| Man&Dolphins |
| Dolphins and humans have a lot of things in common. First of all we are both mammals. We nurse our young, which are born alive, not hatched from eggs. Mammals breathe air. A dolphin must come up to the surface to breathe through a blowhole on the top of its head. When it dives, the blowhole closes shut. Rather than breathing continuously, like we do, a dolphin takes a breath and holds it until it surfaces again. Unlike us, a dolphin breathing is not automatic, so they have to think to breathe rather than think to hold their breath. Both humans and dolphins are warm-blooded. A dolphin's body temperature is normally 96-98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Its outer body temperature is slightly lower. A human's body temperature is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit just a fraction higher than a dolphin's. It has also been observed that dolphins frequently stroke each other with their flippers, hence, indicating that they require physical contact much like humans. A dolphin's skin is extremely delicate and easily injured by rough surfaces--very similar to human skin. |
| COMMUNICATION How do dolphins communicate? Dolphins communicate by making two types of sounds: vocalizations and echolocation. Vocalizations are the many noises dolphins use to communicate. These sounds come from their blowhole. Echolocation, also called sonar, is the way dolphins locate and distinguish between objects underwater. A dolphin emits a sound and listens for the echo. This allows a dolphin to navigate through dark or murky water without bumping into anything. A dolphin produces powerful clicking sounds that travel through the water, which then bounce off objects and return to the dolphin. Whopping 1,200 clicks a second can be transmitted ahead of a dolphin like a beacon. These clicks come from the rounded forehead of the dolphin, called the melon. This melon along with the lower jaw is filled with a jelly-like substance used to simplified sound waves. Therefore, as a dolphin swims, it moves its head back and forth to scan its surroundings, while the echoes it sends out bounce off objects and hit the lower jawbone, which conducts the returning sound waves to the inner ear. By the pitch of the returning echo and the time it takes to get there, the dolphin can determine the shape, size, speed, texture, and density of the object. It can even view the inside of an object, almost like an X-ray, except it a dolphin has vision by sound. They are excellent mimics of sounds and clearly communicate with one another, but does that mean they "talk?" No one less than Aristotle once wrote, "The voice of the dolphin in the air is like that of the human in that they can pronounce vowels and combinations of vowels, but have difficulties with the consonants." But a more scientific analysis of dolphin sounds suggests that for all their communication skills, dolphins lack the repertoire to have anything approaching language, as we know it. It has been suggested that the reason dolphins always seem to be grinning is that they understand our language and are patiently waiting for us to learn theirs. With this thought in mind, Regina Blackstok (she is not a dolphin expert), found that languages do exist in several human communities where people communicate by whistling. The most mentioned example was the Mazateco language in Mexico. Could Dolphins learn and speak one of these human whistling languages? Whether this is feasible or not, I don't know, but it might be well worth the effort if it could allow us to meet them halfway! But no one when so far, like the group of the institute of Morphologic Evolution and Ecology of the animals of the Academia of Science of Russia. Researchers commanded by scientist Vladimir Markov, after a long studying in the aquarium of dolphins of Karadag, in Arzebaijão, announced the existence of an open system of language made of 51 sounds of vocal impulsion and nine types of tone whistles, that would make a possible alphabet of their species. Biologists have been doing a lot of experiments to try to prove it, but we still don’t know for sure, what we know is that they can at list talk about abstract ideas like left and right. |
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