Inside our quest to talk to dolphins

[@jimmygadd]

one time in my life on a diveboat in egypt, we heard "Dolphins" that was the start of a lifetime memory, it was a pod of wild dolphins that came and checked us out, we all jumped in the water, 4 males came and checked out us, then a 5 year old jumpd in to the water, then the dolphins changed and the whole pod with kids come it was around 50-70 dolphins and always around the little girl was two dolphins that looked like they took care so no bad should happen, then the dolphins swim by us with baby dolphins. Memory of a lifetime, those images is like they happend this morning!

[@juniorr2646]

How beautiful

[@karnewarrior]

Cute! Sounds like they recognized the child as a child and decided you weren't some kind of hunters or other threat.

[@jimmygadd]

@@karnewarrior Yeah that was we tought. Memory of a lifetime!

[@waywardplanet]

I wonder if one could communicate to the dolphins that our hearing range isn’t as advanced as theirs, like, by setting up a keyboard for them with a huge spectrum of pitches. They’d mess around with the keyboard, learn it makes different tones, and then one way or another they might hopefully notice that humans don’t react to the higher pitches. Maybe the buttons for the pitches we *can* hear would be differently colored, so that the dolphins would have a visual aid. Then, maybe, a separate human/dolphin dialect that both species would have to compromise on could be developed.

[@monoham1]

bats can stun their prey with sound, cant dolphins do the same thing? they could use their voice to use the keyboard faster too.

[@DD-lc8ei]

I have wondered about it for years and they can articulate over the interent the contents of a Bible in a few minutes or less. She said JANE Goodall andmY be a friend of a friend.

[@heartquake1100]

This is so amazing. I can't wait to see what happens in the future with this research

[@ryanowen2097]

The world needs more pure science like this

[@Supportsystemforme]

I was so pleased to come across your site. I joined your research as a visitor many years ago - 1989, I believe. It was an amazing experience. I had trained before but could not keep up with the other swimmers for length of holding my breathe. At one point, I swam to the surface and decided to just relax at the top with my snorkel and watch others swimming and diving. A few seconds later two dolphins swam next to me, one on either side. I stared into their eyes and almost lost my breathe. As soon as I was near to the boat, they swam away. You thought maybe they were concerned that I was away from my "pod." Ever since, I've been donating and writing letters to support dolphin projects, such as Earth Island Institute that tries to stop killing of dolphins in Taiji, Japan. Your research trip was amazing. I wish my underwater pictures had come out. I remember their excitement when my camera started rewinding. They were fascinated by the whirring. Take care, Marlene Meyer in Washington

[@advertise3606YT]

What happens if you record their sounds and play it back to another dolphin?

[@nando4896]

Actually a very good question.

[@moemichel6901]

Those dolphins were just saying racial slurs

[@suicidalbanananana]

This is something that was done early on (going by a full length docu i saw about the same researchers) but it has very little value if you dont know what you are 'saying', and there was little to no response at all, dolphins most definably are smart enough to realize that humans were just repeating stuff. Compare it to humans and parrots, when we come across one we might stop for a few seconds and go "hey that's weird, they can sound like us" but no human actually thinks we can have a conversation with them, or that they understand what we are saying. Repeating dolphin sounds to dolphins has the same effect, they might stop for a moment to investigate but it really wouldn't take long for them to go "ha, fooled me for a second, gonna swim away now bye"

[@ChloeLalonde]

I wonder if there was a baby that grew up only hearing what the dolphin mothers were saying to calf’s that it might naturally learn dolphin-ish

[@zakuro8532]

Like the video said dolphines hear and speak in a hertz range 10 times as big as humans can.

[@gato0082]

Sure 🤔🐚 if bby CD stay under water w/🐬🐬🐬🐬🐬🐬🐬🐬🐬🐬🐬🐚🐬🐚🐬🐬🐬

[@ThePCadict]

Gotta start feeding AI (machine learning, etc...) this data. They will crack it i bet

[@luckyblockyoshi]

thats... not how AI works

[@jmister28]

@@luckyblockyoshi it Kinda is, if you were to feed these sounds to a neural network and provide it with the output associations seen in the field experiments, I believe that it will have no trouble cracking it. In fact we are currently using AI neural networks to crack the "language" of our dna.

[@nayber2352]

@@jmister28 DNA has a much larger output set to train with though, there is both not enough data from the field experiments, and to inspecific data to train a net with. Also, what if their language has syntax? "give me that" "can I have that" "pass that here" "stop hogging it" could all elicit the same response but be entirely different inputs, and with a small dataset, you can't parse anything useful out of this. AI was only able to crack our language using a huge library of direct translations (audio books, text to type etc) and only after a model is built can you do any sort of cross training or constitutional training because you have a working model of the language prebuilt.

[@zkrwiikosci]

@Clorox Tree Where can one read or watch about it? This is amazing. I want to get to know everything humanly possible about this topic. There must be a way to step up with these researches.

