Facts about signature whistles of bottlenose dolphins, Tursiops truncatus

Sayigh, Laela S.; Esch, H. Carter; Wells, Randall S.; Janik, Vincent M.

doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2007.02.018

Cited by 149 publications

(173 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…Here, whistle rates were determined by visual inspection of spectrograms. Individual whistle contours were counted as one whistle if they were continuous (i.e., no breaks in the fundamental frequency band exceeding .25 s), narrowband frequency modulated signals (following Sayigh, Esch, Wells, & Janik, 2007). Unfortunately, the limited sampling rate of the video recorder made it impossible to determine the full spectral analysis of the whistle contours.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Underwater observations of dolphin reactions to a distressed conspecific

et al. 2015

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This report describes the epimeletic (or Bcaregiving^) behavior produced by members of a group of Atlantic bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) and the possible role of the ailing animal's distress call in eliciting such behavior. Epimeletic behavior in cetaceans most typically involves forms of support provided to a distressed, injured, or dying animal (Caldwell & Caldwell, 1966). Analyses of underwater video and corresponding acoustic recordings revealed a distressed dolphin (the DD) that frequently produced what are most likely distress calls, often paired with the emission of long bubble streams. The frequency of her whistle production was positively correlated with the frequency of the supporting behaviors the DD received from other dolphins. These helping behaviors included raft formations, lifts, and stimulating pushes that were predominantly directed toward the upper third of the DD's body, all of which appeared to be directed towards bringing the DD toward the surface so that she could breathe. This is the first documented underwater account of multiple wild bottlenose dolphins providing epimeletic care to a distressed conspecific, and highlights the possible role of distress calls in such scenarios.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Underwater observations of dolphin reactions to a distressed conspecific

et al. 2015

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“…The reliability of call identification was tested with 10 untrained volunteers, yielding an average inter-observer agreement of better than 97% (Crance, 2008). This method has been used successfully in identifying stereotyped cetacean calls previously (Janik, 1999;Sayigh et al, 2007).…”

Section: Data Collectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Several species of social odontocetes altered frequency characteristics of their vocalizations during short-term playback of military sonar signals (DeRuiter et al, 2013), although the matches were not close. Bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) trained to imitate arbitrary human-made sounds (Richards et al, 1984) showed poor matches after short-term exposure, but bottlenose dolphins acquire close matches of novel, individually distinctive species-typical whistle contours (signature whistles) after changes in social association (Reiss and McCowan, 1993;Janik, 2000;Sayigh et al, 2007;King et al, 2013). They also add features of artificial sounds to their whistles (Miksis et al, 2002).…”

Section: Research Articlementioning

confidence: 99%

Evidence for vocal learning in juvenile male killer whales,Orcinus orca, from an adventitious cross-socializing experiment

Crance

Bowles

Garver

2014

Journal of Experimental Biology

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Killer whales (Orcinus orca) are thought to learn their vocal dialect. Dispersal in the species is rare, but effects of shifts in social association on the dialect can be studied under controlled conditions. Individual call repertoires and social association were measured in three adult female killer whales and three males (two juveniles and an adult) during two periods, 2001-2003 and 2005-2006. Three distinct dialect repertoires were represented among the subjects. An adventitious experiment in social change resulted from the birth of a calf and the transfer of two non-focal subjects in 2004. Across the two periods, 1691 calls were collected, categorized and attributed to individuals. Repertoire overlap for each subject dyad was compared with an index of association. During 2005-2006, the two juvenile males increased association with the unrelated adult male. By the end of the period, both had begun producing novel calls and call features characteristic of his repertoire. However, there was little or no reciprocal change and the adult females did not acquire his calls. Repertoire overlap and association were significantly correlated in the first period. In the second, median association time and repertoire similarity increased, but the relationship was only marginally significant. The results provided evidence that juvenile male killer whales are capable of learning new call types, possibly stimulated by a change in social association. The pattern of learning was consistent with a selective convergence of male repertoires.

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“…This is a new finding for dolphin whistles, other than the debated signature whistle ( [20][21][22] for review) and research indicating that whistle sequence has some relationship to behavioral context [14]. Furthermore, we have seen that dolphins share, in some cases, the context in which a certain whistle type tends to be or not be produced, which constitutes a prerequisite of successful communication among individuals.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

A Law of Word Meaning in Dolphin Whistle Types

Ferrer-i-Cancho

McCowan

2009

Entropy

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Abstract:We show that dolphin whistle types tend to be used in specific behavioral contexts, which is consistent with the hypothesis that dolphin whistle have some sort of "meaning". Besides, in some cases, it can be shown that the behavioral context in which a whistle tends to occur or not occur is shared by different individuals, which is consistent with the hypothesis that dolphins are communicating through whistles. Furthermore, we show that the number of behavioral contexts significantly associated with a certain whistle type tends to grow with the frequency of the whistle type, a pattern that is reminiscent of a law of word meanings stating, as a tendency, that the higher the frequency of a word, the higher its number of meanings. Our findings indicate that the presence of Zipf"s law in dolphin whistle types cannot be explained with enough detail by a simplistic die rolling experiment.

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Facts about signature whistles of bottlenose dolphins, Tursiops truncatus

Cited by 149 publications

References 33 publications

Underwater observations of dolphin reactions to a distressed conspecific

Underwater observations of dolphin reactions to a distressed conspecific

Evidence for vocal learning in juvenile male killer whales,Orcinus orca, from an adventitious cross-socializing experiment

A Law of Word Meaning in Dolphin Whistle Types

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