Dolphins give each other unique names, just like humans

Animals continue to surprise us by exhibiting traits traditionally believed unique only to human beings. Anyone who’s ever had the fortune of owning a pet or spending a lot of time with animals will attest to this. Dogs can experience love, hopelessness and depression. Some bird species mate for life, while others cheat on their partners. And cats… well, cats are cats.

 

Now, researchers at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland have conducted a study that reveals dolphins give each other special names in order to identify each other. Exactly like what humans do.

 

According to the BBC and iO9, the subjects in question were bottlenose dolphins, the most well-known and common of this species of marine mammals. The study’s findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, support previous research that identified the animals’ unusual whistles, which were then believed to play a role in their communication.

 

A 'role' call, under the sea!

 

To better comprehend the role of these calls, Dr. Vincent Janik and his fellow researchers recorded a variety of signature sounds a group of wild dolphins used in their particular population. Using underwater speakers, the team then played these sounds back to the dolphins.

 

“We played signature whistles of animals in the group, we also played other whistles in their repertoire and then signature whistles of different populations – animals they had never seen in their lives,” said Janik.

 

It was discovered that specific individuals within the group responded to specific calls. When an individual heard a particular call, it acknowledged it by sounding the very same whistle back.

 

When the team played back calls that were unfamiliar to the group, however, the dolphins gave no reaction.

 

The team believes the dolphins are behaving just like humans: they answer when they hear someone call them by their own name, and they ignore those who do not call them by this name.

 

Whistles as identifiers of particular individuals

 

According to previous research, these sounds are used often in dolphin communities. Dolphins within the same group are able to learn and then reproduce these unique whistles or calls.

 

As for why dolphins would use such a technique to identify each other, Janik has a theory.

 

Dolphins “live in this three-dimensional environment, offshore without any kind of landmarks and they need to stay together as a group,” he explained. “These animals live in an environment where they need a very efficient system to stay in touch. Most of the time they can’t see each other, they can’t use smell underwater, which is a very important sense in mammals for recognition, and they also don’t tend to hang out in one spot, so they don’t have nests or burrows that they return to.”

 

In other words, dolphins could have developed this “naming” process as a workaround to the distinct problem that their vast watery habitat does not give them many other ways to identify each other. This, in turn, helps the group stick together.

 

This is the first study that has demonstrated that dolphins create, learn, and respond to unique calls for the purposes of labeling individuals with unique identifiers and preventing the group from dispersing.

 

Janik believes understanding how this skill evolved in different groups of animals could give us more clues as to how communication developed in humans.

 

Aside from dolphins, the parrot may be the only other animal that has been observed to use its own equivalent of the regular human practice of naming individuals. — TJD, GMA News