There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Abstract
The bottlenose dolphin, Tursiops truncatus, is one of very few animals that, through
vocal learning, can invent novel acoustic signals and copy whistles of conspecifics.
Furthermore, receivers can extract identity information from the invented part of
whistles. In captivity, dolphins use such signature whistles while separated from
the rest of their group. However, little is known about how they use them at sea.
If signature whistles are the main vehicle to transmit identity information, then
dolphins should exchange these whistles in contexts where groups or individuals join.
We used passive acoustic localization during focal boat follows to observe signature
whistle use in the wild. We found that stereotypic whistle exchanges occurred primarily
when groups of dolphins met and joined at sea. A sequence analysis verified that most
of the whistles used during joins were signature whistles. Whistle matching or copying
was not observed in any of the joins. The data show that signature whistle exchanges
are a significant part of a greeting sequence that allows dolphins to identify conspecifics
when encountering them in the wild.