Staff Writer
When someone is speaking to an infant or young child, you can tell it right away. It turns out that moms of dolphins also speak to their young in a high-pitched voice.
According to a study that was released on Monday, female bottlenose dolphins alter their tone when speaking to their young. In Florida, researchers captured the distinctive whistles of 19 mother dolphins while they were swimming alone or with other adults, with their young, or both.
A distinctive and significant communication, a dolphin’s trademark whistle is comparable to calling out their own name.
They locate one another by using their whistles. “They’re periodically saying, ‘I’m here, I’m here,'” said Laela Sayigh, a marine biologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and a study co-author.
According to a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, the mother’s whistle pitch is higher and her pitch range is wider than usual when giving the signal to her calves.
According to scientist Peter Tyack, a co-author of the study from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, “that was true for every single mom in the study, all 19 of them.”
This information wasn’t easy to get by. Scientists have repeatedly placed specialized microphones on the same wild dolphin moms in Florida’s Sarasota Bay to record their distinctive whistles for more than three decades. Dolphin calves in Sarasota often stay with their moms for three years, thus this covered both the years in which they had calves and the years in which they did not.
According to Mauricio Cantor, a marine biologist at Oregon State University who was not involved in the study, “This is unprecedented, absolutely fantastic data.” This study is the outcome of a significant amount of research.
Although the purpose of baby talk in humans, dolphins, and other animals is unknown, it is thought that it may aid young ones in learning how to pronounce new sounds. Human neonates may pay more attention to speech with a wider pitch range, according to research from the 1980s.
Female rhesus monkeys may modify their calls to draw in and maintain the attention of their young. Additionally, to speak to chicks, Zebra finches raise their pitch and tone down their song, which may make it simpler for people to learn bird songs.
It is unknown if dolphins utilize baby speak for other exchanges or if it aids their babies in learning to “talk” like it does with humans because the dolphin study only focused on the trademark call.
According to Frants Jensen, a behavioral ecologist at Denmark’s Aarhus University and a research co-author, “It would make sense if there are similar adaptations in bottlenose dolphins – a long lived, highly acoustic species,” where calves must learn to vocalize a variety of sounds to communicate.
To get the kids’ attention is another reason to use specific pitches.
In contrast to just proclaiming her presence to others, Janet Mann, a marine biologist at Georgetown University who was not involved in the study, said, “It’s really important for a calf to know ‘Oh, Mom is talking to me now’.”
