Washington, Sept 01 (ANI): Florida researchers are hoping to develop a common language with dolphins that may help us talk to extraterrestrials.
For 27 years, marine biologist Denise Herzing and colleagues have been regular visitors in the Atlantic Ocean home of a 200-member pod of spotted dolphins living north of the Bahama Islands.
Two-way communication with dolphins has been attempted various times over the years, but never with a group of animals in the wild.
The research has implications in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, with the dolphins standing in as a sort of E.T. analogue.
"The idea is 'how do you recognize intelligence?' That's why people test dolphins and primates in captivity, to try to measure their cognitive skills, their abilities, how they use their minds," the Discovery News quoted Herzing, a researcher with Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton and the founder and head of the Wild Dolphin Project, as saying.
"If you ever got to some place (with a non-technological but potentially intelligent species), how would you recognize it and how might you establish some communicative repertoire?" she said.
"There's a lot of species on this planet that we can probably learn from as models," she added.
Herzing is continuing to refine the technology for two-way communication with dolphins.
The prototype used an underwater keyboard and props such as balls and scarves that were labelled with symbols and paired with a whistle sound the dolphins could replicate. (ANI)
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