Incredible Dolphins Love Talking To Each Other | Animal Conversations | Nature Bites

Dolphins take vocal recognition to a different level. They give themselves names. They embed whistled signatures into their vocalizations. No two signatures are the same. They serve to distinguish each dolphin individually, like a personal identity signal. They are specific whistle types, so new modulation patterns that the animals produce that identify the animal that's making the sound. In fact, signature whistles do work like names in the sense that others can copy those whistles and can use them to address an animal. And for example, if I'm trying to find a particular animal, I can call that signature whistle and I can address the other one or try to find him. Dolphins learn to shape their whistled signatures from birth. This small female dolphin has just been born. She is nursing from her mother, and from the first days of her life, she hears the adults of her family whistle and vocalize. This is how she becomes familiar with the whistled signatures of the dolphins around her. So an animal, when it grows up, will start to develop its own unique, novel whistle type. They are listening to whistles in their environment, use some of them, and then just modify them rather than making something completely new up from scratch. So what seems to happen is that the animals take a whistle that they hear, they copy it, and then they kind of create their own variation of it and change it, and so that way, they come up with new whistles. They babble, a bit like babies who are learning their first words. So dolphins have an ability to learn that resembles ours. Researchers refer to this as vocal learning.