[cetalingua]

It is not easy, we have not yet cracked the code, plus will they even have the motivation or any interest to communicate with us?

What we do know is that they produce a variety of signals, some very complex and their communication is super fast, which is another obstacle for possible "communication". For example, we cannot generate a burst pulse with our current technology, we can only record theirs and play it back.

But many research groups are trying. We are starting Dolphin Chat citizen science project on Zooniverse in a month or so, to classify and prepare a large dataset of bottlenose dolphins' vocalizations for out deep learning model. You can check it out and even participate, it will definitely help to appreciate how complex their vocal repertoire is (and how "chatty" they are).

[andi999]

What do you actually mean by 'we cannot generate a burst pulse with our current technology'? What is the obstacle?

[cetalingua]

The obstacle is that we still do not fully understand nor are able to replicate their sonar, even the Navy that has been studying dolphins for decades still cannot duplicate biosonar (read more here: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2019/5/140328-navy-d...)

The burst pulse is extremely complex, some can have 400 single clicks in one pulse (our ear cannot even hear these single pulses, they merge and for our human ear it sounds like a creaky door), and the pulse duration is like a few seconds. Each click is broadband (can go up to 100 kHz and beyond), it is frequency modulated with varied peak frequencies, center frequencies, RMS, some clicks can have 2 peaks, etc. It is super fast and super complex, we we cannot just generate one, only dolphin's sound producing mechanism can.

[mrfusion]

Really cool. Do you have a link?

[cetalingua]

https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/cetalingua/dolphin-chat

It is not active yet, it will be in a month or so. You can also sign up for our newsletter here: cetalingua.com , we will send notification when this project goes live.