Dolphins Recorded Having a Conversation For The First Time (telegraph.co.uk)

For the first time Russian researchers have recorded a conversation between two dolphins -- Yasha and Yana -- who were talking to each other in a pool. An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes The Telegraph: Scientists developed an underwater microphone which could distinguish the animals' different "voices" [and] have now shown that dolphins alter the volume and frequency of pulsed clicks to form individual "words" which they string together into sentences in much the same way that humans speak...

"This language exhibits all the design features present in the human spoken language, this indicates a high level of intelligence and consciousness in dolphins, and their language can be ostensibly considered a highly developed spoken language, akin to the human language... Humans must take the first step to establish relationships with the first intelligent inhabitants of the planet Earth by creating devices capable of overcoming the barriers that stand in the way of using languages and in the way of communications between dolphins and people."
The dolphins listened to an entire "sentence" before replying, according to the article, which points out that dolphin brains are larger and more complex than the brains of humans.

Comments

Dogs too.

[pubwvj]

There are a lot of language using animals which are not yet recognized. Humanity is just getting to the point of seeing that there are other intelligences here on Earth.

We have livestock working dogs. They exhibit a lot of language and string up to six words together, use adjectives and have names for each other, us and objects. We have about 300 words we use with them, both from us to them and them to us as well as what they use to each other. It is clear they have a lot more words they use with each other that I don't understand so their language is considerably more extensive than the smattering of pidgin we share.

Realize I'm not talking about Fluffy, a typical domesticated dog that was raised as a singleton isolated from other dog culture. These are livestock large working dogs that are far closer to their wolf ancestors and they grow up in a culturally rich environment of a many generational pack on our farm. They work for a living and know hundreds of individual livestock animals that they tend to on the farm.

Re:More complex?

[Immerman]

Actually, not really. Among most species bigger brains = bigger neurons, so that the number of neurons increases far more slowly than you would expect. One of the major evolutionary leaps among primates was that neuron size remains relatively constant across species, so that larger primates have dramatically more neurons than their smaller cousins.

Which is largely responsible for the fact that, despite the fact that dolphins have larger brains than us, they have only ~20 blllion neurons, compared to our ~100 billion.