Because of a special Dolphin named Kylie, researchers discovered that animals could learn languages not native to their species.
Kylie is a wild common Dolphin who was heard speaking with her adoptive family of harbor Porpoises in the western coast of Scotland’s Firth of Clyde. She has been separated from her pod for unknown reasons and has been with her Porpoise cousins for more than a decade.
The discovery of this phenomenal world-first cross-species communication was studied in 2022 by Mel Cosentino and fellow researchers as seen in Bioacoustics.
DOLPHINS VERSUS PORPOISES
It is really hard to tell Dolphins and Porpoises apart as they look so much alike. But take a look at their mouths!
A Dolphin’s mouth is more prominent and elongated, and has cone-shaped teeth, A Porpoise, on the other hand, has a smaller mouth and spade-shaped teeth.
Dolphins communicate with whistling sounds through their blowholes, while Porpoises communicate with narrow-band, high-frequency clicks.
SPEAKING ANOTHER LANGUAGE
Kylie’s conversation with her fellow Porpoises had a flow, albeit how much information she conveyed is uncertain.
Unlike other Dolphins, she never whistled. Records from 2016 to 2018 by David Nairn, who co-authored the study with Cosentino, observed that instead of using whistles, Kylie used narrow band high-frequency (NBHF) clicks associated with Porpoises, even when she was alone.
“She definitely identifies as a Porpoise,” Nairn added.
INNATE OR LEARNED?
The finding was a huge leap in underscoring the evolution and adaptation of animals’ social behavior to the changes in their environment.
Prior studies, such as one by Elena M. Panova and Alexandr V. Agafonov that came out in 2017 in the journal Animal Cognition have shown that some species, such as the Beluga Whales, socialize with Bottlenose Dolphins by copying their sounds.
Given the lack of studies, it is still unknown if doing NBHF clicks is an innate behavior among Dolphins of
if they learned this after more than a decade of being exposed to Porpoises.
3 THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT DOLPHINS
DOLPHINS GRIEVE THEIR DEAD LOVED ONES
Dolphins are emotional animals. They grieve when a member of their family dies, the same way many other Mammals do.
NOT ALL DOLPHINS LIVE IN THE OCEAN
Some Dolphin species, such as the South Asian River Dolphins and the Amazon River Dolphins, thrive in freshwater streams and rivers.
DOLPHINS CAN DO SOMETHING BATS DO
Bats aren’t the only creatures who use echolocation! Dolphins communicate and also track their prey using echolocation.
SOUNDS FOR SURVIVAL
Dolphins use echolocation, a type of acoustic communication in which they send information to themselves, as defined by Annalisa Berta and colleagues in a 2015 book titled Marine Mammals. Richard A. Altesa and his team mentioned in a 2023 article published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America that Dolphins perform
a series of echolocation attempts in rapid succession to probe and to know more information about their prey.
The whistles that Dolphins make are distinct to every pod, which is also how they find their missing members. Interestingly, Peter L. Tyack wrote in a 2008 article published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology that they mimic other pods’ whistles to initiate socialization.
EXCITING BUT NOT SURPRISING
Dolphins are known for being social animals who love to play with their pods and other marine animals. On sightings, we see them doing leaps, spins, breaches, and making sounds as a form of their foraging and communicating behavior.
While the fact that they can learn another species’ language is a relatively new discovery, it shouldn’t come as a surprise, given their social and intelligent nature.
