DOLPHIN-SPEAK

Dolphin-speak
If animals seemingly as simple as rodents have a language replete with nouns, adjectives, syntax and dialects, think what higher-order animals might be saying...

...Elephants hold funerals for their dead and have been known to orchestrate raids on human villages in retaliation for poaching. Chimps wage wars. Complex animal behaviors like these necessitate complex languages, Bekoff said. "People wonder, 'How do wolves coordinate their hunts?' It's by having really complex communication systems."

Consider dolphins. They form strong social bonds, and a recent study found they even display culture, preferring to socialize with other dolphins that use the same simple tools as they do. Dolphins also make a variety of vocalizations, such as clicks and whistles. Those aren't likely to be meaningless. So will people ever learn what they're saying?

It turns out scientists have been trying to do so for over half a century. "We know a lot more than we knew a few decades ago, but we're still a long way from two-way communication," said Stan Kuczaj, director of the Marine Mammal Behavior and Cognition Laboratory at the University of Southern Mississippi.

Kuczaj said the major stumbling block has been figuring out what the units of dolphin communication are.

Monosyllabic sounds and other "phonemes are the building blocks of human languages," Kuczaj told Life’s Little Mysteries. "We don't know what the building blocks of dolphin communication systems are. Are they whistles, clicks? We now know they use touch and posture as well. My guess is we'll learn more about the units by studying the development of communication in dolphin calves. And then the next level is, what do the combinations of the units mean?"

Denise Herzing and colleagues at the Wild Dolphin Project have discovered that dolphins seem to address each other with names — vocalizations that the researchers call "signature whistles." These would suggest the whistles are units of communication, but how dolphins' clicks and postures enter in remains to be determined.

Kuczaj thinks we may eventually crack the code, but not everyone agrees there's a code to be cracked. Justin Gregg, a researcher with an international dolphin research organization called the Dolphin Communication Project, thinks dolphins may not have units of language at all.

"After 50 years of studying dolphin communication, it does not seem that dolphins are producing wordlike vocalizations that we can then 'decode' in the way you might think of when you think of 'learning' a foreign language or 'deciphering' Egyptian hieroglyphics," Gregg said. "This is because animal communication systems and human language are very different. Dolphin communication does not likely contain wordlike 'symbols' or 'grammar' in the way we think of human language. At present, there is no reason to believe that dolphin communication functions like human language, and thus there is no 'language' there for us to learn in the first place."

Only time will tell if that distinction between communication and language bears out. After all, if prairie dogs have the loquacity to describe an unnatural black oval in their midst, then many scientists think a surprising number of other social animals probably do as well.

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