Dramatic news from the Scotsman:
Scientists have finally unravelled the meaning of squeaks and whistles that make up dolphin “speech”.
Excellent! And what have they found?
Dolphins were known to use “signature” whistles to identify themselves to others, but the meaning of the other whistles they make was a mystery.
Dr Hawkins recorded 1,647 whistles from 51 different groups of dolphins living in Byron Bay, New South Wales.
The biologist, who presented her work at a meeting of the Society for Marine Mammalogy in Cape Town, grouped all the whistles into five tonal classes and found that these groups, and even individual whistles, clearly went with different behaviours.
Dr Melinda Rekdahl, of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, said it was too early to know whether whistles might mean something specific, but added: “It is possible. Dolphin communication is much more complicated than we thought.”
This is clearly a technical use of the word “unravelled” with which I was unfamiliar.
Mick Hartley 
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