May 1, 2026 • 33 mins
They're some of the smartest animals on Earth. Could we ever have a conversation with them? Jorge takes the plunge with two dolphin experts to find out.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey, welcome to Sign Stuff production of iHeartRadio. I'm Hoar
hit Cham and today we're asking the question, can we
talk to dolphins? They're one of the most intelligent animals
out there. Is it possible to decode what they're saying
to each other? We're gonna talk to two dolphin experts
who have been observing and listening in on our poor
(00:23):
boys friends for decades, and they're gonna tell us what
we know about dolphines and whether we can use it
to have a conversation with them. So get ready to
take the plunge as we dive into clear blue waters
to answer the question can we talk to dolphins?
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Enjoy?
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Hey everyone, If you ask a bunch of kids what
their favorite animal is, the chances are more than a
few of them will say it's dolphins. And I was
one of those kids. I love to swim and I
scuba and so to this day, if anyone asked me
if I could be any animal, which one would it be,
I'll still answer a dolphin. So I was excited to
(01:05):
talk to our experts today. I had a lot of questions,
what are dolphins like, what do we know about their language?
And could we ever actually communicate with them. We'll start
with our first expert, doctor Denise Hersing. Doctor Hearsing is
well known in the marine biology community, and she's often
called the Jane Goodle of the sea for her decades
(01:26):
long work trying to understand how dolphins behave and talk
to each other. First question I had for doctor Hersing
was what are dolphins like? Well, thank you so much,
doctor Heusing for joining us.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Great to be here. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Can you please tell us who you are and what
you do?
Speaker 3 (01:44):
Sure? I'm doctor Denise Hersing.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
I am a marine mammalogist and I specialize in dolphin
acoustic and behavioral communication. And I'm the head of the
Wild Dolphin Project, which is a nonprofit I've been running
for forty plus years and we go out in the
Bahamas in the summer study while dolphins, and we've been
doing it ever summer since nineteen eighty five.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
What kind of animal are dolphins like? How would you
describe what they're like?
Speaker 2 (02:13):
Dolphins are an aquatic social mammal. They have a lot
of parallels to terrestrial mammals like primates and elephants, in
the sense that they have tight societies that are based
on mother cap relationships. They have long term friendships. They
learn and develop through the years, so everything they do
(02:36):
is not instinct, you know. They learn the social rules,
they learn who their friends are and who their enemies are,
and they survive in the wild. So they're really a
complicated social mammal that has just evolved for a aquatic existence.
Partly why they're so difficult to study, to get time
with them on the water and or under the water.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
What do I mean? Just the water is a difficult
place to do studies.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
The ocean is a large place. It's a big area
that they're resident in, right, So we can spend days
looking for them. We kind of know where they hang
out sometimes, but their mobile they move around, they chase fish,
so getting observation time is harder I think than many
terrestrial animals.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Oh wow, I had thought about that. Yeah, you have
to swim after them basically to study them. So you
mentioned that it's a resident pod. How about how many
dolphins are you talking about?
Speaker 2 (03:26):
So historically it's been about one hundred animals every summer,
so it's a small community. They're considered a coastal species,
so they don't live in these big open ocean schools.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
Oh, I see. Is there a sense of what kind
of social structure they have? Do these hundred dolphins organize
themselves in any way or are they just sort of
hanging out?
Speaker 2 (03:46):
No, they have their own organization. We call it fission fusion,
which means that they come together and split apart, come
together and split apart. For example, a typical group size
for us would be eight to ten dolphins, like females
would forage with other females, or it might be a
big group of males looking for females. Or it might
be a mixed up group.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
Interesting and it's flexible. I guess they'll switch groups and
form different groups at different times.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
Yeah, but you know they have friends. They have their
best friends, and they have their alliances. They might form
to fight off predators that sort of thing. But yeah,
it's pretty organized. The strong bonds between mothers and cats,
in between male groups and the juveniles are the teenagers, right,
They're getting in trouble and learning the hard way.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Sometimes, whoa how does the dolphin get into trouble? Oh?
Speaker 2 (04:36):
There are many ways of dolphin cann't get to trouble.
They can think they know more than they do, so
they could challenge like an adult that's older than them.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
They'll get slapped around. For example, they can.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
Get a little too bold with sharks and they get eaten,
you know, or injured.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
Again, they think they know everything when they're teenagers.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Sounds familiar, huh, it does? Yeah. Did they also call
their parents broke like my kids did these days?
Speaker 2 (05:05):
I don't know, We don't know.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
The other dolphin scientist I talked to was doctor Layla Sayik,
a scientist that's been involved in the longest running study
of a dolphin population in history.
Speaker 3 (05:20):
My name is Leila Sayek, and I'm a scientist at
the Woodsville Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and the United States,
and I study dolphin communication.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
Amazing. How long have you been working with dolphins?
Speaker 3 (05:32):
About forty years? Hard to willing.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
Yeah, Oh my goodness. Can you tell me about this study?
What do you mean it's been the longest running study
on a group of dolphins.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
Yeah, it's amazing because this resident population of dolphins in
Sarasota was first sort of discovered and study began back
in nineteen seventy, so fifty five years ago at this point,
and they did some research seeing where the animals go
and actually discovered pretty quickly that these animals live there, like,
not migrating up and down the coast. They are living
in this one area in the waters in and around Sarasota, Florida.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
How many dolphins are there?
Speaker 3 (06:09):
There's about one hundred and seventy and.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
So you've tracked these dolphins through multiple generations by at
this point, I imagine.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
Yes, yes, there are six generations known to researchers. Yeah,
so that's just amazing to be able to know an
animal's mother and grandmother and great grandmother and great great grandmother,
and not to mention all their siblings and aunts and
uncles and you know, you name it. It's really an amazing
data set.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
How would you describe what kind of animal they are?
Speaker 3 (06:41):
They definitely are very intelligent animals. I mean if they
are very curious and really interesting to study because they're complicated.
They kind of like us. They live long lives and
they have a lot of different relationships with other dolphins.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
It's interesting to hear you say the word relationship. What
do you mean what kinds of relationships the dolphins have?
Speaker 3 (07:02):
Well, they have really long lasting I don't know if
you want to call them friendships or I don't you know,
I don't know what the right word is, but they
definitely hang out with certain other dolphins very predictably. And
so that's seen especially in the adult males in the
population that I study. And so when the males reach adulthood,
they have this partner, their alliance partner who they are
(07:26):
with really virtually all of the time. I mean, it's
it's really the strongest bond that we see in the population.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
Maybe we can call them friendships. Sorry, interesting, So males
and para kind of for life almost.
Speaker 3 (07:41):
Yeah, I mean, it can be for life. And I
should also point out that I am talking about this
one population of dolphins that I work with in Sarasota, Florida,
but there are plenty of other populations of dolphins out there.
We don't even know if a lot of them have
these same types of social relationships.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
Oh wow, we don't know.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
We don't know. There is one other long term research
site in Australia in an area called Shark Bay, and
there the males actually much more typically form trios rather
than pairs.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
What that's fascinating. It's almost like they have a local culture.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
I feel like you're saying, yeah, potentially that's right. I mean, yeah,
that different populations do different things. They're certainly not in
any way kind of hardwired to behave in certain ways,
at least at that level.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
How would you describe this group of dolphins. Is it
like a village, Is it like a pack? Is it
like a family?
