A dolphin living alone in the Firth of Clyde has learned to communicate with local harbour porpoises, an expert believes.
The short-beaked common dolphin, nicknamed Kylie by locals, has made his home around a navigational buoy between Fairlie and the Isle of Cumbrae, after he is thought to have got lost from his group.
The area is not commonly visited by dolphins and Kylie has mostly been exposed to sounds produced by other species, particularly the harbour porpoise.
University of Strathclyde PhD research student Mel Cosentino has been studying underwater audio recordings and found the dolphin has learned to increase the frequency of the clicking sounds made to navigate and hunt to match the porpoises.
Common dolphins have peak frequencies below 100 kilohertz (KHz) while for harbour porpoises it is around 130KHz.
Recordings made by volunteers from the Clyde Porpoise group using two towed underwater microphones found Kylie now regularly produces clicks with peak frequencies reaching over 130KHz when accompanied by harbour porpoises.
Ms Cosentino said: “Several cetacean species, such as bottlenose dolphins, belugas and killer whales, have the ability to change their acoustic repertoire as a result of interactions with other species.
“This vocal learning ability has mainly been observed in captive individuals and few cases have been reported for wild cetaceans.”
Ms Cosentino aims to gather and analyse more recordings of the dolphin to verify her findings.
She said: “If further analysis shows this to be the case, it would be the first time a common dolphin, either in captivity or the wild, has demonstrated an ability for production learning, where it has learned to imitate another species.”
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here