Do Dolphins Have Conversations? We Still Can’t Say

Sure, dolphins use sonar, whiz through the ocean at incredible speeds, and battle sharks. But can they chat? Last week, a study published in Russia’s St. Petersburg Polytechnical University Journal: Physics and Mathematics claimed to have recorded two dolphins doing just that. Two Black Sea bottlenose dolphins, named Yasha and Yana, exchanged a series of vocal pulses that resembled “a conversation between two people,” wrote the study’s author, Vyacheslav Ryabov, a senior researcher at the T. I. Vyazemsky Karadag Scientific Station. What’s more, Yana and Yasha were exceedingly polite, listening to one another at turns without interrupting.

“As this language exhibits all the design features present in the human spoken language, this indicates a high level of intelligence and consciousness in dolphins, and their language can