Dr. Laela Sayigh

It is hard to actually capture the sounds and be sure which dolphin is making them.

That's actually been one of the things that has been really one of the biggest challenges, I would say, in the study of dolphin communication over the decades that I've been involved.

For the most part, we can't actually even see them anyway because they're underwater.

But even if we can see them, they don't make any movement when they vocalize.

So they don't open their mouths like we do, for example.

Their sounds are made in a really different way.

But we do have this capability in Sarasota where we can temporarily handle the animals, these brief catch and release health assessments that are carried out down there.

And in that context, we can record them with sound.

contact hydrophones that we can put actually with suction cups right on their bodies and also with these digital acoustic tags that also attach with suction cups that we can put on before we release them.

And so those are ways that we can get some really nice recordings of known dolphins, which is pretty important when you want to understand their communication.

Well, I'm not even sure I think of anything about what they're saying.

So true.

And that's a great question, too.

And we have been able to confirm that...

In a bunch of ways.

So, well, for one, the situation when dolphins are isolated, at least even temporarily or even just by a few feet from another dolphin or from, you know, from whoever they're with, that is a context that really promotes isolation.

signature whistle production.

So they tend to just make a lot of signature whistles when they're in that situation of being isolated, even very briefly, and even still an earshot of other dolphins.

And this was something that's been observed initially in captivity by the people who discovered signature whistles, David and Melba Caldwell, and they recorded isolated animals back then and found

that they made almost 100%, just one specific whistle.