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Do Irish dolphins have a brogue of their own?

A Shannon River estuary brogue?

All dolphins apparently don't speak the same language

by Eric Jackson

Irish scientists working for the Shannon Dolphin and Wildlife Foundation ---  http://www.shannondolphins.ie/ --- have made an interesting discovery that may also relate to Panama's ongoing controversy about a proposal to capture wild dolphins from this country's waters on both sides of the isthmus. The AFP news service reports that when using a computer set up in a County Clare barn to analyze the recorded sounds of some 120 bottlenose dolphins that live in the Shannon estuary, researchers found eight categories of whistling sounds not found among another group of the same species in Cardigan Bay, Wales. The two groups of dolphins were eavesdropped upon by means of hydrophones, in a project involving not only the foundation in Shannon but also several universities and grant money from the Vodafone Group Foundation.

It is known that dolphins use sound both the communicate with one another and for ecolocation --- finding their way around by a natural sonar ability. Scientists are far from being able to decipher dolphin language, but researchers with the foundation are working on it by compiling a catalog of dolphin sounds, correlating them with observed behaviors and by building mathematical models of these.

It may be just a human conceit to reserve the definition of "language" to the ways that we communicate among ourselves, but the Shannon researchers are describing what they think they may have found as a difference in "dialect." Similar differences, sometimes limited to small related groups within a species, have been noted among certain monkeys and whales.

Just how to define the differences in the ways that distinct groups of bottlenose dolphins communicate will require more research.

This research has been conducted among dolphins living in their natural wild environments. We really don't know many details about how captivity affects dolphin communication, but there are clearly disruptions of the natural sonic environment and social structures when dolphins are held captive. It just might be that to take dolphins from the Solomon Islands and put them in a pen with other dolphins in Cancun, Mexico, or to take dolphins from Bocas del Toro and confine them with Pacific dolphins would be to put them into artificial social groups whose members have no common system of communication.

Ireland and the UK don't allow the capture of wild dolphins in their waters, so there won't be any comparative studies of Irish and Welsh dolphin languages as affected by captivity. But despite the absence of dolphin parks' marine dog tricks, the dolphin studies in the wild still add to a profitable tourism industry. Some 25,000 tourists take to the waters of the Shannon estuary in small boats every year to observe the dolphins and it's a growing niche in overall ecotourism. Evidence of a peculiar Irish dolphin "brogue" is likely to enhance the attraction.

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Do Irish dolphins have a brogue of their own?