Speaker 3 (08:34):
Well, the word that my colleagues are run the project
down there at the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program, they call
it a community. That's the word that they typically use
to describe it. So, you know, that sort of probably
brings to mind, you know, sort of the idea that
these animals are connected in ways, you know, the way
we think of a community, that they probably almost certainly
(08:54):
all know each other. They probably even know whose mom
and sister and things like that. I wouldn't be surprised.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
Yes, there's a lot we don't know about dolphins. We
know they have complex societies and that their behavior is
not necessarily hardwired, which means they learn from each other.
And that brings us to the main question of the episode,
which is how do dolphins communicate? And could we ever
talk to them? So when we come back, I'll ask
(09:23):
our two experts these questions. So don't flip out, stay
with us, We'll be right back. Hi, welcome back. We're
(09:45):
talking about whether we can ever talk to dolphins, and hey,
if you're interested in the general topic of animal communication,
check out our December tenth episode in which we talk
about the history of humans trying to talk to all
kinds of animals, from gorillas and parrots, cats and dogs.
But today we're focusing on dolphins. And so far we've
talked about how complex the social structure of dolphins is.
(10:09):
Now the question is what do we know about how
they talk to each other. Here's more of my conversations
with doctor Denise Herzing and doctor Layla Seig. Well, I
guess that's prett to the question what kind of language
do dolphins have or what do we know about how
the way that they talk to each other?
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Sure, well, I think most scientists would probably first of all,
say we don't know if they have a language, because
that infers a lot of things. As far as you know,
what we know of human language, so we know they
have complicated communication.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
For sure. We do know some things.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
We know a couple really important things I could tell
you right now. We can identify certain behavioral states like
courtship or fighting by the types of sounds that are
within that activity. You know, certain types of sounds we
hear in aggression. Yeah, I mean, you know, it's like
I could do it by ear too. But we kind
of know that they do change sound types for different activities.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
Huh.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
What we don't know is are there repeated patterns structure
and order to some of these sound sequences that would
suggest they have language like structure, because any language has
to have some structure, right. So we're just starting, I think,
to look at this and some reasearers might say, well,
we've looked at all of it, and they don't. But
(11:24):
you know, honestly, we haven't had the tools.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
I don't think.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
Now we have machine learning and AI, and these tools
are going to at least help us identify some of
these patterns and structures.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
It just a curmed I guess there's sort of three things, right.
There's a certain pattern of behavior in terms of the
calls they make during certain activities. There's the idea of vocabulary,
like do certain sounds correspond to certain things or concepts?
And then there's the concept book language, which is like
are these words arranged in specific orders? I guess you're
(11:56):
saying that we're not quite sure where in that spectrum
dolphins are yet.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
That's correct.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
So imagine going into your friend's house and having dinner
at the dinner table and recording the conversation with the
larger family structure, and you play it later. Would you
know if they're talking about the mashed potatoes or are
they talking about what the kids did in school today?
Speaker 3 (12:19):
Right?
Speaker 2 (12:19):
Or what are your plans for tomorrow? So we can say, yeah,
the dolphins make these sounds when they're forging, but are
they just hunting sounds and this helps them find their prey?
Are they saying, hey, Stubby, there's a big fish over here,
or let's go yesterday to that same place where we
found the good fish. We don't know, right, And that's
part of the key to language, right. So that's what
(12:41):
we don't know.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
So there's a lot we don't know about how dolphins communicate.
But one thing we do know that it's very rare
in the animal kingdom, is that dolphins have names for
each other.
Speaker 3 (12:55):
One thing that we know about their communication that is
very cool is that they produce in individually specific sounds
that are called signature whistles, and these are the closest
analog to our names in the animal world. So each
dolphin has their own specific whistle. That's why it's called signature,
you know, kind of like our signature is our own thing,
(13:16):
and so that's individual identifiers. And so that's been something
that's been really interesting to study. And they use them
in some ways like we do, in other ways not
so for example, they will often produce their own signature whistle,
which is not something that we typically do because we
don't usually walk around saying our own names a lot.
(13:36):
But we also usually can see each other, whereas they
usually can't see each other. So because the water is
very murky, if they're sort of spread out feeding, that
what we might often hear them sort of calling out
occasionally I'm over here, I'm over here, I'm over here,
just by using their own signature whistle, or maybe they're
meeting another group as they travel and they want to,
you know, say who they are something like that.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
Is it sort of like if we humans we're all
living in the dark or in a giant cave we
can't see, we would be basically doing the same thing
all the time, saying like, hey, I'm here. It's hoorheyge
or hey here hey kind of is that what you mean?
Speaker 3 (14:12):
Yeah, I think we would have to all be saying
our names periodically because we couldn't see each other, and
you know, we normally rely on site. But they don't
have that. Wow, I mean, they don't have that capacity
just because the water is generally very muky.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
It's just like you said, it's about checking in with
the rest of the group. Yeah, So dolphins have names.
Each dolphin has a sound that identifies them and they
say it a lot. About fifty percent of all the
calls of dolphin makes is their signature whistle. As doctor
(14:48):
Saying mentioned, it's hard to see underwater dolphins of sonar,
so they can tell where other dolphins are, but they
can't visually recognize each other. So one reason for having
these names and saying them that so they can keep
track of each other. And actually, we've thought about these
names since the nineteen sixties. I guess at what age
(15:09):
does that name get cemented or generated.
Speaker 3 (15:13):
It's certainly usually within the first three months. That's been
documented through actually studies of animals held in captivity by
the people who discovered signature whistles. Melba and David Caldwell.
They discovered signatre whistles actually back in the nineteen sixties,
and in that work they sampled more than one hundred
dolphins that were held in different facilities at the time,
(15:33):
and they would record them in isolation, so just you know,
briefly put a dolphin in one place outside of other dolphins,
so that they were able to say, Okay, this whistle
is definitely coming from this dolphins And in that context,
they tend to make a lot of signature whistles because
they're probably trying to contact their groupmates, saying hey, I'm
over here, I'm over here, I'm over here. So usually
(15:55):
if you isolate a dolphin, you will pretty quickly be
able to identify it's signature whistle.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
Yeah. I guess if I get separated from a group
in a giant dark cave, I would be like, hey,
I'm here, I'm here, I'm here, or here trying to
get back right.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
I mean, they're very social animals, So.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
Each dolphin has their own signature whistle. Do dolphins ever
say the signature whistle of another dolphin?
