[LINK] "Deciphering Beluga Whales’ Bubble Language"
Kiona Smith-Strickland's D-Brief post looking at research into the meaning of the bubbles blown by belugas appeals to me. I like belugas a lot--the above is a photo I took at Marineland of one in 2007. That perhaps this same animal, this canaries of the sea, was a subject in the research project in question is just fantastic.
Whales and dolphins have a wide repertoire of ways to communicate with each other, from complex vocalizations to body language and even blowing bubbles.
And after watching 44 captive belugas for the past eight years at Marineland of Canada, in Ontario, animal behavior researchers Elizabeth George and Michael Noonan say they’ve begun to decode belugas’ bubble language. They believe beluga whales blow bubbles that correspond to specific states of mind. Their observations raise some new questions about beluga whales’ social lives.
Belugas, George and Noonan say, blow bubbles in four distinct flavors: blowhole drips, blowhole bursts, blowhole streams and mouth rings. A shimmering bubble ring or a handful of little bubbles slowly released from the whale’s blowhole, for example, usually indicates a playful attitude, while large, sudden bursts of bubbles seem to be a warning or a defensive reaction to something startling.
It’s impossible to say for certain what is going through a whale’s mind, of course, but researchers can draw some conclusions about what a behavior means based on when it happens. Researchers are careful not to anthropomorphize, or assign human emotions to animal behavior.
And the findings come with another important caveat: George and Noonan were observing belugas in captivity, not in their natural habitat. Animals in artificial environments may behave very differently than they would in the wild, so researchers have to take observations like these with a proverbial grain of salt.
The trouble is that it’s difficult to study belugas in the wild, so nearly all research on beluga bubble-blowing so far has been conducted in captivity. George and Noonan’s findings match other researchers’ observations of captive whales. They presented their findings at the annual conference of the Animal Behavior Society in July, and a more detailed paper is currently under review for publication in the journal Aquatic Mammals.