Can We Talk to Dolphins?

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 boys friends for decades, and they're gonna tell us what we know about dolphines and whether we can use it

Enjoy?

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 talk to our experts today. I had a lot of questions, what are dolphins like, what do we know about their language?

Great to be here. Thank you.

Can you please tell us who you are and what you do?

Sure? I'm doctor Denise Hersing.

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.

What kind of animal are dolphins like? How would you describe what they're like?

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 is not instinct, you know. They learn the social rules, they learn who their friends are and who their enemies are,

What do I mean? Just the water is a difficult place to do studies.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

Interesting and it's flexible. I guess they'll switch groups and form different groups at different times.

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.

Sometimes, whoa how does the dolphin get into trouble? Oh?

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.

They'll get slapped around. For example, they can.

Get a little too bold with sharks and they get eaten, you know, or injured.

Again, they think they know everything when they're teenagers.

Sounds familiar, huh, it does? Yeah. Did they also call their parents broke like my kids did these days?

I don't know, We don't know.

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.

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.

Amazing. How long have you been working with dolphins?

About forty years? Hard to willing.

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.

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.

How many dolphins are there?

There's about one hundred and seventy and.

So you've tracked these dolphins through multiple generations by at this point, I imagine.

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.

How would you describe what kind of animal they are?

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.

It's interesting to hear you say the word relationship. What do you mean what kinds of relationships the dolphins have?

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

Maybe we can call them friendships. Sorry, interesting, So males and para kind of for life almost.

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.

Oh wow, we don't know.

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.

What that's fascinating. It's almost like they have a local culture.

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.

How would you describe this group of dolphins. Is it like a village, Is it like a pack? Is it like a family?

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 all know each other. They probably even know whose mom

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 our two experts these questions. So don't flip out, stay

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.

For sure. We do know some things.

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.

Huh.

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 you know, honestly, we haven't had the tools.

I don't think.

Now we have machine learning and AI, and these tools are going to at least help us identify some of these patterns and structures.

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 saying that we're not quite sure where in that spectrum dolphins are yet.

That's correct.

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?

Right?

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 we don't know.

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.

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, and so that's individual identifiers. And so that's been something

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?

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.

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 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

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.

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.

I mean, they're very social animals, So.

Each dolphin has their own signature whistle. Do dolphins ever say the signature whistle of another dolphin?

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 are super interested in trying to see whether dolphins actually

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 I know that you're an individual person and I'm wondering where you are.

Maybe right exactly, or even potentially talking about me to somebody else, although that's getting a whole other layer further.

Down that I'm not dolphin gossip, yeah exactly.

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.

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.

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 what we do when we're talking with like infants or children.

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?

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 than to somebody else. I mean, that's one possible hypothesis.

Yeah, that's fascinating. So when the kid was around, they would have this.

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.

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 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

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

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.

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 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?

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 you would hear back from humans. Okay, what really intreagued Suctor's Ayeek about this particular whistle is that she's heard

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 going on here when I first discovered it. And so it's not a totally like slam dunk.

Maybe could be like a question mark at the end of their word.

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.

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?

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 AI could interpret those sounds without that additional contextual.

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.

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

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.

Right, It's really lacking that context, which is really crucial when you want to understand what sounds mean.

I'll make it bad joke. It's almost like you need to know the poor poise of the word.

That's very true though.

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 us a little bit about that? Sure, well, we do a little bit of both.

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.

So in this case with the dolphins, what's the scenario, Capain, it's a picture of what's involved.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

And the idea is to expose.

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 to refer to seagrass or culture. And it sort of worked.

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.

I don't think it's gone very far, but at least you.

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 flexibility to do that in their brains, but we still don't know if they use it in their own system, right,

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 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.

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.

Just kind of understanding how this animal, what it's like to be this animal.

Yeah, yeah, exactly, like how they interact with each other and what kinds of things they do and kind of communicate with each other.

It's fascinating how they see and hear the world.

Yeah, definitely.

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.

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.

I think it.

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?

Right? Yeah, it sounds like maybe the question is not can we talk to dolphins, but whether dolphins want to talk to us?

There you go, it's a good way of stating it.

Yep.

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, 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