Speaker 3 (16:17):
Yes, they do. They copy each other's signature whistles. We've
seen that quite commonly so there's maybe two animals that
we're recording, and sometimes we'll see one of them make
the other dolphin signature whistle, which is probably sort of
a way of being like, hey, you over there or whatever,
something like that, come on over my way, or who
knows what you know, something along those lines. But we
(16:38):
are super interested in trying to see whether dolphins actually
make signature whistles of animals that aren't with them. That
would be, you know, something pretty exciting because that would
really suggest that they have sort of a representation of
that animal in their head. You know. It's different from
if you're with another animal and they're making their whistle
(16:58):
and you make their whistle back at some point to them,
you're hearing it, you're sort of copying it. That's really
different than like being swimming around and maybe thinking like, oh,
I wonder if you know Bob's here, and then making
Bob's whistle or something like that. It's a bit of
a holy grail, honestly, and studying animal communication is this
idea of whether animals have these abstract representations for things
(17:20):
or other animals interesting.
Speaker 1 (17:22):
It's sort of like if you and I are in
a dark cave together, I might be like Orte here,
Jorge and Hoorte, and you might be saying Leayla here,
Layla here, here, Leila, and then I might start saying
Laila Leila also just to sort of like maybe echo
or connect with you. Yeah, like right, But if you're
not there and I say your name, that could be
maybe a sign that I'm thinking of you and that
(17:42):
I know that you're an individual person and I'm wondering
where you are.
Speaker 3 (17:45):
Maybe right exactly, or even potentially talking about me to
somebody else, although that's getting a whole other layer further.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
Down that I'm not dolphin gossip, yeah exactly.
Speaker 3 (17:56):
I'm not trying to imply that that's happening yet to anyway.
Who knows. We might yet discover that, but yeah, that
would be a pretty cool thing if we were able
to document that.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
So those are signature whistles. Another cool thing we've learned
about how dolphins talk to each other is that they
can have an accent.
Speaker 3 (18:16):
Although there is one other thing about signature whistles. I
might just mention quickly because it's so fascinating. But just
a couple of years ago, we did a study where
we found that mother dolphins use something similar to what
we call mother eaves, where they will modify their signature
whistles when they're communicating with their calves by raising the
highest frequency of their whistles. So it's kind of like
(18:38):
what we do when we're talking with like infants or children.
Human caregivers tend to talk and kind of a more
sing songy voice. I pitch sing songy voice, and so
it really seems like dolphins do a similar thing.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
It's sort of like if I was with a group
of fans, that'd be like, or here a porge, this
is Orge. But if I was trying to get to
my kid to see, like here's daddy, Daddy's here, Daddy's here?
Is that kind of you? What do you mean to
make that?
Speaker 3 (19:05):
I think? I mean, they're still saying the same name,
but they are inflecting it differently, And it's potentially like
with human mother ease, it seems like there's something about
that kind of more inflected speech that engages the children
in some way, you know, to sort of be like,
maybe it's that they know, Okay, they're talking to me now,
you know that this sound is directed to me rather
(19:26):
than to somebody else. I mean, that's one possible hypothesis.
When mom makes her whistle a little bit higher, the
calf is like, Okay, she's she's telling me something now,
you know, rather than maybe to one of the other
dolphins that's around here. But that's just a hypothesis. I mean,
(19:47):
we really don't know how it might funk him for dolphins,
but it was just really cool to find that they
do something similar to what we do.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
Yeah, that's fascinating. So when the kid was around, they
would have this.
Speaker 3 (20:00):
They would increase the frequency of highest frequency of their
whistles so it would go up to a higher pitch
when they were communicating with their calf versus when they
were not communicating with a calf.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
Yes, it seems that dolphins also baby talk when talking
to babies. Okay, so that's what we know about how
dolphins talk to each other. Now the question is can
we use what we know to talk to them? Could
we use AI to decode the words they use or
try to teach them new words, or what would happen
to be said their names back to them. As it
(20:32):
turns out, both our experts have tried to do this.
So when we come back, we'll talk about actually talking
to dolphins, and I don't want to oversell it, but
it's going to be fantastic. Okay, that was a dull
fin joke. The point is, stay with us, give you
right back, Hey, welcome back. We're talking about talking to dolphins,
(21:10):
and so far we've learned about the social structure they
have and what we know about how they communicate with
each other. Now the question is could we use any
of this to have a conversation with them as it happens.
The two dolphin experts in our show today have tried
to do this in two very different ways, and they
both sort of work. The first approach is to play
(21:32):
back to dolphins' words we think we've learned from them first,
how doctor Lei la Seig describes it.
Speaker 3 (21:39):
Yeah, So that's and being focused. If I worked for
the last couple of years, and it was only maybe
about ten years ago or so that we were doing
some experiments where we playback sounds to dolphins, and I
noticed multiple different dolphins making a similar whistle in response
to those playbacks, and I remember being like, what's going
on here? Like this is so crazy, Like I didn't
(22:02):
expect anything like that, And I remember being really blown
away and actually like contacting my colleague and saying, you know,
you're not gonna believe this, but I'm seeing like multiple
dolphins making a really similar response here, and so that
kind of launched this whole direction of my research focused
on what we call shared non signature whistles. So these
(22:22):
are not signature whistles, but there are types of whistles
that are produced by multiple dolphins. So it's not just
some random whistle. There's like these different whistle that lots
and lots of different dolphins make. And so we now
are really trying to understand what do those mean? Do
those have you know, specific meanings the way potentially a
phrase or a word might for us. You know, we
(22:45):
don't know the answer to that, but that's what we're
trying to find out through playbacks. By playing back these
sounds of dolphins and observing how they respond.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
I see fascinating. Can you describe your experiment in a
little bit more detail. You played bad non signature whistled
sound that you recorded, but you don't know what it means.
You just recorded a sound.
Speaker 3 (23:06):
Right, There's one particular whistle type that I have like
a hunch that it's produced in response to kind of
a surprising sound. So it seems like that could be
some kind of like a what was that sort of sound.
It's not so much that we think that that whistle
(23:26):
probably represents something, you know, the way like the word
chair means a chair, but it might be more like
something like a dolphin going wait, what was that?
Speaker 1 (23:35):
Oh? Yes, doctor Sayik thinks she might have decoded the
first ever dolphin word in history, and that word could
be the dolphin equivalent of what the F, which kind
of makes sense. Actually, if a dolphin scientist suddenly jumped
out of the water and started saying strange sounds to us,
what the F would probably be the most common thing
(23:57):
you would hear back from humans. Okay, what really intreagued
Suctor's Ayeek about this particular whistle is that she's heard
it from lots of dolphins in the community. And you
find that dolphins say that this word across a community.
It's like each time you go back, you're not pulling
the same group of dolphins, You're pulling a totally different
group and they.
Speaker 3 (24:16):
I mean, it's all the same one hundred and seventy dolphins.
But I think I've seen at least thirty five different
dolphins doing it at some point. There's one feature of
the whistle that's very consistent, which is this flat, constant
frequency part at the end of the whistle. And that's
something very unusual because dolphins in Sara's to almost never
make constant frequency whistles. And I was like, what is
(24:37):
going on here when I first discovered it. And so
it's not a totally like slam dunk.
Speaker 1 (24:44):
Maybe could be like a question mark at the end
of their word.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
It could be it could be that that flat component
it just adds that. But anyway, we have a lot
of work to do to figure this out.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
What do you think of the idea of using AI?
