Who doesn’t know someone who talks in their dreams at night? People rearrange our ideas while we sleep, and sleep is said to play an important role in fixing information and assimilating new knowledge. Something like this could happen with dolphins, as has been confirmed by a group of ethologists from the “Wild Planet” dolphinarium in Port-Saint-Père (France).
The researchers made recordings during the night in which they were able to identify a series of sounds that did not correspond to those that dolphins emit during the day. In the end, they managed to identify the mysterious songs: these are practically the same as those emitted by humpback whales. The dolphins hear this sound on a daily basis as it is part of the soundtrack of the show that “Wild Planet” offers its visitors.
Although it was already known that these animals are capable of imitating sounds, until now it was thought that they were only capable of doing so right after hearing them . However, in this case the dolphins do not imitate the whales during the performance of the show, but wait several hours to “practice” the new melodies learned. The next step will be to check if the dolphins are asleep while making the whale sounds, since that would mean that the dream helps them to fix, like people, the new information in memory.
However, other specialists on the subject warn that you have to be cautious with the results. “I have recorded wild dolphin sounds very similar to those made by humpback whales,” says Peter Tyack of the University of St. Andrews. “Dolphins make so many different sounds that it is difficult to tell when they are imitating other animals.” So we will have to wait for new data to know if dolphins really speak the language of whales in dreams.
