It seems dolphins not only enjoy making bubbles as much as human children (see video), but they also have a "word" that's equivalent to the gleeful sound humans make while at play.
Liz Hawkins, a scientist from the Whale Research Centre at Southern Cross University in New South Wales, Australia, spent three years listening in to dolphin gossip. Her team recorded 1,647 whistles from 51 different pods in Byron Bay, New South Wales. By comparing the frequency and duration of these whistles she identified 186 distinct types, with a subgroup of 20 being most the commonly used "words" in the dolphins' vocabulary.
As the dolphins rode the wave created by the team's boat, they would make a flat-toned whistle, which Hawkins believes is similar in meaning to a child on a slide shouting "wheeee." Hawkins thinks another whistle commonly made by lonesome dolphins could mean "I'm here, where is everyone?"
"This communication is highly complex and it is contextual, so in a sense it could be termed a language," says Hawkins in an interview with New Scientist magazine.
If dolphins, along with other highly sentient animals, are capable of such complex human-like communication, many scientists are now arguing that we should extend human-like rights to such creatures. Though this may ultimately lead to more controversy as we argue about which species these rights are extended to, it is becoming increasingly clear that humans no longer have the monopoly on what we perceive as humanity.
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