Dolphins Communication

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Dolphins are extremely social animals with an advanced display of communication skills that scientist have been studying for years and have yet to fully understand it. Dolphins can communicate with each other through many different unique verbal entities. Dolphins also communicate behaviorally, studying this nonverbal communication helps us better understand these animals. The similarities between how human communicate and how dolphins communication has lead us to explore how humans and dolphins can communicate with each other.
The most prominent way dolphins communicate is verbally. There are three different categories that dolphin sounds are divided up into, they are whistles, clicks, and burst pulsed sounds (Herzing, 2014, p.354). Whistles …show more content…

Leatherwood and Reeves studied four dolphins and found aberrant whistles occurred when these dolphins were put in stressful event of stranding and isolation. This study showed that when a dolphin is in a stressful situation they will tend to quaver or have breaks in their whistles, they also found that the whistles would get faster when stressed (Leatherwood & Reeves, 1990, p.223). The aberrant whistles can communicate to other dolphins that they are in danger. Certain types of whistles can differ over the different species of dolphins, geographic locations, social groups, populations, and even individuals of a different gender or age. Some dolphins do not use whistles, so these dolphins have to rely on echolocation or burst pulsed sounds as their form of communication. Echolocation works by the dolphin sending out clicks as sound waves by passing air between four air sacs at about 120 kHz (this sound frequency is much greater than anything a person could make or hear), they can direct where they want the sound waves to go through their melon. Then, the sound waves bounce off surrounding objects and return to the dolphin through their lower law to the ear with the information (Dudzinski & Frohoff, 2008, p.42). Clicks from

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