“Breaking the communication barrier between dolphins and humans
When a chimpanzee gazes at a piece of fruit or a silverback gorilla beats his chest to warn off an approaching male, it’s hard not to see a bit of ourselves in those behaviors and even to imagine what the animals might be thinking. But dolphins are something truly different. They “see” with sonar and do so with such phenomenal precision that they can tell from a hundred feet away whether an object is made of metal, plastic, or wood. They can even eavesdrop on the echolocating clicks of other dolphins to figure out what they’re looking at. Unlike primates, they don’t breathe automatically, and they seem to sleep with only half their brains resting at a time. Their eyes operate independently of each other. They’re a kind of alien intelligence sharing our planet—watching them may be the closest we’ll come to encountering ET.
Dolphins are extraordinarily garrulous. Not only do they whistle and click, but they also emit loud broadband packets of sound called burst pulses to discipline their young and chase away sharks. Scientists listening to all these sounds have long wondered what, if anything, they might mean. Surely such a large-brained, highly social creature wouldn’t waste all that energy babbling beneath the waves unless the vocalizations contained some sort of meaningful content. And yet despite a half century of study, nobody can say what the fundamental units of dolphin vocalization are or how those units get assembled.
“If we can find a pattern connecting vocalization to behavior, it’ll be a huge deal,” says Kuczaj, 64, who has published more scientific articles on dolphin cognition than almost anyone else in the field. He believes that his work with the synchronized dolphins at RIMS may prove to be a Rosetta stone that unlocks dolphin communication…” read full story in National Geographic