Dolphins in sentence

132 examples of Dolphins in a sentence

I've been working on whales and dolphins in Ireland for 20 years now, and they're a bit more dramatic.

And you always think you might have some legacy you can leave the world behind, and I was thinking of humpback whales breaching and dolphins.

Well, now we're going to the Bahamas to meet a remarkable group of dolphins that I've been working with in the wild for the last 28 years.

Now I'm interested in dolphins because of their large brains and what they might be doing with all that brainpower in the wild.

So decades ago, not years ago, I set out to find a place in the world where I could observe dolphins underwater to try to crack the code of their communication system.

Now in most parts of the world, the water's pretty murky, so it's very hard to observe animals underwater, but I found a community of dolphins that live in these beautiful, clear, shallow sandbanks of the Bahamas which are just east of Florida.

Now, Atlantic spotted dolphins are a really nice species to work with for a couple of reasons.

She's 35 years old in this shot, but dolphins can actually live into their early 50s.

And like all the dolphins in our community, we photographed Mugsy and tracked her little spots and nicks in her dorsal fin, and also the unique spot patterns as she matured over time.

Now, young dolphins learn a lot as they're growing up, and they use their teenage years to practice social skills, and at about the age of nine, the females become sexually mature, so they can get pregnant, and the males mature quite a bit later, at around 15 years of age.

And dolphins are very promiscuous, and so we have to determine who the fathers are, so we do paternity tests by collecting fecal material out of the water and extracting DNA.

Now, dolphins are natural acousticians.

So dolphins can buzz and tickle each other at a distance.

So dolphins are also political animals, so they have to resolve conflicts.

Now, in the Bahamas, we also have resident bottlenose that interact socially with the spotted dolphins.

(Dolphins noises) Now, these are bottlenose dolphins, and you'll see them starting to synchronize their behavior and their sounds.

Now, it's important to remember that you're only hearing the human-audible parts of dolphin sounds, and dolphins make ultrasonic sounds, and we use special equipment in the water to collect these sounds.

Now, scientists have used keyboard interfaces to try to bridge the gap with species including chimpanzees and dolphins.

This underwater keyboard in Orlando, Florida, at the Epcot Center, was actually the most sophisticated ever two-way interface designed for humans and dolphins to work together under the water and exchange information.

And one of the reasons we thought we could do this is because the dolphins were starting to show us a lot of mutual curiosity.

Now, dolphins are social mammals, so they love to play, and one of their favorite games is to drag seaweed, or sargassum in this case, around.

Now, when dolphins solicit humans for this game, they'll often sink vertically in the water, and they'll have a little sargassum on their flipper, and they'll sort of nudge it and drop it sometimes on the bottom and let us go get it, and then we'll have a little seaweed keep away game.

And so we started thinking, well, wouldn't it be neat to build some technology that would allow the dolphins to request these things in real time, their favorite toys?

So the original vision was to have a keyboard hanging from the boat attached to a computer, and the divers and dolphins would activate the keys on the keypad and happily exchange information and request toys from each other.

But we quickly found out that dolphins simply were not going to hang around the boat using a keyboard.

They're outside the dolphin's normal repertoire, but they're easily mimicked by the dolphins.

And I spent four years with my colleagues Adam Pack and Fabienne Delfour, working out in the field with this keyboard using it with each other to do requests for toys while the dolphins were watching.

And the dolphins could get in on the game.

I'm going to try to request this toy, the rope toy, from the dolphins using the rope sound.

Up come the dolphins, and drop off the rope, yay.

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