The sad story of the dolphin who talks only to keep himself company

A voice accompanies the depths of the Baltic Sea: it is the whistles coming from a solitary dolphin. Upon hearing it, researchers from the University of Southern Denmark wondered if the cetacean was talking to itself or making sounds in the hope of attracting its companions. These are the findings published in the journal Bioacoustics.

What does the study say?

Bottlenose or bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) are social cetaceans that usually live in pods. In September 2019, the dolphin examined in the new studynicknamed “Delle” by locals, reached the Svendborgsund channel, south of the island of Funen, in Denmark. This area is outside the usual range of bottlenose dolphins, so no other specimens had ever been observed in the vicinity before their arrival.

To analyze the dolphin’s strange behavior, researchers installed underwater devices. From the recordings they discovered that the animal made very frequent sounds. “I thought we would capture distant whistles. I didn’t anticipate that we would be able to record thousands of different sounds,” he told the outlet. Live Science Olga Filatova, biologist and first author of the report. Between December 8, 2022 and February 14, 2023, specialists detected more than 10 thousand sounds, some of them related to communication, such as whistles, rapid series of “clicks”, low-frequency and percussive sounds.

The team observed that Delle made three different whistles: “Bottlenose dolphins produce sounds that we know as ‘distinctive whistles’; these can be unique to each individual, like a name. If we had not known that the dolphin was alone, we would have thought that a group of at least three dolphins participated in social interactions,” Filatova said. Hearing these vocalizations was a surprise to the researchers, who did not expect these sounds to be related to communication.

According to their hypothesis, the cetacean was talking to itself or making involuntary sounds caused by some emotion.“like when we laugh at something funny, even though no one is listening to us,” says the main author. Another hypothesis is that Delle made sounds in hopes of attracting the attention of others of her species who were nearby. “Although this seems unlikely. He had been in the area for three years and probably already knew that there were no other dolphins present.”

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Talking dolphins are not new

For other experts, the results of the study are not so surprising: “Dolphins are very vocal animals, so it doesn’t surprise me too much that this Tursiops truncatus made sounds despite being alone,” said Thea Taylor of the local UK initiative Sussex Dolphin Project, who was not involved in the study. She also added that These animals depend on vocalizations for many other activities such as hunting, sensing the surrounding environment, and communicating over long distances.

Regarding the hypothesis that the sounds made by dolphins could be involuntary emotional signals, Taylor added that “this opens up many questions about whether dolphin communications can be used to better understand their behavior and emotions in the wild.”

Article originally published in WIRED Italy. Adapted by Alondra Flores.