Seen that a lot in using AI and computers to
try to feed it all this data and have it
figure out how dolphins talk. What do you think about that?
Speaker 3 (25:07):
So a lot of people ask me about that. I
don't personally feel that AI, at least where it stands
right now, is in a place to interpret dolphin sounds.
If we want to interpret what these sounds mean, I
just don't see any other way to do that than
to actually observe how the dolphins are using them or
responding to them, Like I just don't see how an
(25:29):
AI could interpret those sounds without that additional contextual.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
Data, because I guess you need to tie to the
animal's behavior to be able to make those confusions. But
right now the data is not connected to behavior or
observations exactly.
Speaker 3 (25:46):
Most of the uses that I know of of AI
on a large scale with animal vocalizations has involved so
just feeding the vocalizations into an AI, having it spit
out patterns, which could be super interesting, but that's what
they are at this point. They are patterns, and we
don't know if they mean anything to the animals. So
you have to get out there and watch them while
they're producing them and see are they doing something different
(26:09):
when they make it this way versus that way. But
without that information, to me, it could just be random.
It could just be noise. It could be like us
clearing our throat, you know, or something like that. We
just don't know.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
I see. It'd be like trying to understand human language
just from recordings of us talking without any context of
whether we were in pairs or in a group, or
distress or having fun or eating or anything.
Speaker 3 (26:33):
Right, It's really lacking that context, which is really crucial
when you want to understand what sounds mean.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
I'll make it bad joke. It's almost like you need
to know the poor poise of the word.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
That's very true though.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
That's a good one, all right. The second way that
scientists have tried to talk to dolphins has been to
try to teach dolphins you words to them. Here's for
Denise Herzing. Okay, so there's the idea of trying to
understand how dolphins communicate. But then a part of your
work has been on maybe another approach. Can you tell
(27:10):
us a little bit about that? Sure, well, we do
a little bit of both.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
Two way communication is about interacting actively to try to communicate,
versus just standing by and observing, recording and trying to
decode what you see in here and not interacting.
Speaker 1 (27:25):
So in this case with the dolphins, what's the scenario, Capain,
it's a picture of what's involved.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Well, our two way system involves underwater computers. So they
are little aloneum casings we wear on our torso well,
right now it actually has a pixel phone in it.
It's really off the shelf now, but it's got preprogrammed
sounds that we have labeled for different toys. The dolphins
like to play with for example, and it's got a
(27:51):
powerful real time recognition program. So when a dolphin might
mimic that whistle, then the computer would tell the human researcher,
who's wearing also a head, said it hurt a match,
And so a dolphin is trying pretty hard to mimic
that sound.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
So the scenario is that a scientist a diver will
dive down with this device and then they'll sort of
wave a toy around. What does that particle look like?
Speaker 2 (28:15):
So our normal protocol would we get in the water
and we might have this device on, but we're not
going to use it unless the dolphins want to interact
with us. Now, if the dolphins start playing with us,
they offer us a toy, they start interacting, then we
might go into our play protocol. So let's try to
label this toy they brought over.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
Then they'll do that. They'll like bring up and say
sort of like a dog like here, ball here, let's
play really.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
Yeah, so they'll offer us piece of sarcasm or seagras.
Sarcasm is a piece of algae basically, Okay, so I
can push my little keypad on my box playing the
whistle for sarcasm. I can ask them for it, or
I can wave it and say sarcasm while I'm playing
the whistle.
Speaker 3 (28:57):
And the idea is to expose.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
Them to it. Okay, So the idea here is to
basically teach dolphins' words the same way you might teach
your dog the word ball or sin or water. Scientists
would play with dolphins and try to get them to
learn that a certain whistle means sea grass or algae,
and then they would try to get the animals to
say the whistle back to them when the dolphins wanted
(29:20):
to refer to seagrass or culture. And it sort of worked.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
So we had some interesting reactions and some suggestive data,
but nothing earth shattering and nothing to really show that
they would see the functionality of these different sounds. Now,
I think in captive studies they've gotten a little further
with that because they have more time with the animals.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
I don't think it's gone very far, but at least you.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
Can see maybe they understand the different function of these
signals and objects. So part of the big debate I
think among scientists is that if they a dolphin in captivity,
darts being able to understand semantics and syntax, which they
have especially in Hawaii at lu Herman's old lab there.
The question is, Okay, so we know they have the
(30:10):
flexibility to do that in their brains, but we still
don't know if they use it in their own system, right,
I see. So you could have an animal that's exposed
to human culture and to these kinds of things and
they learn they're like, oh, I'm flexible, I can figure
this out. But that doesn't mean they have a language
in their own communications system. So that's a big debate
(30:31):
as well. So lots of things we don't know.
Speaker 1 (30:35):
Okay, So that's kind of the state of the art
of talking to dolphins. You're starting to catalog all the
sounds they make, and there are possible breakthroughs with some sounds.
And we also know dolphins could learn sounds from us,
but it wouldn't necessarily tell us how they communicate among themselves.
Of course, the bigger question is if we could talk
(30:56):
to dolphins, what will we say to them? What would
it mean for us people to understand dolphins and what
they're saying to each other.
Speaker 3 (31:04):
I mean, I think that would be amazing. I mean
that's because I just feel like the possibility is for
complexity in their communication system, given that they do learn
and have this flexible communication system. I just think it's
just super exciting and I think it'll be really eye opening.
Speaker 1 (31:23):
Just kind of understanding how this animal, what it's like
to be this animal.
Speaker 3 (31:27):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, like how they interact with each other
and what kinds of things they do and kind of
communicate with each other.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
It's fascinating how they see and hear the world.
Speaker 3 (31:39):
Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
The last question here, if we figure out how they communicate,
what would you want to tell or ask a dolphin
or a group of dolphins.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
So that's my question. I always ask people that question really,
So for me, it would just be more about learning, Like,
you know, what do you think about It's important to you?
And I'm sure there's all sort of secrets if we
could ever ask them in detail about the ocean, I
can tell us all sorts of things about the ocean,
you know.
Speaker 1 (32:09):
I think it.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
Could just be as simple as finding common ground. I
think what it could do for us is give us
a fuller respect of other species and that hey, we
all have a right to be here. They have their
own lives, they have full interesting lives. You know, I
think as humans we have to be careful. Is it
about us or is it about them?
Speaker 1 (32:29):
Right? Yeah, it sounds like maybe the question is not
can we talk to dolphins, but whether dolphins want to
talk to us?
Speaker 2 (32:37):
There you go, it's a good way of stating it.
Speaker 3 (32:39):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
All right, Well it sounds like we might be able
to talk to dolphins in the future, in which case
we should probably figure out if we are a species
worth talking to. Thanks for joining us, See you next
time you've been listening to Science Stuff. Production of iHeartRadio,
(33:02):
written and produced by me or Y Cham, edited by
Rose Seguda, executive producer Jerry Rowland, and audio engineer and
mixer Jasey Pegram And you can follow me on social media.
