Inquiry Project #1

Question: How could humans and dolphins communicate?

In order to find ways humans and dolphins could communicate; I first researched how dolphins communicate with each other, and what they talk about. I found out that dolphins communicate by using many sounds, ‘whistles, clicks, squawks, and squeaks.’ They also communicate while using body postures, touch, and by making whistle sounds that humans cannot hear. After many researches, scientists had made some assumptions about what dolphins’ conversations are about. Dolphins talk about basic facts such as their age, their emotional states, which are very similar to human conversations.

After researching roughly about how dolphins communicate, I researched about ways humans communicate with each other which are by speaking languages, writing, body language, facial expression, music, and through technology.

After finding facts and assumptions about dolphins and humans, I searched a question, ‘Do dolphins listen to music?’

It has been proved that dolphins like to listen to music but prefer classic and country music, while Jazz and rock music stresses them out. Scientists were able to identify this through an observation when dolphins came up to the window and their play patterns became more fluid, friendly, and curious about what was going on in the other room where music was played. They rubbed their noses against the windows, walls, and expressed more sensory communication. After finding this information, I thought maybe we could identify dolphins’ body language or sounds by having them listen to different styles and types of music and investigating their responses.

I also researched about what kind of ways scientists are using for humans to be able to communicate to dolphins. There were some scientists that believed that if humans ever hope to talk to animals, dolphins might represent all animals because of their high intelligence and their sophisticated form of communication amongst themselves. After noticing that dolphins tried to mimic our vocalization and our postures, some scientists tried recording the whistles of dolphins and replicate them for use. However, they figured out that it was difficult to effectively duplicate these sounds to communicate with the dolphins because they found out that dolphins have individualized whistles and different types of language lingo within pods.

I discovered that recently, a scientist called, ‘Dr. Herzing’ had effective result from an experiment. The experiment was to teach dolphins new created words that used dolphin-like vocalizations. The experiment succeeded after a dolphin made the unique whistle associated with a type of seaweed.

So far, I have found examples of experiments scientists tried out to figure our dolphin languages, find information and relation of how dolphins and humans communicate among themselves.