Each bottlenose dolphin produces her/his own signature whistle. These whistles appear to communicate the identity, location, and also the emotional state of the dolphin making the whistle. Vocal learning appears to help dolphins develop a novel whistle, and this happens early in life. Signature whistles usually make up about half of the whistles of a [...]
Barks, yelps, thunks, grunts, chirps, and squawks are little-studied and infrequent sounds emitted by different dolphin species. They are called low frequency narrow band (LFN) sounds, and they seem to be associated with socializing, sexual, or aggressive behavior, or possibly foraging activities. LFN sounds have conservation implications because acoustic communication is particularly important in inshore [...]
The main motivation for all of us to move into the field of marine mammal communication was to find a way to identify which dolphin makes a sound within an interacting group. This is critical for untangling the patterns of signal and response that make up a system of communication, but it is difficult with [...]
Has a wild dolphin whistled at you lately? Learn (and hear) more about dolphin sounds!
By Laela Sayigh, PhD, WHOI, Vincent Janik, PhD, SMRU, St. Andrews, UK and Peter Tyack, PhD, WHOI This year we had an exciting new development in our dolphin communication studies, by successfully testing the attachment for a newly developed digital acoustic tag, the DTAG version 3. The DTAG v.3 is a powerful, non-invasive tool for [...]
The results from our experiments in Sarasota Bay show that copying a signature whistle provides an effective way of addressing dolphins.
We continue to work toward creating a fully digital whistle database that will be accessible to other researchers. During each capture-release session, high-quality recordings are obtained, making the Sarasota Whistle Database the most comprehensive of its kind in the world. Many individuals have been recorded on multiple occasions, over periods of many years, enabling us [...]
The bottlenose dolphin exhibits a fission-fusion social structure characterized by temporary associations lasting from minutes to hours. Such flexible grouping patterns in which dolphins are constantly changing associates is intriguing and raises the question as to what factors are influencing a dolphin’s decision to leave and join a temporary group. As groups change in composition, [...]
Our playback studies are designed to test specific questions that arise from the observational studies on dolphin communication that we conduct. All of our playback studies are carried out during brief capture-release events, allowing us to carefully observe the dolphins’ reactions, such as whether they turn their head towards the speaker when they hear a [...]
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