication studies terribly far.

Part of the problem, I’m sure, is the expense of working with dolphins. Parrots, like those astounding African Greys, are dirt-cheap to study - A dedicated researcher could literally do it for pocket money. Apes are much more expensive, but they don’t have the tremendous environmental support costs that dolphins do.