Decoding the Dolphin Code
Communication means the transmission of a message in the form of tangible or intangible form and the subsequent feedback or response from the other side,thereby involving the ability to decode(apprehend and implement) and work accordingly. The complexity of the communication processes seems to be exclusive to the human race.
Despite this, it is clear that dolphins have a sophisticated communication system which is the reason for their success against their predators. In short, dolphins survive because they communicate with each other and this allows them to organize and cooperate to increase their probabilities of survival.Hence dolphins are highly social creatures.
Cognitive learning is about making use of — auditory, sensory and tactile (touch)senses of perception. Cognitive processes includes observing, categorizing, and forming generalizations about our environment. The Cognitive Learning Theory explains why the brain is the most incredible network of information processing and interpretation in the body as we learn things. This theory can be divided into two specific theories:
Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) and Cognitive Behavioral Theory (CBT).
Social cognitive theory (SCT), used in psychology education, and communication, holds that portions of an individual’s knowledge acquisition can be directly related to obseothers within the context of social interactions, experiences, and outside media influences. This theory was advanced by Albert Bandura as an extension of his social learning theory. The theory states that when people observe a model performing a behavior and the consequences of that behavior, they remember the sequence of events and use this information to guide subsequent behaviors.
These theory suggests that the “learning”, “thinking”, “apprehending ability” of a species is largely an influence of both extrinsic and intrinsic factors. An organism creates a cognitive map in his mind, i.e. an image of the external environment, preserves and organizes information gathered, as a result of the consequences of events encountered during the learning process.
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a psycho-social intervention that aims to improve mental health. CBT focuses on challenging and changing unhelpful cognitive distortion (e.g. thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes) and behaviors, improving emotional regulation, and the development of personal coping stratigies that target solving current problems. CBT includes a number of cognitive or behaviour psychotherapies that treat defined psychopathologies using evidence-based techniques and strategies.
Surprisingly, dolphins like the famous Bottle-nose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) develop individually distinctive signature whistles that they use to maintain group cohesion.
Unlike the development of identification signals in most other species, signature whistle development is strongly influenced by vocal learning. This learning ability is maintained throughout life, and dolphins frequently copy each other’s whistles in the wild.
There are various sounds of different frequencies being emitted by dolphins that enables them to communicate according to their necessities. Dolphins communicate through the emission and reception of sounds; sound waves travel 4–4.5 times faster in water than in air due to the differences in their refractive indices. Each dolphin develops its distinctive sound since the first years of life. All individuals produce a unique sound, which is different to the others so they can fully identify each other. Dolphins emit two types of vocal sounds:
Continuous tone and Burst-pulsed sound. Mainly the sound is being produced by nasal air sacs with the powerful contractions of the muscles surrounding the blowhole. Scientists believe that every bottle-nose dolphin develops a distinctive high-pitched whistle, called a signature whistle (Tyack, 2000). This whistle appears to serve as a means of individual identification, much like a name. It may let the rest of the pod know which pod members are around, where they are, and, perhaps, something about their mental state. Dolphins in distress sometimes emit their signature whistles very loudly up to 240kHz. Whistles may serve to establish or maintain vocal or physical contact between dolphins.If they become separated, a young calf and its mother whistle frequently until reunited. Dolphins also whistle when separated from other group members. Infant dolphins learn their names (individual whistles) from their mothers and keep them for life.
GENERALIZED BEHAVIOR:
Pods of dolphins leap, tumble, back flip and spin together; and there is often no explicable reason for their behavior other than pure social enjoyment. Dolphins will race towards boats to surf in the bow wave or play in the wake performing amazing acrobatics. Why? Well, wouldn’t you if you could?
One dolphin will nudge another a few times to indicate its willingness for a game, then high-speed pursuit will take place through the sea, as they take turns chasing each other. Some dolphins have teamed up with other animals in the process of play amazing games between bottle-nose dolphins and humpback whales have been filmed off the coast of Hawaii.
The dolphins swim onto the nose of the whales, which then raise themselves out of the water to a great height, so that the dolphins slide down their heads with a great splash. As the game is repeated over and again, it seems clear that both individuals are enjoying it. Though dolphins use a wide range of sounds and nonverbal gestures to communicate, virtually no evidence supports the existence of anything resembling a dolphin language — though scientists are still looking.
Some studies are using advanced algorithms to find rhyme and reason behind dolphin noises and gestures. Some scientists are even trying to talk to dolphins themselves. CHAT (cetacean hearing and telemetry), a computer that can broadcast dolphins’ prerecorded signature whistles as well as dolphin-like whistles into the ocean at the push of a button, was developed and is currently being used by the world’s leading dolphin scientists in an attempt to communicate with dolphins in the wild.
COMMUNICATION SKILLS:
Dolphins communication skills are at the very heart of their cooperative lifestyles and social interactions.. Scientists agree that they communicate with each other in sophisticated and at times, novel and interactive ways. Dolphins may use other sounds besides whistles to communicate. Courtship behavior can yield pulsed yelps. When under duress, dolphins emit pulsed squeaks.
Aggressive confrontation can produce buzzing click-trains and burst pulses(chirping).
They don’t have the ability to smell so olfactory senses are absent. Hence, there are several experiments being conducted to measure the ability of dolphins to learn and acquire skills especially in imitation of human behavior. Experts have figured out that some dolphin species use distinct names for one another; they are identifiable, individual whistles sometimes known as signature whistles.
The dolphin’s vocal plasticity from infancy through adulthood, in what is probably an ‘open’ communication system, is likely to be related to their fission-fusion social structure and, specifically, to the fluidity of their short-term associations.
