Killer Whales Caught On Tape Speaking Dolphin 152
sciencehabit writes Two years ago, scientists showed that dolphins imitate the sounds of whales. Now, it seems, whales have returned the favor. Researchers analyzed the vocal repertoires of 10 captive orcas, three of which lived with bottlenose dolphins and the rest with their own kind. Of the 1551 vocalizations these seven latter orcas made, more than 95% were the typical pulsed calls of killer whales. In contrast, the three orcas that had only dolphins as pals busily whistled and emitted dolphinlike click trains and terminal buzzes, the scientists report in the October issue of The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. The findings make orcas one of the few species of animals that, like humans, is capable of vocal learning (video)—a talent considered a key underpinning of language."
Loosely translated: (Score:5, Funny)
"Hey buddy. Hey pal. You wanna come swim in my tank? Come jump on over, my tasty friend. We have lots of fish to fill your delicious belly."
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Whale: Me no likey fishy. Me likey seals. You likey fish? capiche?
Dolphin: Shit, where's this guy from?
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In BC, we have two kinds of orcas. The "resident orca" population actually eats fish (salmon) most of the time. The others are "transient" and they are the ones that eat seals.
Both are orcas, but they have completely different diets.
Dolphins though generally eat smaller fish.
OTOH, one wonders if orcas do it to eat dolphins. (They aren't called "killer whales" for nothing).
Seals have also been known to seek
Re:Loosely translated: (Score:4, Funny)
Dolphin to Orca: Hey man, you need to get checked out. It looks like you blew a seal.
Orca to Dolphin: Nope, it's just ice cream.
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Dolphin to Orca: Hey man, you need to get checked out. It looks like you blew a seal.
Orca to Dolphin: Nope, it's just ice cream.
Are you sure you are not confusing it with a sperm whale?
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No, I'm pretty sure the killer whale taught himself to say, "Look, there's no way your husband could find out".
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If you think about it, it all makes kinda sense. The name 'killer whale' is wrong (result of a bad translation), it should be 'whale killer' and with a revelation like this, I think it makes the Orca a more perfect hunter as it not only hunts whales in packs and communicate between each other, it could also speak and understand the language of it's prey.
Orca Alpha (voice only): Yo bro, wanna buy some Krill? Got the best $hit around.
Whale approaches. Gang of Orcas pop out from behind an iceberg.
Whale: Like,
Inter-species communication (Score:4, Insightful)
Hmm.. Language learning could as well be within-species. Sounds more interesting here that dolphins and orcas can communicate spontaneously given close quarters.
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The summary at least says "imitate".
Sure, making noise is some limited form of communication (a dog barking is 'telling' you something). But unless TFA goes into more actual detail, this isn't true inter-species communication, but mimicry. Is a parrot "communicating" with you when it says "Polly want a cracker?"
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Is a parrot "communicating" with you when it says "Polly want a cracker?"
If it wants one and has received them in the past using that sound, then clearly, yes. The "monkey see, monkey do" hypothesis is nonsense born from the perfectly natural tendency of humans to believe they hold a special place in the animal kingdom. For example, there's a native bird in the hills near where I live called a lyrebird. It's said to be the world's best mimic (check it out on YT), it will accurately mimic any other sound it hears.
What people rarely mention, or even notice, about this "mimic" i
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The summary at least says "imitate".
Indeed. For all we know, this could be the equivalent of Charlie Chan. Did anyone ask the dolphins if they find it offensive?
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The summary at least says "imitate".
Sure, making noise is some limited form of communication (a dog barking is 'telling' you something). But unless TFA goes into more actual detail, this isn't true inter-species communication, but mimicry. Is a parrot "communicating" with you when it says "Polly want a cracker?"
Actually, that's speculation on your part. Because WE don't understand it, it doesn't mean it's mimicry. Since dolphins do indeed seem to have language, names and definitely can understand sentence structures (as we do), it's more likely your speculation is wrong.
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But that doesn't mean that a dolphin can understand the _language_ and _sentence structures_ of whales.. (this story was actually about the reverse, whales mimicing dolphins.. but the hypothesis goes both ways.)
Even if it can mimic the sounds of th
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My parrot will say "Want more" when I'm eating something he wants. If he likes it he will say "Good shit, Maynard." or "Good shit cheese" if it's cheese. Once I gave him American Cheese and he threw it to the ground and said, "No! Good shit cheese!", so I gave him some Swiss.
When he wants to go back to his cage to sleep he'll say, "Wanna go to bed?" and if I leave the lights on he'll say, "Lights off."
Yes, there are often times he says things and makes noise for no good reason, but hey, we all do that.
