During health assessment sessions in 2010 we began a new set of playback experiments to begin looking at whether dolphins discriminate between signature whistles produced by the owner-dolphin vs. copies of these whistles that are produced by another dolphin. We experimented with a new playback design, the habituation-dishabituation design, in which we played back a [...]

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.

In an effort to standardize how multi-looped whistles are treated across studies, we recently had a note accepted by the journal Marine Mammal Science demonstrating that inter-loop intervals in stereotyped sequences of disconnected loops (multiple elements) are shorter and more consistent (less variable) than are the intervals between successive whistles. For whistles with multiple disconnected [...]

We recently had a manuscript accepted by the Journal of Mammalogy reporting the potential use of whistles as indicators of stress in bottlenose dolphins. In particular, we examined the possibility that parameters of bottlenose dolphin signature whistles may serve as indicators of some level of stress. Bottlenose dolphins in Sarasota Bay, Florida, have been recorded [...]

In 2008, we completed experiments (described in previous issues of Nicks’n’Notches) aimed at determining whether dolphins can recognize each others’ whistles by means of voice cues, in the same manner that most people recognize the voices of people that they know. Data are being prepared for publication, and analyses so far indicate that dolphins do [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]