Arik Kershenbaum.
College Lecturer at Girton College, University of Cambridge, and formerly Herchel Smith Research Fellow in Zoology
GIRTON
COLLEGE
The Smoky Mountains in autumn (Arik Kershenbaum)
Everyone knows dolphins are intelligent, and that they communicate with sound. But we are still far from knowing how and what they exchange information. I work with dolphin sounds, as well as those from their close relatives the killer whales and pilot whales, looking for evidence of syntax and structure.
Cetaceans
Dolphins, orca, pilot whales...
Dolphins use frequency modulated whistles to identify themselves to each other, and probably also to address each other by "name".
I look at how both identity, and possibly other information, is encoded in these whistles. I also look at the syntactic structure of sequences of sounds made by pilot whales and orca (killer whales), whose purpose is currently unknown.
My research has found that:
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Dolphins can encode their individual identity in a whistle very consicely: only a small proportion of the whole whistle is necessary to differentiate between individuals. Understanding the way that information exists in sounds will help us test specific hypotheses of meaning in communication.
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Pilot whales and orca make complex sequences of sounds that appear more complex than those of many other animals. We know that these animals are both social and intelligent, so some cetacean communication may contain clues to the evolutionary pathway that led to human language.
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Kershenbaum A., Bowles A.E., Freeberg T.M., Jin D.Z., Lameira A.R., Bohn K. (2014) Animal vocal sequences: not the Markov chains we thought they were. Proceedings of the Royal Society B
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Kershenbaum A., Sayigh L., Janik V. (2013) The encoding of individual identity in dolphin signature whistles: how much information is needed? PLoS One 8(10): e77671.