“Dolphin clicks are highly directional, with the energy focused in front of the animal, much like a flashlight,” says Marc Lammers, an expert in dolphin acoustics and an associate research professor at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology. While the findings presented in Ryabov’s paper may seem exciting and new, scientists who have spent decades studying dolphin communication point instead to a poorly devised experiment. “The biggest problem,” says Connor, “is that now when people make real scientific discoveries on dolphin communication, the public, having been exposed to this nonsense, will not be impressed because they will think Russian researchers already showed that they have language.” The Signal and the Noise “It is complete bull, and you can quote me,” says Richard Connor, a marine biologist at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth and a researcher of dolphin social interactions for more than 30 years. However, many of the world’s leading experts in dolphin communication remain, shall we say, unconvinced. Ryabov suggests that the variation seen in these pulses represents the equivalent of phonemes, or words, and that the strings of pulses could reasonably be considered dolphin sentences. Vyazemsky Karadag Scientific Station in Russia. Two Black Sea bottlenose dolphins were recorded exchanging a series of sounds that resembled “a conversation between two people.” The dolphins took turns producing the sounds and did not interrupt each other, according to study author Vyacheslav Ryabov, a senior researcher at the T. Petersburg Polytechnical University Journal: Physics and Mathematicsthat seemed to offer tantalizing signs of dolphinese. This week, headlines have been swirling about a paper published in the St. But one big question has remained frustratingly elusive: Do these highly intelligent mammals possess their own spoken language? Dozens of dolphin communication patterns, including the animals’ familiar whistles, clicks, and body postures, have been fascinating scientists for years.
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