Study
Communication in bottlenose dolphins: 50 years of signature whistle research
Janik, V. M.; Sayigh, L. S.
Journal of Comparative Physiology A, 2013
A review of half a century of research on signature whistles: how they were first identified, the long argument about whether they exist at all, how development and learning were established, and what the copying of another animal’s whistle is currently understood to mean.
- Studied in
- Tursiops truncatus
- Sample size
- five decades of published signature-whistle work
Signature whistles are learned in the first months of life, are stable for decades, are individually distinctive in contour rather than in voice, and are copied by close associates — most often between mothers and calves and between allied males.
What it means
The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.
How the authors put it
Signature whistles function as individual identity signals, and their development involves vocal production learning, which is rare among mammals.
How NatureHQ reads it
Carried mainly for the history, which is more instructive than the conclusion. The existence of signature whistles was disputed for decades, largely because early recordings came from restrained animals and the pattern looked like an artefact of stress. It took repeated recording of free-swimming, individually known animals over years to settle it. Popular accounts present "dolphins have names" as a discovery; it was an argument, and the argument is the interesting part.
- A review rather than new data.
- Almost all of it concerns one species, and mostly one or two long-studied populations.
- Function in the wild — how often signature whistles are actually used to address a specific animal — remains harder to establish than their existence.
What this study is used for on NatureHQ
One study can inform several subjects. Here is everywhere this one is cited.
Animal communication
A great deal of animal signalling is produced automatically by the animal’s state, not chosen — and that is one of the things that makes it unlike speech.
Dolphins
Each bottlenose dolphin develops its own whistle, others learn to copy it, and a dolphin answers when its own whistle is played back.
Published by: Springer journalsPublished in a Springer journal.
doi.org/10.1007/s00359-013-0817-7
Checked against Crossref on 2026-09-28, and they agree on the title, the authors and the year.
NatureHQ summarises research in its own words and does not reproduce published text. Reviewed 2026-08-31.