Two months after being relocated to a pen with bottlenose dolphins, a beluga whale began whistling like them. She eventually dropped her own beluga “speech patterns” to communicate with her new neighbors, according to researchers from the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.
In her previous habitat, the beluga had been surrounded by other whales. But after she was relocated to Crimea’s Dolphinarium Koktebel in 2013, she was the only whale around. In order to adapt to her new peers, the whale picked up the bottlenose dolphin language, including the pod’s individual whistles, assigned to each dolphin like a name.
However there’s still one unknown: scientists are unable to determine if the beluga actually understands what she is chirping out to the dolphins or if she’s just learned to mimic their sounds.
I'm still not going to learn Czech though.
http://www.travelandleisure.com/animals/beluga-whale-learns-to-speak-dolphin
No comments:
Post a Comment
Due to a small but consistent influx of spam, comments will now be checked before publishing. Only egregious spam/illegal/racist crap will be disapproved, everything else will be published.