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(except attention)
Yes, so that's simple positive reinforcement, like a dog wagging its tail when you pet it, which people anthropomorphize into "happiness".
(You and some of the other responses seem to think I'm claiming people aren't animals. I'm not.. I was simply pointing out that the summary talked about mimicry, and not what I'd call more sophisticated communication.)
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Neighbors of mine had a cockatoo that would imitate a smoke detector. Had the volume and pitch down quite closely.
That was pretty irritating.
Whales? (Score:3, Informative)
Aren't Orcas dolphins?
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No. They are both cetaceans, though.
Re:Whales? (Score:4, Informative)
They both belong to the same family [wikipedia.org]
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Re:Whales? (Score:5, Funny)
[cetacean needed]
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Yes. And dolphins are apparently classified as toothed whales, just to completely confuse things.
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Your mom gets enough publicity as it is...
Free the bastards! (Score:4, Insightful)
I get it though, they're no longer suited to living in the wild, etc etc. Can't we help them out with some head-mounted lasers or something?
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Lasers?! Don't be silly. What do you think they are, sharks?
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If we gave dolphins lasers, we'd quickly have a rebellion on our hands.
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How about searching for a large briny or brackish inland lake, something actually big enough to offer a degree of freedom to Orcas, and turn them loose there where one can keep an eye on them and provide food? It could either serve as a halfway-house for release into the wild, or could become a permanent home for those that demonstrate that they can't provide for themselves. One could make the venture profitable by having whale-watching tours with glass-bottom surface craft and wi
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Depends on how long they have been captive. Orcas have complex group dynamics, both socially and for hunting, so an orca that was never taught those skills as a youngster would be incapable of joining a group and surviving. About 2/3 of orcas currently in parks weren't even born in the wild, which means they never learned how to hunt and survive in a group.
Raise someone in a jail cell from birth, then at 30 drop them into the world all alone with nothing. What are the odds that they would survive? There's a
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Do we? I mean, food is just out there in the wilderness waiting for us to pick it. It's right there...what's the problem? Yet for all our intelligence, people consistently fail to survive when stranded alone in the wilderness, even though there's food all around them.
Orcas are basically oceanic wolves: they live, move and hunt in packs, whether it is tail slapping to get seals or corralling fish. Orcas hardly ever survive alone, even those that are raised in a group. Luna is one of the few from recent memor
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what's the problem?
Ironically, your assumption that fish just calmly swim about waiting to be eaten by a 30 ton killer whale is an excellent example of the GP's original point about humans and jail cells.
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public indecency, and so on.
And lewd conduct/sexual assault as well. Dolphins can and DO sometimes rub genitals on human handlers.
So we can't eat them? (Score:2)
anymore... Put away his Orca on a stick corn dog....
Orcas *are* dolphins.... (Score:1)
Whales and Daulphins - blowholes (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Whales and Daulphins - blowholes (Score:4, Funny)
Fascinating, but why are you submitting your third grade science homework to Slashdot?
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yea you pretty much sounded exactly like 3rd grader giving a presentation to the class about whales and dolphins
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One bit that I find extremely interesting (and beyond what we covered in third grade):
Baleen whales have two blowholes positioned in a V-shape while toothed whales have only one blowhole. The blowhole of a sperm whale, a to
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These are also the only mammals (or anything for that matter) that have blowholes.
Lawyers and politicians have blowholes, though many of them are Reptilians.
Re: Whales and Daulphins - blowholes (Score:2)
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How about viruses? They're masses of DNA just coherent enough to wreak havoc without actually doing anything themselves.
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Not reptiles. Reptilians [bing.com].
Yes, I use Bing.
I wonder, what they are saying... (Score:5, Funny)
Are they thanking us for all the fish?.. I'm worried now...
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Why would you be worried? Did you lose your towel?
I wonder .... (Score:2)
I wonder if they speak it with an accent, like when I try to speak a little Spanish. :-P
I guess this doesn't seem all that surprising (on the surface, to someone who admittedly doesn't know much about it).
A huge amount of their brains is geared towards processing sound because they use sonar. Is picking up some dolphin sounds really that much of a stretch?
I mean, I can haltingly say "dos cerveza por favor" and "ron negro con jugo de pina" ... and my wife assures me I'm an idiot.
Whales and the like are smar
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It looks like Google translate is not detecting the language right. There are many languages that share words and basic structure and spelling rules with Spanish. Judging by the translation it is giving you it appears to be confusing it with another language. When I tested it it confused it with Galician. A relatively small language spoken in an area of Spain bordering Portugal which is why it has traits of both Spanish and Portuguese (dos = "of the" in Galician/Portuguese but means "two" in Spanish).
