Dolphins pamper their little ones with ‘baby talk’, a study tells how

Dolphins are known to have unique personality traits similar to humans as they play and socialise with people. However, a recent study has found that dolphins also do something very common among humans - their mothers coo to their babies.

In a study, published on Monday, the researchers found that the tone of female bottlenose dolphins changes when they address their calves as they use a particular kind of high-pitched baby talk.

The signature whistles of 19 mother dolphins were recorded by the researchers in Florida when they were along with their young offspring and when they were swimming alone or were accompanied by other adults. The signature whistle of dolphins is unique and is an important signal which is similar to calling out their own name.

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“They use these whistles to keep track of each other. They’re periodically saying, ‘I’m here, I’m here’,” stated study co-author Laela Sayigh, who works as a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution marine biologist in Massachusetts.

When the mother directs the signal to their calves, her whistle pitch is higher, as per the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“That was true for every one of the mums in the study, all 19 of them,” stated biologist Peter Tyack, a study co-author from the University of St Andrews in Scotland.

It was no simple feat to obtain this data about dolphins. The data, which has been obtained in more than three decades, was collected by special microphones placed multiple times by the scientists on the same wild dolphin mothers in Florida’s Sarasota Bay for recording their signature whistles. This experiment included years when dolphins had calves and when they didn't, as the babies stay with their mothers for an average of three years in Sarasota. Meanwhile, fathers don’t play a prolonged role in parenting.

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“This is unprecedented, absolutely fantastic data,” stated Mauricio Cantor, an Oregon State University marine biologist who was not involved in the study. “This study is the result of so much research effort," Cantor added.

To study the dolphins, the researchers solely focused on the signature call, so they remain unaware if thesame baby talk is used by the dolphins for other exchanges.

“It would make sense if there are similar adaptations in bottlenose dolphins – a long-lived, highly acoustic species,” where calves need to learn to vocalise many sounds to communicate, stated Frants Jensen, who is a behavioural ecologist at Denmark’s Aarhus University and a study co-author.

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