Just search for PhD Comics and the name of your
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(33:22):
and please tell your friends we'll be back next Wednesday
with another episode. Hey, please take a second and leave
us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you
(33:42):
listen to the podcast. Thanks a lot,
Hey, welcome to Sign Stuff production of iHeartRadio. I'm Hoar
hit Cham and today we're asking the question, can we
talk to dolphins? They're one of the most intelligent animals
out there. Is it possible to decode what they're saying
to each other? We're gonna talk to two dolphin experts
who have been observing and listening in on our poor
(00:23):
boys friends for decades, and they're gonna tell us what
we know about dolphines and whether we can use it
to have a conversation with them. So get ready to
take the plunge as we dive into clear blue waters
to answer the question can we talk to dolphins?
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Enjoy?
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Hey everyone, If you ask a bunch of kids what
their favorite animal is, the chances are more than a
few of them will say it's dolphins. And I was
one of those kids. I love to swim and I
scuba and so to this day, if anyone asked me
if I could be any animal, which one would it be,
I'll still answer a dolphin. So I was excited to
(01:05):
talk to our experts today. I had a lot of questions,
what are dolphins like, what do we know about their language?
And could we ever actually communicate with them. We'll start
with our first expert, doctor Denise Hersing. Doctor Hearsing is
well known in the marine biology community, and she's often
called the Jane Goodle of the sea for her decades
(01:26):
long work trying to understand how dolphins behave and talk
to each other. First question I had for doctor Hersing
was what are dolphins like? Well, thank you so much,
doctor Heusing for joining us.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Great to be here. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Can you please tell us who you are and what
you do?
Speaker 3 (01:44):
Sure? I'm doctor Denise Hersing.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
I am a marine mammalogist and I specialize in dolphin
acoustic and behavioral communication. And I'm the head of the
Wild Dolphin Project, which is a nonprofit I've been running
for forty plus years and we go out in the
Bahamas in the summer study while dolphins, and we've been
doing it ever summer since nineteen eighty five.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
What kind of animal are dolphins like? How would you
describe what they're like?
Speaker 2 (02:13):
Dolphins are an aquatic social mammal. They have a lot
of parallels to terrestrial mammals like primates and elephants, in
the sense that they have tight societies that are based
on mother cap relationships. They have long term friendships. They
learn and develop through the years, so everything they do
(02:36):
is not instinct, you know. They learn the social rules,
they learn who their friends are and who their enemies are,
and they survive in the wild. So they're really a
complicated social mammal that has just evolved for a aquatic existence.
Partly why they're so difficult to study, to get time
with them on the water and or under the water.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
What do I mean? Just the water is a difficult
place to do studies.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
The ocean is a large place. It's a big area
that they're resident in, right, So we can spend days
looking for them. We kind of know where they hang
out sometimes, but their mobile they move around, they chase fish,
so getting observation time is harder I think than many
terrestrial animals.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Oh wow, I had thought about that. Yeah, you have
to swim after them basically to study them. So you
mentioned that it's a resident pod. How about how many
dolphins are you talking about?
Speaker 2 (03:26):
So historically it's been about one hundred animals every summer,
so it's a small community. They're considered a coastal species,
so they don't live in these big open ocean schools.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
Oh, I see. Is there a sense of what kind
of social structure they have? Do these hundred dolphins organize
themselves in any way or are they just sort of
hanging out?
Speaker 2 (03:46):
No, they have their own organization. We call it fission fusion,
which means that they come together and split apart, come
together and split apart. For example, a typical group size
for us would be eight to ten dolphins, like females
would forage with other females, or it might be a
big group of males looking for females. Or it might
be a mixed up group.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
Interesting and it's flexible. I guess they'll switch groups and
form different groups at different times.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
Yeah, but you know they have friends. They have their
best friends, and they have their alliances. They might form
to fight off predators that sort of thing. But yeah,
it's pretty organized. The strong bonds between mothers and cats,
in between male groups and the juveniles are the teenagers, right,
They're getting in trouble and learning the hard way.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Sometimes, whoa how does the dolphin get into trouble? Oh?
Speaker 2 (04:36):
There are many ways of dolphin cann't get to trouble.
They can think they know more than they do, so
they could challenge like an adult that's older than them.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
They'll get slapped around. For example, they can.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
Get a little too bold with sharks and they get eaten,
you know, or injured.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
Again, they think they know everything when they're teenagers.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Sounds familiar, huh, it does? Yeah. Did they also call
their parents broke like my kids did these days?
Speaker 2 (05:05):
I don't know, We don't know.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
The other dolphin scientist I talked to was doctor Layla Sayik,
a scientist that's been involved in the longest running study
of a dolphin population in history.
Speaker 3 (05:20):
My name is Leila Sayek, and I'm a scientist at
the Woodsville Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and the United States,
and I study dolphin communication.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
Amazing. How long have you been working with dolphins?
Speaker 3 (05:32):
About forty years? Hard to willing.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
Yeah, Oh my goodness. Can you tell me about this study?
What do you mean it's been the longest running study
on a group of dolphins.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
Yeah, it's amazing because this resident population of dolphins in
Sarasota was first sort of discovered and study began back
in nineteen seventy, so fifty five years ago at this point,
and they did some research seeing where the animals go
and actually discovered pretty quickly that these animals live there, like,
not migrating up and down the coast. They are living
in this one area in the waters in and around Sarasota, Florida.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
How many dolphins are there?
Speaker 3 (06:09):
There's about one hundred and seventy and.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
So you've tracked these dolphins through multiple generations by at
this point, I imagine.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
Yes, yes, there are six generations known to researchers. Yeah,
so that's just amazing to be able to know an
animal's mother and grandmother and great grandmother and great great grandmother,
and not to mention all their siblings and aunts and
uncles and you know, you name it. It's really an amazing
data set.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
How would you describe what kind of animal they are?
Speaker 3 (06:41):
They definitely are very intelligent animals. I mean if they
are very curious and really interesting to study because they're complicated.
They kind of like us. They live long lives and
they have a lot of different relationships with other dolphins.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
It's interesting to hear you say the word relationship. What
do you mean what kinds of relationships the dolphins have?
Speaker 3 (07:02):
Well, they have really long lasting I don't know if
you want to call them friendships or I don't you know,
I don't know what the right word is, but they
definitely hang out with certain other dolphins very predictably. And
so that's seen especially in the adult males in the
population that I study. And so when the males reach adulthood,
they have this partner, their alliance partner who they are
(07:26):
with really virtually all of the time. I mean, it's
it's really the strongest bond that we see in the population.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
Maybe we can call them friendships. Sorry, interesting, So males
and para kind of for life almost.
Speaker 3 (07:41):
Yeah, I mean, it can be for life. And I
should also point out that I am talking about this
one population of dolphins that I work with in Sarasota, Florida,
but there are plenty of other populations of dolphins out there.
We don't even know if a lot of them have
these same types of social relationships.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
Oh wow, we don't know.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
We don't know. There is one other long term research
site in Australia in an area called Shark Bay, and
there the males actually much more typically form trios rather
than pairs.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
What that's fascinating. It's almost like they have a local culture.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
I feel like you're saying, yeah, potentially that's right. I mean, yeah,
that different populations do different things. They're certainly not in
any way kind of hardwired to behave in certain ways,
at least at that level.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
How would you describe this group of dolphins. Is it
like a village, Is it like a pack? Is it
like a family?
