Ever since the 1960s, scientists have tried to figure out whether or not dolphins communicate with a language. The World Dolphin Project has created Cetacean Hearing and Telemetry (CHAT), a prototype dolphin translator, and works with Dr. Denise Herzing and her team. After 25 years of tracking a member of a dolphin pod, she finally succeeded in translating a dolphin whistle. They taught the dolphin a whistle that meant “sargassum,” a genus of seaweed, and now the dolphin has finally used it.
It is not known whether the dolphin said the word because it saw some of the seaweed and was trying to communicate with another a dolphin. However, the dolphin did communicate the whistle it was taught. The next step is for us to recognize the meanings of the natural communicational whistles of dolphins. After that, the World Dolphin Project will look into tow-way communication.
The actual builder of CHAT, Thad Starner, used algorithms to discover patterns in order to analyze dolphin communication through whistling. This device helps us recognize sounds and clues our human ears can’t pick up on (dolphin whistles are 10 times higher than the highest pitch we can hear). Starner has currently discovered seventy-three different whistles and has distinguished eight different components. Some of these whistles have also been recognized as mother-calf interactions.
For centuries, fiction books have been written about people having the ability to talk to animals. Now, they might be non-fiction. This is the beginning of our potential to talk to dolphins.