SEMINAR: Animal Biology seminar - Whistling to a signature tune: the role of signature whistles in bottlenose dolphin communication

Bottlenose dolphins are one of very few species that use vocal learning to develop their own unique vocal signature early in life. Many animals may encode identity in a signal through general voice features, but each bottlenose dolphin produces one stereotyped whistle type, called a signature whistle, which encodes its individual identity information independently of such voice features. Interestingly, as each individual's signature whistle forms a major part of only one animals’ repertoire, it allows the signature whistle to act as a label for that particular individual when copied. The idea that signature whistles may be used as descriptive labels either to address individuals or to refer to them has long been an intriguing hypothesis. However, which members of the community produced these copies and in which contexts they occurred was not known. I will discuss signature whistle copying in bottlenose dolphins, and my use of sound playback experiments with wild and captive dolphins, to show how signature whistle copying facilitates the labelling and addressing of social companions in the bottlenose dolphin communication system.