Speaker 3 (08:34):
Well, the word that my colleagues are run the project
down there at the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program, they call
it a community. That's the word that they typically use
to describe it. So, you know, that sort of probably
brings to mind, you know, sort of the idea that
these animals are connected in ways, you know, the way
we think of a community, that they probably almost certainly
(08:54):
all know each other. They probably even know whose mom
and sister and things like that. I wouldn't be surprised.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
Yes, there's a lot we don't know about dolphins. We
know they have complex societies and that their behavior is
not necessarily hardwired, which means they learn from each other.
And that brings us to the main question of the episode,
which is how do dolphins communicate? And could we ever
talk to them? So when we come back, I'll ask
(09:23):
our two experts these questions. So don't flip out, stay
with us, We'll be right back. Hi, welcome back. We're
(09:45):
talking about whether we can ever talk to dolphins, and hey,
if you're interested in the general topic of animal communication,
check out our December tenth episode in which we talk
about the history of humans trying to talk to all
kinds of animals, from gorillas and parrots, cats and dogs.
But today we're focusing on dolphins. And so far we've
talked about how complex the social structure of dolphins is.
(10:09):
Now the question is what do we know about how
they talk to each other. Here's more of my conversations
with doctor Denise Herzing and doctor Layla Seig. Well, I
guess that's prett to the question what kind of language
do dolphins have or what do we know about how
the way that they talk to each other?
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Sure, well, I think most scientists would probably first of all,
say we don't know if they have a language, because
that infers a lot of things. As far as you know,
what we know of human language, so we know they
have complicated communication.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
For sure. We do know some things.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
We know a couple really important things I could tell
you right now. We can identify certain behavioral states like
courtship or fighting by the types of sounds that are
within that activity. You know, certain types of sounds we
hear in aggression. Yeah, I mean, you know, it's like
I could do it by ear too. But we kind
of know that they do change sound types for different activities.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
Huh.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
What we don't know is are there repeated patterns structure
and order to some of these sound sequences that would
suggest they have language like structure, because any language has
to have some structure, right. So we're just starting, I think,
to look at this and some reasearers might say, well,
we've looked at all of it, and they don't. But
(11:24):
you know, honestly, we haven't had the tools.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
I don't think.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
Now we have machine learning and AI, and these tools
are going to at least help us identify some of
these patterns and structures.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
It just a curmed I guess there's sort of three things, right.
There's a certain pattern of behavior in terms of the
calls they make during certain activities. There's the idea of vocabulary,
like do certain sounds correspond to certain things or concepts?
And then there's the concept book language, which is like
are these words arranged in specific orders? I guess you're
(11:56):
saying that we're not quite sure where in that spectrum
dolphins are yet.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
That's correct.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
So imagine going into your friend's house and having dinner
at the dinner table and recording the conversation with the
larger family structure, and you play it later. Would you
know if they're talking about the mashed potatoes or are
they talking about what the kids did in school today?
Speaker 3 (12:19):
Right?
Speaker 2 (12:19):
Or what are your plans for tomorrow? So we can say, yeah,
the dolphins make these sounds when they're forging, but are
they just hunting sounds and this helps them find their prey?
Are they saying, hey, Stubby, there's a big fish over here,
or let's go yesterday to that same place where we
found the good fish. We don't know, right, And that's
part of the key to language, right. So that's what
(12:41):
we don't know.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
So there's a lot we don't know about how dolphins communicate.
But one thing we do know that it's very rare
in the animal kingdom, is that dolphins have names for
each other.
Speaker 3 (12:55):
One thing that we know about their communication that is
very cool is that they produce in individually specific sounds
that are called signature whistles, and these are the closest
analog to our names in the animal world. So each
dolphin has their own specific whistle. That's why it's called signature,
you know, kind of like our signature is our own thing,
(13:16):
and so that's individual identifiers. And so that's been something
that's been really interesting to study. And they use them
in some ways like we do, in other ways not
so for example, they will often produce their own signature whistle,
which is not something that we typically do because we
don't usually walk around saying our own names a lot.
(13:36):
But we also usually can see each other, whereas they
usually can't see each other. So because the water is
very murky, if they're sort of spread out feeding, that
what we might often hear them sort of calling out
occasionally I'm over here, I'm over here, I'm over here,
just by using their own signature whistle, or maybe they're
meeting another group as they travel and they want to,
you know, say who they are something like that.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
Is it sort of like if we humans we're all
living in the dark or in a giant cave we
can't see, we would be basically doing the same thing
all the time, saying like, hey, I'm here. It's hoorheyge
or hey here hey kind of is that what you mean?
Speaker 3 (14:12):
Yeah, I think we would have to all be saying
our names periodically because we couldn't see each other, and
you know, we normally rely on site. But they don't
have that. Wow, I mean, they don't have that capacity
just because the water is generally very muky.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
It's just like you said, it's about checking in with
the rest of the group. Yeah, So dolphins have names.
Each dolphin has a sound that identifies them and they
say it a lot. About fifty percent of all the
calls of dolphin makes is their signature whistle. As doctor
(14:48):
Saying mentioned, it's hard to see underwater dolphins of sonar,
so they can tell where other dolphins are, but they
can't visually recognize each other. So one reason for having
these names and saying them that so they can keep
track of each other. And actually, we've thought about these
names since the nineteen sixties. I guess at what age
(15:09):
does that name get cemented or generated.
Speaker 3 (15:13):
It's certainly usually within the first three months. That's been
documented through actually studies of animals held in captivity by
the people who discovered signature whistles. Melba and David Caldwell.
They discovered signatre whistles actually back in the nineteen sixties,
and in that work they sampled more than one hundred
dolphins that were held in different facilities at the time,
(15:33):
and they would record them in isolation, so just you know,
briefly put a dolphin in one place outside of other dolphins,
so that they were able to say, Okay, this whistle
is definitely coming from this dolphins And in that context,
they tend to make a lot of signature whistles because
they're probably trying to contact their groupmates, saying hey, I'm
over here, I'm over here, I'm over here. So usually
(15:55):
if you isolate a dolphin, you will pretty quickly be
able to identify it's signature whistle.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
Yeah. I guess if I get separated from a group
in a giant dark cave, I would be like, hey,
I'm here, I'm here, I'm here, or here trying to
get back right.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
I mean, they're very social animals, So.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
Each dolphin has their own signature whistle. Do dolphins ever
say the signature whistle of another dolphin?
Speaker 3 (16:17):
Yes, they do. They copy each other's signature whistles. We've
seen that quite commonly so there's maybe two animals that
we're recording, and sometimes we'll see one of them make
the other dolphin signature whistle, which is probably sort of
a way of being like, hey, you over there or whatever,
something like that, come on over my way, or who
knows what you know, something along those lines. But we
(16:38):
are super interested in trying to see whether dolphins actually
make signature whistles of animals that aren't with them. That
would be, you know, something pretty exciting because that would
really suggest that they have sort of a representation of
that animal in their head. You know. It's different from
if you're with another animal and they're making their whistle
(16:58):
and you make their whistle back at some point to them,
you're hearing it, you're sort of copying it. That's really
different than like being swimming around and maybe thinking like, oh,
I wonder if you know Bob's here, and then making
Bob's whistle or something like that. It's a bit of
a holy grail, honestly, and studying animal communication is this
idea of whether animals have these abstract representations for things
(17:20):
or other animals interesting.
