Say what? Dolphins convey disbelief

Scientists have identified what they call ‘the WTF whistle’, a noise dolphins seem to make when something strange is afoot or when they are confused.

Dolphins at Monkey Mia in WA’s Shark Bay.

The official name for the dolphin vocalisation was “non-signature whistle B”. The “suggested function of this whistle type”, researchers wrote in careful language, was “as a ‘query’.”

They also had an unofficial, perhaps slightly less careful, name for it. Laela Sayigh, from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said they had called it “the WTF whistle”.

They used the online abbreviation – unprintable in full – for incredulity because that was what seemed to be going on. It was a noise the dolphins seemed to make when something strange was afoot.

Dr Sayigh’s work investigating this and other dolphin calls has led to her being shortlisted for the world’s newest scientific award: the Coller-Dolittle prize for interspecies communication. This is a $US100,000 annual prize for research into understanding what animals are saying – and seeing whether we can say something back.

Yossi Yovel, from Tel Aviv University, the chair of the prize’s scientific committee, said it was about more than simply chatting to our pets. “Our human language is, we think, unique. We would like to know, though, how unique is it? Where does it come from? And by studying other animals, this can give us some intuition.”

This inaugural year, the shortlisted studies include research into decoding the songs of nightingales and uncovering naming structures in marmosets.

One team in contention worked with cuttlefish to try to establish what is going on when they flap their arms at each other. Not only do cuttlefish respond to videos of other cuttlefish flapping with complex sequences of flaps of their own, the scientists found, they have a similar reaction if they feel the wave pattern made by those flaps. What are they doing?

It is not about sex, says Sophie Cohen-Bodenes of Ecole Normale Superieure. “We were thinking it was like in birds, where they were saying ‘Look how beautiful I am when I wave my arms’.” But it was not. When you consider they change their colour as they make the flaps, “the most plausible interpretation is that these signs are symbolic and can encrypt a variety of possible meanings”, she said.

Which is impressive, but is it as impressive as incredulous dolphins? The WTF whistle came about because of wider experiments in decoding dolphin whistles. In Sarasota Bay, Florida, the dolphins have been studied for generations. This has been long enough to tease apart all their signature calls – the calls that identify them to each other.

Initially, the concept of a signature call can feel odd, says Sayigh. “We don’t tend to walk around going ‘I’m Laela, I’m Laela, I’m Laela’.” But when you realise that sound travels a lot further underwater than light, it makes more sense. “They like to know where each other are. So they are saying ‘I’m over here. I’m over here. I’m over here.’. They will sometimes even use an apparently altered version of the other dolphin’s call in response, to say ‘There you are. There you are.’ ”

What they do not do is waste energy making a signature call when it is not needed. One day, off the coast of Florida, she and her colleagues played a dolphin known as F142 the signature call of a dolphin called F276. This was confusing for both parties – because they were right next to each other. How did they respond? On hearing each other’s calls, obviously not coming from either of them, they emitted a different call entirely: the WTF call.

In truth, Sayigh says, citing the famous question of philosopher Thomas Nagel, we cannot know what it is like to be a dolphin. There could be other interpretations of the call.

Yet in methodically identifying signature whistles, working out their uses and then finding the non-signature whistles too, it is a tiny chip from a cetacean Rosetta Stone. Put another way, it has got us a little closer to identifying WTF it is that dolphins are chatting about.

The Times