Dolphins greet each other with whistles

Researchers from the School of Biology, Dr Vincent Janik and Nicola Quick, have found that when groups of dolphins met up, they swapped whistles that outwardly sounded the same but were individual signatures that were never matched or copied by other dolphins.

The whistles are clearly important, as they were heard in 90 percent of the joinups, says their paper, which was published in the British Journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

The discovery adds an intriguing footnote about the bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus), one of only very few species which can invent or copy noises. [more]