Dolphins Talk Like Humans

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Dolphins do not whistle, but instead 'talk' to each other using a process very similar to the way that humans communicate, according to a new study. While many dolphin calls sound like whistles, the study found the sounds are produced by tissue vibrations analogous to the operation of vocal folds by humans and many other land-based animals.

Peter Madsen, a researcher in the Department of Biological Sciences at Aarhus University in Denmark, and his team studied how dolphins communicate by digitizing and reanalyzing recordings made in 1977 of a 12-year-old male bottlenose dolphin.