Speaker 1 (17:22):
It's sort of like if you and I are in
a dark cave together, I might be like Orte here,
Jorge and Hoorte, and you might be saying Leayla here,
Layla here, here, Leila, and then I might start saying
Laila Leila also just to sort of like maybe echo
or connect with you. Yeah, like right, But if you're
not there and I say your name, that could be
maybe a sign that I'm thinking of you and that
(17:42):
I know that you're an individual person and I'm wondering
where you are.
Speaker 3 (17:45):
Maybe right exactly, or even potentially talking about me to
somebody else, although that's getting a whole other layer further.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
Down that I'm not dolphin gossip, yeah exactly.
Speaker 3 (17:56):
I'm not trying to imply that that's happening yet to anyway.
Who knows. We might yet discover that, but yeah, that
would be a pretty cool thing if we were able
to document that.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
So those are signature whistles. Another cool thing we've learned
about how dolphins talk to each other is that they
can have an accent.
Speaker 3 (18:16):
Although there is one other thing about signature whistles. I
might just mention quickly because it's so fascinating. But just
a couple of years ago, we did a study where
we found that mother dolphins use something similar to what
we call mother eaves, where they will modify their signature
whistles when they're communicating with their calves by raising the
highest frequency of their whistles. So it's kind of like
(18:38):
what we do when we're talking with like infants or children.
Human caregivers tend to talk and kind of a more
sing songy voice. I pitch sing songy voice, and so
it really seems like dolphins do a similar thing.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
It's sort of like if I was with a group
of fans, that'd be like, or here a porge, this
is Orge. But if I was trying to get to
my kid to see, like here's daddy, Daddy's here, Daddy's here?
Is that kind of you? What do you mean to
make that?
Speaker 3 (19:05):
I think? I mean, they're still saying the same name,
but they are inflecting it differently, And it's potentially like
with human mother ease, it seems like there's something about
that kind of more inflected speech that engages the children
in some way, you know, to sort of be like,
maybe it's that they know, Okay, they're talking to me now,
you know that this sound is directed to me rather
(19:26):
than to somebody else. I mean, that's one possible hypothesis.
When mom makes her whistle a little bit higher, the
calf is like, Okay, she's she's telling me something now,
you know, rather than maybe to one of the other
dolphins that's around here. But that's just a hypothesis. I mean,
(19:47):
we really don't know how it might funk him for dolphins,
but it was just really cool to find that they
do something similar to what we do.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
Yeah, that's fascinating. So when the kid was around, they
would have this.
Speaker 3 (20:00):
They would increase the frequency of highest frequency of their
whistles so it would go up to a higher pitch
when they were communicating with their calf versus when they
were not communicating with a calf.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
Yes, it seems that dolphins also baby talk when talking
to babies. Okay, so that's what we know about how
dolphins talk to each other. Now the question is can
we use what we know to talk to them? Could
we use AI to decode the words they use or
try to teach them new words, or what would happen
to be said their names back to them. As it
(20:32):
turns out, both our experts have tried to do this.
So when we come back, we'll talk about actually talking
to dolphins, and I don't want to oversell it, but
it's going to be fantastic. Okay, that was a dull
fin joke. The point is, stay with us, give you
right back, Hey, welcome back. We're talking about talking to dolphins,
(21:10):
and so far we've learned about the social structure they
have and what we know about how they communicate with
each other. Now the question is could we use any
of this to have a conversation with them as it happens.
The two dolphin experts in our show today have tried
to do this in two very different ways, and they
both sort of work. The first approach is to play
(21:32):
back to dolphins' words we think we've learned from them first,
how doctor Lei la Seig describes it.
Speaker 3 (21:39):
Yeah, So that's and being focused. If I worked for
the last couple of years, and it was only maybe
about ten years ago or so that we were doing
some experiments where we playback sounds to dolphins, and I
noticed multiple different dolphins making a similar whistle in response
to those playbacks, and I remember being like, what's going
on here? Like this is so crazy, Like I didn't
(22:02):
expect anything like that, And I remember being really blown
away and actually like contacting my colleague and saying, you know,
you're not gonna believe this, but I'm seeing like multiple
dolphins making a really similar response here, and so that
kind of launched this whole direction of my research focused
on what we call shared non signature whistles. So these
(22:22):
are not signature whistles, but there are types of whistles
that are produced by multiple dolphins. So it's not just
some random whistle. There's like these different whistle that lots
and lots of different dolphins make. And so we now
are really trying to understand what do those mean? Do
those have you know, specific meanings the way potentially a
phrase or a word might for us. You know, we
(22:45):
don't know the answer to that, but that's what we're
trying to find out through playbacks. By playing back these
sounds of dolphins and observing how they respond.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
I see fascinating. Can you describe your experiment in a
little bit more detail. You played bad non signature whistled
sound that you recorded, but you don't know what it means.
You just recorded a sound.
Speaker 3 (23:06):
Right, There's one particular whistle type that I have like
a hunch that it's produced in response to kind of
a surprising sound. So it seems like that could be
some kind of like a what was that sort of sound.
It's not so much that we think that that whistle
(23:26):
probably represents something, you know, the way like the word
chair means a chair, but it might be more like
something like a dolphin going wait, what was that?
Speaker 1 (23:35):
Oh? Yes, doctor Sayik thinks she might have decoded the
first ever dolphin word in history, and that word could
be the dolphin equivalent of what the F, which kind
of makes sense. Actually, if a dolphin scientist suddenly jumped
out of the water and started saying strange sounds to us,
what the F would probably be the most common thing
(23:57):
you would hear back from humans. Okay, what really intreagued
Suctor's Ayeek about this particular whistle is that she's heard
it from lots of dolphins in the community. And you
find that dolphins say that this word across a community.
It's like each time you go back, you're not pulling
the same group of dolphins, You're pulling a totally different
group and they.
Speaker 3 (24:16):
I mean, it's all the same one hundred and seventy dolphins.
But I think I've seen at least thirty five different
dolphins doing it at some point. There's one feature of
the whistle that's very consistent, which is this flat, constant
frequency part at the end of the whistle. And that's
something very unusual because dolphins in Sara's to almost never
make constant frequency whistles. And I was like, what is
(24:37):
going on here when I first discovered it. And so
it's not a totally like slam dunk.
Speaker 1 (24:44):
Maybe could be like a question mark at the end
of their word.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
It could be it could be that that flat component
it just adds that. But anyway, we have a lot
of work to do to figure this out.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
What do you think of the idea of using AI?
Seen that a lot in using AI and computers to
try to feed it all this data and have it
figure out how dolphins talk. What do you think about that?