The r
Orcas, Dolphins, and Whales (Score:4, Interesting)
TFS seems to imply some divide between dolphins and whales, where orcas fall into the latter. Orcas and dolphins share the same subfamily.
For comparison, humans and chimps share the same subfamily, and there are clear examples of similarities between us (assuming most of you are human) and chimps. Thus it's not exactly surprising to find similarities between orcas and dolphins.
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Have you met a chimp that has learned to talk yet?
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Isn't the limitation physiological? Something to do with an inability to precisely control their vocal cords like humans?
I thought they had taught a few to use sign language.
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Of course it's physiological. The point I'm making is that nothing about them being the same subfamily would make that they would be able to talk to each other any more or less surprising.
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Sign language is pretty damn close.
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To complete the comparison:
Whale is to dolphin what monkey is to human.
That is, a dolphin is a species of whale, just as a human is a species of monkey.
timtowdi (Score:1)
One of these days, we are going to figure out that intelligence != human intelligence. Who knows, maybe it'll be before the alien overlords who haven't learned their equivalent show up?
Sorry (Score:5, Funny)
Vocal Learning (Score:5, Interesting)
A talent shared by other species (parrots, for example).
I wondered if the errant pings from MH370 that various navies were chasing might be immitations of the actual FDR sonar pinger made by some sea creatures. Dolphins (or something) hear the real pinger and then figure out that if they imitate the noise, people in ships will come over to 'play'.
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IIRC, Carl Sagan said in one of his books that he believed we were "TV for dolphins", their entertainment.
Parrots and chimpanzees (Score:2)
In other news, parrots who live with humans learn to speak human languages and some chimpanzees living with smokers have even learned to smoke cigarettes.
I guess those things are bound to happen when two species hang together when their anatomies allow to.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new... [dailymail.co.uk]
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Sigh (Score:2)
I'm always amazed at how WE'RE always amazed (or supposed to be) that animals can do things that we do.
There are fewer and fewer and fewer things that are the realm of humans alone (and even then, it's generally only by scale, rather than actual ability).
We're animals. They are animals. We all do things like "try to sound like other animals we hear".
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The Orca said to the Dolphin.... (Score:3)
Orca: What do you mean "So long, and thanks for all the fish"? What aren't you telling me?
I speak whale! (Score:2)
Most likely use of cross-race communication (Score:5, Funny)
Pickup lines by male Orcas.
"Hey, Baby, you've heard about Orcas, right? We're whales, Honey, and I do mean that in every way. Yeah. Once you've gone black and white, you never go back. And white."
pedant here (Score:2)
Dogs do too... (Score:2)
I have dogs that speak pig words and human words. We have a large pack of livestock working dogs that do guarding and herding on our pastured pig farm. The dogs have learned some of the sounds the pigs make to drive the pigs when herding. This makes them more effective at doing their job. They also know and use some human words both with us and with each other. We also use whistles, clicks and hand signs to communicate. There is a lot more interspecies communications going on than scientists realize in thei
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Those of us out working in the real world have known many of these things for millennia.
That's amazing, you write in such a modern style.
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What is interesting is that you think "us" has to mean an individual - a very limited view of language.
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What is interesting is that you think "us" has to mean an individual - a very limited view of language.
No, and that is a very limited interpretation of my response. I think that "those of us" applies to a subgroup.
Captive Orcas (Score:2)
I wish more people were bothered by the fact that they are doing experiments at all on captive Orcas and Dolphins.
Most captive Orcas aren't in facilities because they've been injured (unlike zoos and aquariums which work on rehabilitation and reintroduction). Orcas are often ripped away from their pods. Many of them get violent and kill trainers (and rightfully so). You can't put something that travels the ocean in a fish tank. Orcas only live to be about 25 in captivity where in the while, they live to be
Captive orcas (Score:2)
You'll never catch me going through the doors of one of those revolting places. They should be shut down and the captive animals rehabilitated and returned to the wild. The ones which were captive-born are a more difficult problem, and may need to be released into a constrained area (a fjord with a netted sea connection. perhaps) for an extended period of rehabilitation and time to form a stable pod and learn their natural environment.
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Humans are bipedal creatures from Earth, and the third most intelligent species on that planet, surpassed only by mice and dolphins. Originally thought to have evolved from proto-apes, humans may in fact be descendants of Golgafrinchan telephone sanitizers, account executives, and marketing analysts who were tricked out of leaving their home planet to arrive on the planet Earth in two million BC.
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Wait a minute... did Douglas Adams get a writing credit for the final episode of (rot13 spoiler alert) Onggyrfgne Tnynpgvpn?
Re:Humans are not only not the only intelligence (Score:4, Insightful)
All megafauna is intelligent or it wouldn't have made it this long.