[@karnewarrior]

@@luckyblockyoshi You could probably do it with a pretty advanced neural network, but you'd need a human to associate behaviors with the various sounds in a way the computer would understand. It'd be quite the difficult set-up. I agree with Correia though - an AI working through all this data could probably give some very valuable insights, possibly even pick out a few individual words if we're very lucky.

[@raymcdonald6734]

Rather than creating wars, deadly weapons and divide and conquer the population we as humans could do so much more of this type of thing.

[@beautyofscience2016]

Magical, just like in the Arrival movie.

[@dakotajara9676]

So you know how we're constantly seeking intelligent alien life and believe they're on other planets/galaxies? I think we've been living with alien life this whole time (dolphins/whales). But who knows lol

[@suicidalbanananana]

Heres a fun thought, if aliens have ever visited us, they would've likely tried to communicate with sea life over human life, considering the biggest portion of the planet is sea. While we think we're the top of the food chain & the pinnacle of evolution, in fact we are relatively simple/limited compared to many other forms of life on this planet, its very plausible that a bunch of animal types are actually a lot smarter then we realize.

[@infamous4514]

6:58 those dolphin sounds on the graph look like a finger print...

[@MagnusFriberg]

I heard what she said in the very end... 😀

[@aa-to6ws]

Hmm, that is interesting, dolphy what you think about it? -Hehegehfehegeee Yeah I think the same, GUYS YOU ARE AMAZING!!!

[@williamtezen4382]

HmM DoLfY wHaT dO yOu ThInK? NEIN NEIN NEIN NEIN NEIN THE WAR IS NOT LOST THE WAR IS NOT LOST

[@coachdelgado2164]

One summer I fell off a fishing boat taking photos dolphins and lost my camera in the fall. Shortly after dolphin brought it up. It was deemed broken and useless but the act of the dolphin was surreal.

[@aerieaerie]

love it ..great idea!

[@benw9949]

If dolphins can hear in the human range of speech, then why not also try to see if dolphins can learn what human words mean, say English words for the objects, or common scuba and surfing and swimming and beach words. It could be handy to have a human to/from dolphin translation system, if the dolphins could understand us and start from their end. Yes, that assumes they could do that. It assumes they might be intelligent. It's at least an approach to test, to try, and to see what happens. Plus, it's more direct than an arbitrary system of made-up sound codes for scarf, ring, etc., which no one else would understand without knowing the key.

[@Axodus]

English doesn't work underwater, we can only speak their language.

[@monoham1]

the problem is ethically you cant pay the dolphins to keep in the program, theres far too few of them to use that in case it causes species collapse. but what if they could be asked to look for gold or oil underwater? and the only way to do that was to incentivise a whole pod to learn or even make a spoken pigeon language (as opposed to military dolphins). im still not sure anybody has managed to explain to a dolphin that humans are hard of hearing.

[@InanisNihil]

@@monoham1 " im still not sure anybody has managed to explain to a dolphin that humans are hard of hearing." 😂

[@zakuro8532]

This would have worked in dolphin park enclosures if Dolphins were able to do understand. I think dolphins do understand some words but using wistles and hand gestures has proven more effective.

[@goteem9118]

I wonder 1 day if a dolphin made a dope mixtape we humans can understand

[@Toro54098]

NBA DolphinBoy

[@Allfaxnocaps]

Young dolph

[@garbovideo]

So worthwhile research

[@anonkiddo]

This is epic

[@Giveaway18]

Maybe we will be dolphin people one day

[@jadibdraws]

I do feel we need to try to understand species on our own planet better if we wish to have any hope of ever communicating with intelligent life from another planet too often when we fantasize about aliens looking more like us being similar to us. But the reality is there are likely many aliens who are nothing like us. Who can be closer to a sea creature, amphibian, or bird like. So its good to understand our own planet better & the animals among us.

[@justahuman4862]

I hope they went back and then communicated to them in that newly discovered frequency....

[@SmartK8]

Human: *presses button and weird noise comes out* "I'm communicating!" Predator: *over here, over here, over here, turn around, turn around, creepy laugh* "I'm communicating!"

[@dc6758]

So awesome

[@jqstjohn]

Beautiful!

[@TheSpidermanDude]

Imagine telling a dolphin about space

[@suicidalbanananana]

Imagine if 'somebody from space' already told them? and before you go "naaw never", remember how it makes no sense for us to be alone in the universe, and how most of our planet is water? if aliens ever contacted anything on earth, it was most likely sea life.

[@dautisticguy]

that would be pretty cool if we can talk to dolphins

[@lauragarnham77]

This is really interesting and I admire their hard work and effort in trying to communicate with dolphins :). But imagine if, eventually, we can communicate with dolphins, but we don't because all they ever want to talk about is where they can find good fish to eat :P

[@colonelcorn9500]

Lol

[@bootsycarlie6738]

Why not get or invent high frequency hearing aids?

