Organization of Communication System in Tursiops Truncatus Montagu

Parallels of human language in the behavior of bottlenose dolphins

“…1 across languages Mehri, Jamaati 2017;Yu et al 2018). Interestingly, patterning consistent with the law has been found in dolphin vocalizations (Markov, Ostrovskaya, 1990;McCowan et al 1999), suggesting at least some common communicative background between dolphins and certain languages.…”

“…Dolphins produce whistles, narrow band vocalizations that are rather easy to investigate compared to other kinds of vocalizations. The finding of patterning consistent with Zipf's law for word frequencies in dolphin whistles (McCowan et al 1999) and other dolphin vocalizations (Markov, Ostrovskaya 1990) is very suggestive: dolphins and we humans could be sharing similar principles of communication (Ferrer-i-Cancho, Solé 2003;. Zipf thought that the law revealed principles of the organization of vocabularies, in particular a conflict between speaker and hearer needs and in general a conflict between unification and diversification forces (Zipf 1949).…”

Linguistic laws in biology

“…At the organismal level, most work focuses on animal communication, with patterns predicted by this law (or Mandelbrot's modification) documented in the vocalisations of birds (e.g. [21,[38][39][40]) and of both terrestrial and marine mammals [41][42][43], as well as in primate gestural communication [20]. Beyond the organismal level, Zipf's rank-frequency law describes abundance distributions of both species and communities.…”

Bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) moan as low in frequency as baleen whales

“…In tonal sounds, these are features such as continuity ͑e.g., a tone breaking into units͒, frequency modulation ͑spectrographically visible as a "contour"͒, amplitude modulation ͑spectrographically visible as "sidebands"͒, or the shift in energy between harmonics ͑i.e., the fundamental frequency and its overtones͒. In addition, distinct sound types can ͑1͒ be sequentially patterned ͑e.g., in "songs" of mysticetes͒, ͑2͒ be simultaneously produced ͓in-dicating different sound production mechanisms ͑Lilly, 1962; Markov and Ostrovskaya, 1990͔͒, ͑3͒ merge into one another ͓e.g., pulsive into tonal sounds ͑Murray et al, 1998͒; burst pulsed sounds into echolocation clicks ͑Cranford, 2000͔͒, or ͑4͒ be fully emitted as intermediates ͓e.g., pulsed tones ͑Wat-kins, 1967b͔͒.…”