<
https://spacedaily.com/d-within-the-first-few-months-of-life-every-bottlenose-dolphin-invents-a-unique-whistle-that-becomes-its-name-for-the-rest-of-its-life-and-other-dolphins-learn-that-whistle-remember-it-and/>
"The proposition that another animal species besides humans uses personal names
was, for essentially the entire history of comparative animal cognition
research before the 1960s, considered a category error. Names — as humans use
them — require a substantial set of cognitive abilities that the broader
scientific consensus considered unique to the human species: vocal learning
sufficient to produce novel sounds rather than instinctual calls; abstract
symbolic representation sufficient to associate a learned sound with a specific
individual; long-term memory sufficient to retain the association across years;
social referential capacity sufficient to use the sound to call attention to a
third party rather than merely to announce one’s own emotional state; and (most
subtly) the capacity to recognise that the same sound produced by a different
speaker still refers to the same individual. Each of these capacities had been
considered, across various points in 20th-century animal cognition research, to
be human-specific. The cumulative finding of approximately 60 years of
bottlenose dolphin research — beginning with the original 1965 publication of
the marine biologists Melba and David Caldwell in the journal
Nature,
continuing through decades of work by the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program in
Florida and the University of St Andrews in Scotland, and culminating in the
substantial referential studies published by Vincent Janik and his colleagues
in the late 2000s and early 2010s — is that bottlenose dolphins possess all
five of these capacities, and use them in a manner that the peer-reviewed
comparative cognition literature now treats as functionally equivalent to the
way humans use personal names.
The original 1965 Caldwell discovery established the first of these capacities.
As described in
Scientific American’s recent summary of the broader
signature-whistle research literature, the Caldwells observed that the
bottlenose dolphins they had been studying at captive marine facilities in
Florida each produced a distinctive frequency-modulated whistle pattern that
was specific to the individual animal — different from the whistles produced by
every other dolphin at the same facility, stable across recordings made on
different days, and (most importantly) reliably reproduced by the same dolphin
across sufficient instances to establish that the whistle was not merely a
random vocalisation but a learned, deliberate, individually-distinctive
acoustic signal. The Caldwells called these patterns “signature whistles.” The
terminology stuck. Across the subsequent four decades, signature whistles were
documented in essentially every captive and wild bottlenose dolphin population
that was systematically studied, in the same general form: each individual
dolphin develops a unique whistle in approximately the first year of life, the
whistle remains stable throughout the dolphin’s life, and the whistle
constitutes approximately 30 percent of all the vocalisations the dolphin
produces during typical social interactions."
Via Muse.
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
