I agree that it's not at all obvious the dolphins take the recorded bits as their. But it does make perfect sense to me that they would *have* names that they use to initiate speaking to one another. But the fact that the dolphin whose recorded voice is played is the only one responding to it is interesting. It doesn't sound from the BBC article that any special selection of a given dolphin's recorded voice is played. Just some random bit -- is that right? All this proves (apparently) is that a dolphin recognizes a recording of its own voice, and responds by repeating the recording. This *might* mean the dolphin is saying "Roger willco, I'm here." But that's certainly not proven by this experiment. --Dan On 2013-07-24, at 9:20 AM, Fred lunnon wrote:
On 7/24/13, Charles Greathouse <charles.greathouse@case.edu> wrote:
I don't think the result is by any means obvious. All that seems obvious to me is that the dolphins appear to have unique calls to which they respond in kind. To determine if this functions as a name I'd like to see how the other dolphins react (under controlled conditions).