In general, the level of dolphin performance on complex auditory learning and memory tasks has been compared with that of primates on similar visual tasks; however, dolphins have also demonstrated sophisticated visual processing abilities.
EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS:
Bottle-nose dolphins in Australia have developed quite a range of tools and methods to aid mealtimes. One group, known as the ‘spongers’ grab a sea-sponge and dive down to the seabed with it.
Holding the sponges tightly in their mouths, they then poke them into the sandy seabed, disturbing fish in hiding. The fish emerge, the sponge is dropped, the meal is eaten, and the tool picked up for further foraging. The sponges protect the dolphins’ noses from scuffs, scrapes and stings, in the same way as we would protect our hands with gloves when gardening or clearing rubbish from a beach.
In the shallow waters of Florida Bay in the US, dolphins use their speed, which can exceed 20 miles an hour, to swim quick circles around schools of mullet fish, stirring up curtains of mud that force the fish to leap out of the water into the dolphins’ waiting mouths. Dusky dolphins off the coast of Patagonia herd schools of anchovies into neat spheres and then take turns gulping them down.
In several locations including Brazil, India and Myanmar, dolphins have teamed up with fishermen and fished cooperatively together for generations. Shore-based fishermen wait for the dolphins to signal that they have rounded up fish before they cast their nets, the dolphins then easily catch disorientated fish that spill out around the nets.
Finally, there are some unique examples of social learning and knowledge transfer demonstrated clearly by individual dolphins.
There is Billie.
A dolphin who became trapped in a sea lock in the 1980s, she was rescued and rehabilitated in captivity before being released back into the wild just three weeks later. Scientists were amazed to see that, upon her return to the seas, she started tail-walking, a trick taught in marine parks for rewards that she must have observed, even though during those three weeks she was not trained herself. To have picked up the skill so rapidly is one thing… but Billie was soon teaching her wild companions to do the same.
The Dolphin Institute in Honolulu, Hawaii has been conducting research in marine mammal behavior for the past 30 years. They have greatly advanced our knowledge of dolphin behavior and intelligence through their work. The following is a summary of the findings from a number of their research projects:
Dolphins, like humans, are capable of behavioral mimicry. In other words, they can imitate behaviors demonstrated by their human trainers. If a human raises his leg, the dolphin can recognize the relationship the human body part has to its own anatomy and will raise its tail. This indicates the animal can associate a part of its anatomy with the human form.
It can also mimic another dolphins. This is demonstrated by the performance of synchronous behaviors. If one dolphin is about to perform a bow (jump) another animal can copy this behavior and jump at the same time with this animal. One dolphin is said to act as a “demonstrator”, while the other animal is the “imitator” of such behaviors.
Dolphins are also able to interpret televised behaviors and to respond to gestures shown on the screen upon being exposed to television for the first time. This is the first demonstration in any animal species (other than the human) of behavioral response to televised gestures. This research has changed the way in which we have in the past classified dolphins primarily as acoustic specialists using the principles of SONAR. We now realize they are visual specialists as well, using both sight and sound to succeed in their aquatic environment.
Dolphins have been shown to recognize themselves in a mirror, using what is called “contingency testing”, or making movements while examining themselves for this movement. This finding is unexpected as dolphins primarily experience the world through sound and their echolocation system would not function in a 2-dimensional (mirror) reflection.
They are aware of their own recent behaviors and can repeat a behavior or, when asked by a trainer, perform a behavior which has not been performed recently. Commands representing “repeat” or commands representing “any” result in the repeating of a recent behavior or choosing any non-recent behavior, respectively. This shows the ability of a dolphin to maintain a mental image of the behavior it last performed and update that image as each new behavior is performed, repeating the latest behavior in this sequence when requested.
The ability of military personnel to watch a radar screen for hours on end without losing concentration was studied during World War II. Using a program that flashes 60 images and sounds for 1 second each separated by one-half second intervals, dolphins were able to stay focused on the task of identifying the critical image or sound between 95–100% of the time. This demonstrates the dolphin’s ability to remain attentive for long periods and to make rapid discrimination between critical and non-critical images and sounds with a high degree of accuracy.
MIRROR SELF RECOGNITION TEST:
The claim of mirror-self-recognition in bottle-nose dolphins [Remiss and Marino, 2001] was a turning point for discussions on dolphin cognition. Indeed, since the initial studies of Gallup [1970] in chimpanzees, the ‘mark and mirror test’ has been used as an indicator of self-recognition or even consciousness [Gallup, 1982]. It is therefore unfortunate that the study of Remiss and Marino [2001] has several shortcomings such that firm conclusions are difficult to draw. Scientists conducted two studies.
In the first, one dolphin was marked, sham-marked, or not marked (control). Subsequently, the time spent with mark/sham-mark-directed behaviors in front of a reflective surface was measured. Unfortunately, in addition to the mirror, several walls with different degrees of reflective properties were available. Although the animal spent more time in front of the mirror when being marked, it also started to spend increasingly more time before the mirror in the sham-mark condition after real marking trials had started. Thus, the control condition did not work properly.
Due to these problems, the authors conducted a second study with two dolphins that had access to a smaller pool with one mirror as the sole reflective surface. Only the results of one dolphin are provided in detail; the results of the second one are shortly summarized. It is reported that this first animal swam especially fast towards the mirror location and spent more time there when being marked. This could indicate that the dolphin recognized itself and therefore tried to inspect the mark on its body. However, the depicted data pattern makes it likely that this overall effect was mostly due to higher mark-associated stays in the mirror location when the mirror was covered or even absent!
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