Photo: RAYMOND ROIG / AFP / Getty Images
Think about the people you know and how you can say you knew they were around even if you couldn’t see them. Maybe you can do it through the sound of the voice or through his favorite perfume.
For bottlenose dolphins, it is the taste of urine and their characteristic screeches that allow them to recognize their friends in the distance, according to a study published in Sciences Advances.
“The use of flavor is highly useful in the open sea as Urine plumes can persist long after the animals are gone,” wrote the team led by Jason Bruck of the University of St. Andrews.
Bottlenose #dolphins each have their own ‘name’ – which scientists call a ‘signature whistle’. Dolphins greet each other by ‘name’, just like we do and even use another dolphin’s ‘name’ when that dolphin is not around, implying that they are talking about them in their absence 👀 pic.twitter.com/Xw65xEX7bE
— Whale and Dolphin Conservation (WDC) (@whalesorg ) May 23, 2022
“By recognizing who left their trail, dolphins could notice the recent presence of an individual even when they did not signal their presence vocally.”
The question about how these animals can associate these “stamps” of their friends in their minds has been difficult to answer.
First of all, the researchers have focused on laboratory experiments, without making it clear whether these mammals were using such tags to communicate naturally.
Remember screeches until 20 years later
Bottlenose dolphins use “ characteristic screeches” to target specific individuals and can remember them up to 20 years later, so they were an interesting case study.
To investigate, The team presented 8 dolphins with urine samples from familiar and unknown individuals, finding that the dolphins spent three times as much time collecting urine samples from familiar individuals.
Genital inspection, in which a dolphin uses its jaw to touch the genitalia of other individuals, is common in their social interactions, providing a good opportunity to learn to taste others’ urine.
For the purposes of this study, dolphins were trained to provide urine samples in exchange for food a.
Taste and not smell
Dolphins do not have olfactory bulbs like other mammals and the corresponding nerve is underdeveloped, so Researchers are sure that it was taste and not smell that was at stake.
The team then matched the samples with recordings of screeches played through underwater speakers that were either from the same dolphin that the urine sample came from, or to a sample that did not correspond.
Dolphins remained near the horn longer when the vocalizations coincided with the urine samples, indicating that two lines of evidence together generated more interest.
The research team suggested that the main proteins and lipids in the urine, they were possibly responsible for the dolphins being able to distinguish their chemical signature.
“Given the recognition capabilities revealed in our study, we think it is possible that dolphins can also extract other information from urine, such as their reproductive phase, or use pheromones to influence the behavior of others,” they said.
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