Dolphin communication: past, present and future research directions

The idea that dolphins communicate with a complex form of language has been entrenched in our culture since the days of the TV show “Flipper.” I will discuss how this idea originated, and its continuing impact, bygiving a brief history of the study of dolphin communication. I will then discuss our current state of knowledge, including examples of recent research, focusing particularly on structure and function of individually distinctive signature whistles and less well-understood non-signature whistles. I will describe current avenues of research, including playback experiments, tag studies, and a project usingacoustic monitoring to develop an alert system for dolphin massstranding events. I will also discuss future directions including the use of artificial intelligence to detect and classify whistles.