Speaker 3 (25:07):
So a lot of people ask me about that. I
don't personally feel that AI, at least where it stands
right now, is in a place to interpret dolphin sounds.
If we want to interpret what these sounds mean, I
just don't see any other way to do that than
to actually observe how the dolphins are using them or
responding to them, Like I just don't see how an
(25:29):
AI could interpret those sounds without that additional contextual.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
Data, because I guess you need to tie to the
animal's behavior to be able to make those confusions. But
right now the data is not connected to behavior or
observations exactly.
Speaker 3 (25:46):
Most of the uses that I know of of AI
on a large scale with animal vocalizations has involved so
just feeding the vocalizations into an AI, having it spit
out patterns, which could be super interesting, but that's what
they are at this point. They are patterns, and we
don't know if they mean anything to the animals. So
you have to get out there and watch them while
they're producing them and see are they doing something different
(26:09):
when they make it this way versus that way. But
without that information, to me, it could just be random.
It could just be noise. It could be like us
clearing our throat, you know, or something like that. We
just don't know.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
I see. It'd be like trying to understand human language
just from recordings of us talking without any context of
whether we were in pairs or in a group, or
distress or having fun or eating or anything.
Speaker 3 (26:33):
Right, It's really lacking that context, which is really crucial
when you want to understand what sounds mean.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
I'll make it bad joke. It's almost like you need
to know the poor poise of the word.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
That's very true though.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
That's a good one, all right. The second way that
scientists have tried to talk to dolphins has been to
try to teach dolphins you words to them. Here's for
Denise Herzing. Okay, so there's the idea of trying to
understand how dolphins communicate. But then a part of your
work has been on maybe another approach. Can you tell
(27:10):
us a little bit about that? Sure, well, we do
a little bit of both.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
Two way communication is about interacting actively to try to communicate,
versus just standing by and observing, recording and trying to
decode what you see in here and not interacting.
Speaker 1 (27:25):
So in this case with the dolphins, what's the scenario, Capain,
it's a picture of what's involved.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Well, our two way system involves underwater computers. So they
are little aloneum casings we wear on our torso well,
right now it actually has a pixel phone in it.
It's really off the shelf now, but it's got preprogrammed
sounds that we have labeled for different toys. The dolphins
like to play with for example, and it's got a
(27:51):
powerful real time recognition program. So when a dolphin might
mimic that whistle, then the computer would tell the human researcher,
who's wearing also a head, said it hurt a match,
And so a dolphin is trying pretty hard to mimic
that sound.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
So the scenario is that a scientist a diver will
dive down with this device and then they'll sort of
wave a toy around. What does that particle look like?
Speaker 2 (28:15):
So our normal protocol would we get in the water
and we might have this device on, but we're not
going to use it unless the dolphins want to interact
with us. Now, if the dolphins start playing with us,
they offer us a toy, they start interacting, then we
might go into our play protocol. So let's try to
label this toy they brought over.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
Then they'll do that. They'll like bring up and say
sort of like a dog like here, ball here, let's
play really.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
Yeah, so they'll offer us piece of sarcasm or seagras.
Sarcasm is a piece of algae basically, Okay, so I
can push my little keypad on my box playing the
whistle for sarcasm. I can ask them for it, or
I can wave it and say sarcasm while I'm playing
the whistle.
Speaker 3 (28:57):
And the idea is to expose.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
Them to it. Okay, So the idea here is to
basically teach dolphins' words the same way you might teach
your dog the word ball or sin or water. Scientists
would play with dolphins and try to get them to
learn that a certain whistle means sea grass or algae,
and then they would try to get the animals to
say the whistle back to them when the dolphins wanted
(29:20):
to refer to seagrass or culture. And it sort of worked.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
So we had some interesting reactions and some suggestive data,
but nothing earth shattering and nothing to really show that
they would see the functionality of these different sounds. Now,
I think in captive studies they've gotten a little further
with that because they have more time with the animals.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
I don't think it's gone very far, but at least you.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
Can see maybe they understand the different function of these
signals and objects. So part of the big debate I
think among scientists is that if they a dolphin in captivity,
darts being able to understand semantics and syntax, which they
have especially in Hawaii at lu Herman's old lab there.
The question is, Okay, so we know they have the
(30:10):
flexibility to do that in their brains, but we still
don't know if they use it in their own system, right,
I see. So you could have an animal that's exposed
to human culture and to these kinds of things and
they learn they're like, oh, I'm flexible, I can figure
this out. But that doesn't mean they have a language
in their own communications system. So that's a big debate
(30:31):
as well. So lots of things we don't know.
Speaker 1 (30:35):
Okay, So that's kind of the state of the art
of talking to dolphins. You're starting to catalog all the
sounds they make, and there are possible breakthroughs with some sounds.
And we also know dolphins could learn sounds from us,
but it wouldn't necessarily tell us how they communicate among themselves.
Of course, the bigger question is if we could talk
(30:56):
to dolphins, what will we say to them? What would
it mean for us people to understand dolphins and what
they're saying to each other.
Speaker 3 (31:04):
I mean, I think that would be amazing. I mean
that's because I just feel like the possibility is for
complexity in their communication system, given that they do learn
and have this flexible communication system. I just think it's
just super exciting and I think it'll be really eye opening.
Speaker 1 (31:23):
Just kind of understanding how this animal, what it's like
to be this animal.
Speaker 3 (31:27):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, like how they interact with each other
and what kinds of things they do and kind of
communicate with each other.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
It's fascinating how they see and hear the world.
Speaker 3 (31:39):
Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
The last question here, if we figure out how they communicate,
what would you want to tell or ask a dolphin
or a group of dolphins.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
So that's my question. I always ask people that question really,
So for me, it would just be more about learning, Like,
you know, what do you think about It's important to you?
And I'm sure there's all sort of secrets if we
could ever ask them in detail about the ocean, I
can tell us all sorts of things about the ocean,
you know.
Speaker 1 (32:09):
I think it.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
Could just be as simple as finding common ground. I
think what it could do for us is give us
a fuller respect of other species and that hey, we
all have a right to be here. They have their
own lives, they have full interesting lives. You know, I
think as humans we have to be careful. Is it
about us or is it about them?
Speaker 1 (32:29):
Right? Yeah, it sounds like maybe the question is not
can we talk to dolphins, but whether dolphins want to
talk to us?
Speaker 2 (32:37):
There you go, it's a good way of stating it.
Speaker 3 (32:39):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
All right, Well it sounds like we might be able
to talk to dolphins in the future, in which case
we should probably figure out if we are a species
worth talking to. Thanks for joining us, See you next
time you've been listening to Science Stuff. Production of iHeartRadio,
(33:02):
written and produced by me or Y Cham, edited by
Rose Seguda, executive producer Jerry Rowland, and audio engineer and
mixer Jasey Pegram And you can follow me on social media.
Just search for PhD Comics and the name of your
favorite platform. Be sure to subscribe to Sign Stuff on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts,
(33:22):
and please tell your friends we'll be back next Wednesday
with another episode. Hey, please take a second and leave
us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you
(33:42):
listen to the podcast. Thanks a lot,
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