It has long been a staple for human fetus growth that music and singing is of huge benefit to the unborn child. Now, human mothers regularly sing to their children in the womb and even place headphones over their bellies to pipe in some Mozart or Adele to their child. Recent research done at the University of Southern Mississippi has also discovered that dolphin moms, too, sing to their children while they are still in the womb. Dolphins and whales, of course, are two of the most intelligent creatures on Earth. There is a school of thought, or two, that declare that these species are even more intelligent than humans. There seems times when that is hard to argue with.
There are individual sounds and “whistles” that dolphins make that are unique to the individual. Like a human voice with a human child, the dolphin mother makes sure that her unborn calf knows that whistle long before they are born. The research found that the mothers begin their individual whistles as the calf is conceived and sing to it more frequently in the first two weeks of the calf’s development.
Doctoral student, Audra Ames, and her team, took the opportunity to truly research and record the mothers speech over a specified period of time. This had not been done before in dolphin studies. Ames went and studied a mother and her newborn at Six Flags in Vallejo, California for nearly two years.
In all, the team captured more than 80 hours of audio from the mother beginning two months prior to the birth and for two months following the birth of her baby. The signature whistling sound began to accelerate two weeks before birth and for two weeks there after. The researchers were unsure if it was just getting the baby use to its mother’s voice or if the mother was actually teaching the baby dolphin language.
“We actually do see,” Ames said, “that human babies develop a preference for their mother’s voice in their last trimester. We don’t know if that’s something going on here but it could be something similar.”
Ames and her team noticed that for the first two weeks after the dolphin baby was born, the mother increased the frequency with which she called to her calf. Noticeably, the other dolphins didn’t talk much during this two week period. After the two weeks, all of the dolphins seemed to return to their regular societal rhythms and frequencies of speech. The team also noted that a newborn dolphin takes about two months to develop its own voice or signature whistle.
PHOTO CREDIT: Pixabay