[@Snyde70]

Dolphin sounds contain roughly twenty times the sonic information than is required to understand human speech. We can record super high frequencies but the only way we can hear them is if we slow down the recordings by maybe 10 times. This makes real-time communication quite difficult. Computers are needed to analyse this mass of sonic information and translate it in real time but before we can even start that we need to decode their language... this is a massive undertaking.

[@brendatenorio5721]

Fabulous!

[@frigginpatchez3937]

You guys, hear me out. Microphones inside the scuba masks that hear human noise, and translate it into dolphin noise. In AI listens to the noises dolphins make and assigns them noises we can understand. So if we say "wow hooga shooga" the AI might make dolphin noises that mean "(dolphins name) follow me!" Then you lead them to food

[@ThePineTreesBand]

Can anybody point me in the direction of any video/info of any progress achieved in the time since??

[@GenevaKar]

They have built in phones! I'm sure they have some sort of social media and gossip in the sea!

[@MrSlizz-wz5nb]

Cool stuff

[@vj.joseph]

The natural language algorithm that google uses might be of use here.

[@juniorr2646]

Aww my heart ♥

[@henlo9690]

Complex politics!?! Let's hope there's no Donald trump dolphin demanding to build a wall and make orcas (Btw the close range burst clicks sounds like wet kazoos)

[@kool-aidcorncrap7880]

Or let's hope there's not a dolphin like YOU who wants to add stupid politics to everything!!!

[@Axodus]

@Fisfis 9999 People like Henlo make me hate large portions of humanity.

[@liquidbraino]

Three most important words any species can ever say: I. Love. You. I wonder how Dolphins say it? How do YOU say it? (in your own language, please tell me).

[@orangejuice8438]

Pov: you're watching this for school

[@Adxdi]

What species of dolphins are they studying in the video? What did the scientists notice dolphins were doing in the 1990’s? What 3 types of sounds do dolphins make and what is each for? What is the human range of hearing? What is the dolphin range of hearing? How much more hearing range do dolphins have over humans? Why is the chat system body computer that scientists from the University of Hawaii have developed special? What are the parts that make up the body computer chat system? Explain the experiment the two marine biologists did with the chat system. After one dolphin encounter they listened to the audio and realized that the dolphins have been trying to mimic the sounds they were making. Why didn’t they realize this sooner?

[@Axodus]

Are you a teacher that accidentally posted their test questions in the comments?

[@Adxdi]

@@Axodus lol, no I am a student and we were supposed to answer these questions after watching the video so I accidentally wrote the questions on the comments.

[@Axodus]

@@Adxdi that was the second more likely scenario I thought of after seeing your fortnite videos.

[@cameromnartin]

What was the sampled movie?

[@derekneese9497]

Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a Spielberg film about communicating with UFOs/aliens.

[@Allfaxnocaps]

Fish people

[@renanmalone742]

NINTENDO 64!!!!

[@siriusstarlight9881]

😍😍❤️🙏🐬🙏❤️😍😍

[@gato0082]

Which sixteen ppl dnt like this video... 🤔🙄🤣😂😱🙃🙃😮😲😲

[@BEDISA112]

This is fye

[@juliasmith5267]

decent video.

[@absolutefallout7806]

Wish we would get help with coronavirus 🦠😷🦠😷

[@chickenturtle5026]

Why not moose? >:(

[@Jaylio]

Dolphin are more intelligent

[@CocoPiiie2259]

Dolphins are waaay more intelligent than humans

[@Axodus]

@Oliver225 S. I'd agree if we use you as the average.

[@Axodus]

@@tool_fighter Wow, what I said must've really hurt you alot to reply to me, it's almost as if you took it personally, I wonder why... Seeing how I didn't reply to you.. Hmm, you can't take a joke can you? Not only that, you're a year too late. Please look at the likes my comment has received compared to the original comment, clearly you're the minority here.

[@Axodus]

@@tool_fighter After that reply it's certain, you did take it personally, that's your problem, not mine, stop wasting my time with your insecurities.

[@tool_fighter]

@@Axodus Somebody just HAS to be right. I'll just delete it. Arguing on the netg is just so 2016

[@tool_fighter]

@@Axodus lol. You are the one that took it personally and attacked . ( Axodus 1 year ago @Oliver225 S. I'd agree if we use you as the average. )

[@finchdoge3312]

personally I do not appreciate your promotion of 'dolphins'. By sharing this video you are promoting the death of many porpoises by being rammed to death(by dolphins) if you have a consciounce you will delete this videos. I wish you a porposie-appreciating life

[@jostllightybuzz7508]

FinchDoge start the Porpoise Revolutionary Movement!

[@finchdoge3312]

thank you. I appreciate your support. there are less than 30 vaquita porpoises in the wild. I have so far donated £10000 to the porpoise conservation society. it would be a great boost to the ecosystem if you donated too

[@jostllightybuzz7508]

FinchDoge like my comment please and subscribe thx k byw

[@jostllightybuzz7508]

FinchDoge of corse I’ll donate

[@finchdoge3312]

JostlLightyBuzz I will I appreciate porpoise appreciaters

[@hugocantspell9974]

Boring