Every person you know has a name, and you've likely given one to your pets, too. But are names a uniquely human feature, or do other animals also call each other by name?
Research suggests that some mammals and birds use vocal labels for other individuals, but not all scientists agree on how to interpret the evidence.
In the 1960s, scientists discovered that young bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops) create individually distinctive whistles, called signature whistles. Researchers in the years since have conducted experiments in which they played the whistles through an underwater speaker and observed how the dolphins responded. Dolphins copy the signature whistles of other dolphins to initiate contact, similarly to how we use names, and can recognize other individual dolphins based on the frequency and "shape" of the whistle, regardless of the voice of the dolphin whistling.
Dolphins do seem to assign these whistles to other indiv...
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