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Friendship for dolphins seems to be a “matter of taste”, but not just for their favorite foods.
A new study says dolphins recognize their friends or allies by enjoying their urine.
Analyzing each other’s tastes in urine, dolphins seem to demonstrate a type of ‘social recognition’ that begins with the exchange of whistles, which they use as people use people’s names.
Scientists had known that dolphins identify each other with specific whistles for each.
But researchers weren’t sure if they associated these cries with the full individual identity of their friends or simply with the concept of “friend.”
Researchers have recently learned that bottlenose dolphins not only demonstrate acoustic cognition, but also reinforce it by recognizing the “taste” of their friends.
By enjoying an individual’s urine and knowing its source, they show that they can maintain the order of information of herd identities by creating a deeper mental image of those with whom they associate.
The researchers found that by identifying the taste of the urine, the animals reinforced their knowledge of the individuals and then copied the whistles.
To discover this the researchers had to perform extensive tests even though it was previously known that dolphins swim with their mouths open in the urine pus of others, in a way like dogs that use sniffing.
The researchers found that dolphins spent three times as much time testing the taste of foreign dolphins’s urine as those they knew, suggesting that they could recognize their “friends” by taste.
The scientists had gone even further by testing the urine taste of the specimens to compare it to the identification they made of the whistles.
When these two matched each other, the dolphins listened more carefully to the whistling recording, which means that they perceive both sensations to reassure them of the individual identity of the herd.
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