Dolphins recognize friends
by tasting their piss... Scientists put pee “in a little cup at the end of a very long pole” to see if they “sampled” their friends’ pee longer than strangers’ pee.
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Scientists have discovered that bottlenose dolphins can recognize each other through taste. Specifically, the taste of their urine. Published this week in the journal
Science Advances, the paper, by researchers at Stephen F. Austin State University, Texas, and University of St. Andrews, Scotland, found that dolphins can identify other individual dolphins just through the taste of their pee.
The researchers discovered this while they were trying to find out more about dolphins’ “signature whistles”: the specific calls they develop to refer to themselves. Jason Bruck, one of the study’s authors, explained to Motherboard: “[Dolphins] essentially, come up with their own name” but researchers didn’t know whether these work in the same way as human names. “If I name your best friend, you’ll picture them in your head, right?” The scientists wanted to know if dolphins similarly recognize others’ names.
They tested this by matching the whistles to a different sense. A human will use the same word to describe something—say, a mug—whether they see, hear, or feel it. “That’s what we were trying to get at,” Bruck said. To do this, they needed to “match and mismatch” the whistle to a different sense, as another way of identifying the animal. If another dolphin responded more to the match or the mismatch, it would show they knew which individual it belonged to.
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https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7v8...ild-experiment