Dolphins are widely known to be one of the most intelligent animals on the planet. Scientists have been studying them for a long time and have learned a lot, including the fact that dolphins have names for each other in the forms of clicking sounds. There has been a lot of debate among dolphin experts as to whether their language goes beyond simple things like names.

Dolphins can make complex clicks and whistles, and often do, but what do they mean. A new study published in preprint on BioRxiv (yet to be peer-reviewed) indicates that they are able to communicate much more complex ideas than many believed. The authors of the paper state:

“Overall, our study provides the first evidence in dolphins for a wider repertoire of shared, context-specific signals, which could form the basis for a language-like communication system.”

Of course, they also acknowledge that a lot more data is needed before they can figure out exactly how complex their language might be and how many different concepts they can communicate.

The study looked at a pod of bottlenose dolphins in the Sarasota Bay in Florida, USA. This is one of the most studied groups of dolphins in the world, consisting of about 170 individuals who swim freely in the wild, which is important for this type of study.

To conduct the study, researchers came up with an experiment that would playback recorded dolphin sounds to see how they would react. The original recordings were taken during various health assessments spanning 40 years, capturing more than 300 unique recordings. In addition, some dolphins had digital acoustic tags that took recordings from over 100 animals.

During the experiment, a drone with a hydrophone system was deployed in the water. It would play specific sequences of recordings repeatedly with a delay in the middle. Then the recording would change. Depending on the experiment being done, the dolphins would be played two different sequences. In some cases, the researchers would play 3 or 4 sequences, though that was not as frequent.

The drone would then monitor the behavior of the dolphins for 10 minutes after the sounds were played to see what they would do. Based on their responses, the researchers believe that they have identified various types of communication including alarm responses, and ‘confusion’ responses. The confusion responses didn’t mean the dolphins were confused at the sounds, but rather that the sounds indicated that the dolphin was unsure about something, possibly encouraging the other dolphins to investigate further.

Laela Sayigh was the first author on the study, and in a statement to New Scientist, said:

“I’ve actually spent most of my career arguing that there isn’t evidence for language-like communication in dolphins, but I do feel like a lot of the pieces are there in dolphins. Like the fact that they are flexible, lifelong vocal learners.”

Additional research into this type of communication between dolphins is definitely needed, but this study certainly indicates that dolphin language is more complex than most people previously believed.

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