All megafauna have a combination of adaptive traits for their environment, some of which may be traits that we'd categorize under "intelligence". Intelligence isn't a scalar value. We might be able to measure its components by providing tasks that measure the presence and efficiency of specific capabilities of the brain and call the geometric distance from the 0-point "intelligence", but different animals will fall within different places in that multi-dimensional space. Some animals will have better scores than humans, in some dimensions. I'd posit that humans would have the greatest geometric distance from "0", though.
Re:Humans are not only not the only intelligence (Score:4, Insightful)
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If I'm so smart, and my cat is so dumb, why am I the one opening a can of tuna every night? ... and then putting it on the floor and standing well back, in case her intense gaze and licking-of-lips isn't because I'm holding said can?
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Because you value the companionship and sense of worth it gives you. "If I'm so smart and my car is so inanimate then why do I put so much effort into its existence?"
When cats figure out how to catch, can and distribute tuna you might have a point.
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The humans are dumb nonsense comes from the fact that animals are smart enough to achieve equilibrium with their environment while humans pave a path of destruction anymore they go.
In other words, just more hippie nonsense.
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The humans are dumb nonsense comes from the fact that animals are smart enough to achieve equilibrium with their environment while humans pave a path of destruction anymore they go.
Why is it so many people see humans as not part of nature?
If we build a dam, we are damaging the ecology. If a family of beavers build a dam, it is all natural. If we grow a cow and slaughter it in a slaughterhouse, it is barbaric and unnatural. Yet when a lioness brings down a buffalo that is all fine and part of the circle of life. Why is a piece of plastic artificial, but a piece of wood carved by a beaver is not?
In my opinion humans are animals that change their environment around them to suit their nee
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If we build a dam, we are damaging the ecology. If a family of beavers build a dam, it is all natural.
Yes. That's right. Because when we build a dam, we hold back a massive shitload of water and flood gigantic regions. When a beaver builds a dam, it holds back relatively little water and floods small regions. Instead of covering the land with deep water, it makes a swampy area which builds up biomass rapidly.
If we grow a cow and slaughter it in a slaughterhouse, it is barbaric and unnatural. Yet when a lioness brings down a buffalo that is all fine and part of the circle of life.
Yes, that's a big nonsensical. I do think there is something to be said for avoiding cruelty, however. I think we can improve upon nature, with sufficient study and care. On the other hand, nature as we
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Re:Humans are not only not the only intelligence (Score:4, Interesting)
The humans are dumb nonsense comes from the fact that animals are smart enough to achieve equilibrium with their environment while humans pave a path of destruction anymore they go.
Says anyone who doesn't have beavers on their property.
Animals do not have any innate instinct towards living in equilibrium with their environment. If they did, imported species wouldn't overrun their new homes (ask Australians how well cane toads and rabbits are finding a "natural balance"). All animals will do what is necessary to breed to the maximum their environment will allow, even if it is catastrophic to that environment. Humanity is unusual only in the sense of our extreme adaptability to differing climatic regions and the fact that - with the use of tools - were have no natural predators to keep our numbers in check.
If anything, humanity is the most environmentally-friendly of creatures, because we alone consider (albeit not often enough) the consequences of our actions upon the rest of the world and sometimes work against our own immediate interests for the betterment of the world at large.
Which is not to excuse our rapine habits, of course; we as a species are a danger to the current natural balance. But let's not kid ourselves; no other animal would be any better.
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In other words you grew up in a large urban environment and have never actually seen nature let alone understand it and all your knowledge of the wild comes from Disney movies.
Nature does not "achieve" equilibrium. Equilibrium is an emergent property (and an illusion) of having everything grabbing anything it can and killing anything it can get away with. If nature actually reached equilibrium evolution would cease and no species would ever spread. Wild animals regularly breed themselves into starvation. I
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Intelligence as a survival trait, we (at least collectively) are second to none.
A few animals might be able to use simple tools and solve simple problems
but doing things like surviving in a hostile environment, getting out of a trap,
etc.. no other animals even gets close. No other animal can survive equally
as well in the desert and a blizzard. No other animal has mastered fire,
weapons, or escaping from a deadly situation better than humans.
Being able to escape a deadly situation is probably one of the be
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You can see their lips move.
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They're porpoises and they are also very closely related. Orcas are closer to dolphins than they are other most other whale species.
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Apparently they're even more randy than Bonobos!
So the conversation would be more
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This is similar. Why do people treat it as so remarkable?
Agreed. It would be shocking if tuna learned to speak dolphin. When an animal of a type already believed to have language skills demonstrates them, or simply appears to do so, we should not be surprised. By the same token, if a bird of a species which is not considered to be song-learning were to learn to imitate the doorbell, however, we might take notice.