What's in a voice? Dolphins do not use voice cues for individual recognition
Date
11/2017Keywords
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Abstract
Most mammals can accomplish acoustic recognition of other individuals by means of “voice cues,” whereby characteristics of the vocal tract render vocalizations of an individual uniquely identifiable. However, sound production in dolphins takes place in gas-filled nasal sacs that are affected by pressure changes, potentially resulting in a lack of reliable voice cues. It is well known that bottlenose dolphins learn to produce individually distinctive signature whistles for individual recognition, but it is not known whether they may also use voice cues. To investigate this question, we played back non-signature whistles to wild dolphins during brief capture-release events in Sarasota Bay, Florida. We hypothesized that non-signature whistles, which have varied contours that can be shared among individuals, would be recognizable to dolphins only if they contained voice cues. Following established methodology used in two previous sets of playback experiments, we found that dolphins did not respond differentially to non-signature whistles of close relatives versus known unrelated individuals. In contrast, our previous studies showed that in an identical context, dolphins reacted strongly to hearing the signature whistle or even a synthetic version of the signature whistle of a close relative. Thus, we conclude that dolphins likely do not use voice cues to identify individuals. The low reliability of voice cues and the need for individual recognition were likely strong selective forces in the evolution of vocal learning in dolphins.
Citation
Sayigh , L , Wells , R & Janik , V M 2017 , ' What's in a voice? Dolphins do not use voice cues for individual recognition ' , Animal Cognition , vol. 20 , no. 6 , pp. 1067-1079 . https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-017-1123-5
Publication
Animal Cognition
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1435-9448Type
Journal article
Rights
© The Author(s) 2017. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Description
Fieldwork for this study was funded by Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution, Grossman Family Foundation, Dolphin Quest, Inc., NOAA Fisheries, Disney, the Office of Naval Research, Morris Animal Foundations Betty White Wildlife Rapid Response Fund, the Batchelor Foundation, and the Joint Industry Program.Collections
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