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Dolphins are in a position to recognise each other by the taste of their urine, a study has discovered.
Researchers on the University of St Andrews have found that the mammals can recognise family and friends members with out seeing or listening to them.
This distinctive sense of taste permits dolphins to inform between their friends via their urine and other excretions.
In order to search out this out, Prof Vincent Janik, director of the Scottish Oceans Institute, and his colleagues Jason Bruck and Sam Walmsley examined how dolphins reacted to urine samples from totally different people.
According to the study printed within the journal Science Advances, the ocean creatures had been way more occupied with urine from animals they recognised than ones they didn’t know.
Janik, the lead writer, stated: “Dolphins explored urine samples for longer if they came from known animals or when they were presented together with the dolphin’s unique and distinctive signature whistle, an acoustic identifier that works like a name.”
The dolphins within the study had been from the Dolphin Quest resorts in Hawaii and Bermuda, the place their “day job” is swimming with vacationers.
They dwell in pure seawater in their social teams so had been excellent to study. By coaching animals to provide urine samples when wanted, the scientists had been in a position to create a set that was used throughout amenities to current recognized and novel tastes to dolphins.
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Due to this discovering, the researchers consider dolphins have a special expertise of taste to other mammals.
Janik added: “We still know very little about how the sense of taste works in dolphins. Other studies have shown that they lost a lot of the common tastes that we find in other mammals such as sour, sweet, umami or bitter. But they have unusual sensory cells on their tongue that are probably involved in this detection of individual tastes of other animals.”
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