![]() We now have all these new questions to explore,” concluded Collado. “We can’t say what the evolutionary story is yet until we get to know what sounds are produced by other river dolphins in the Amazon area, and how that relates to what we found. Similar calls have been reported in pilot whales and killer whales, for example, and the similarities and differences between different species could help tease out which signals evolved first, and why.Ĭollado added that the calls may also have other functions in addition to identity, perhaps indicating group identity, or providing information on emotional state. But there seems to be a large amount of variation in the repertoire of sounds each species makes.Ĭollado asserted the work could help researchers gain a clearer understanding of how communication evolved in marine mammals. The Araguaian dolphins were only described as a separate species in 2014, and that classification is still under debate. ![]() The Araguaian dolphins are closely related to two other species, the Bolivian river dolphin and the Amazon River dolphin. “There are a lot of obstacles like flooded forests and vegetation in their habitat, so this signal could have evolved to avoid echoes from vegetation and improve the communication range of mothers and their calves,” she said. Corpulent but extremely flexible, this dolphin navigates with the grace of a flying bird among the branches of submerged trees when annual rains flood the forest. Herko, OAR/National Undersea Research Program (NURP). The dolphins also made longer calls and whistles, however, they were rare. Bottlenose Dolphin Sounds (Tursiops truncatus) Description Mother and juvenile bottlenose dolphins head to the seafloor. The most common sounds were short, two-part calls that baby dolphins made when they were approaching their mothers.”It’s exciting marine dolphins like the bottlenose use signature whistles for contact, and here we have a different sound used by river dolphins for the same purpose,” said May Collado. They identified 237 different types of sounds that the dolphins make, but even with 20 hours of recordings, the researchers don’t think they captured the animals’ entire acoustic repertoire. The team used underwater cameras and microphones to record sounds and interactions between the dolphins and took some genetic samples. It lives in the Ganges and related rivers of South Asia, namely in the countries of India, Nepal, and Bangladesh. The Araguaian dolphins, also called botos, are hard to find and difficult to study. The Ganges river dolphin ( Platanista gangetica) is a species of toothed whale classified in the family Platanistidae. ![]() Their vocal repertoire is very diverse,” Laura May Collado said. “We found that they do interact socially and are making more sounds than previously thought. The study was published in the Journal ‘PeerJ’. ![]() The Araguaian dolphins, also called botos, are hard to find and difficult to study.(Unsplash) A new study has found that there are hundreds of sound that the dolphins use to communicate. No matter how friendly a dolphin might appear, the Araguaian river dolphin of Brazil has remained a mystery. ![]()
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