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Dolphin cell phone

A cell phone suitable for dolphin-to-dolphin communications
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The invention of telephone has revolutionized the way we work. Dolphins had been witnessed inventing various ingenious collective hunting strategies, such as mud-ring feeding techniques, and had been shown to have abilities to understand TV, and what not.

Their brain has been shown to have bias towards processing of sound rather than vision, recent observations are suggesting that they might have a complex language. So, here is an interesting way to check the hypothesis:

Make a communication device based on radio waves, that converts their ultrasound into radiowaves, and the received radio signals from another dolphin(s) into ultrasound waves, effectively providing a duplex communications over the distances much larger than their ultrasound can cover, and watch how would they utilize this new communication technology.

Inyuki, Apr 16 2010

pnas.org http://www.pnas.org...nt/103/21/8293.full
"This study demonstrates that bottlenose dolphins extract identity information from signature whistles even after all voice features have been removed from the signal." [Inyuki, Apr 16 2010]

wikipedia.org http://en.wikipedia...tacean_intelligence
"The dolphin's neural area devoted to visual imaging is only about one-tenth that of the human brain, while the area devoted to acoustical imaging is about 10 times that of the human brain." [Inyuki, Apr 17 2010]


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Annotation:







       This idea is leading up to a chat-roulette for dolphins, isn't it?
swimswim, Apr 16 2010
  

       Possibly a dolphin could use ultrasound commands to control the phone, and to dial specifically.
Inyuki, Apr 16 2010
  

       If dolphins can individually identify each other by recognizing vocal patterns, then that's intriguingly bakable.
swimswim, Apr 16 2010
  

       Would the dolphins pay for these phone contracts with cuttlefish? [+]
Aristotle, Apr 16 2010
  

       What next ? Dolphin Neighbourhood Watch ?
8th of 7, Apr 16 2010
  

       "aerial".
FlyingToaster, Apr 17 2010
  

       And probably some cell phone makers could be interested in bolstering a brand name by supporting such kind of research.
Inyuki, Apr 17 2010
  

       We use telephones to contact only those people we wish to speak to. How would dolphins do that? It's not beyond belief that dolphins could comprehend a long distance communication device, I just can't think of a way for them to use it deliberately. Maybe you should just conference call a group (or is it a pod or school?) of dolphins.
wagster, Apr 17 2010
  

       [21_Quest] Very finny.
mouseposture, Apr 17 2010
  

       Would their active efforts to share the same ideas which they normally share through pointing, touching and body movements result in new abstractions in their language?
Inyuki, Apr 17 2010
  

       Interesting idea, but I don't think we really know how dolphins use the way that sound travels through water to communicate. If they devote that much of their brains to sound, they may use aural cues in their language that would be completely lost when using speakers.
nomocrow, Apr 18 2010
  

       I picture a sophisticated alien race strapping some machine on to people in a way we cannot detect or understand that gives us new abilities we don't understand to see if we have the intelligence to use them
Voice, Apr 18 2010
  

       This idea should be tried with other animals as well.
VJW, Jun 15 2011
  

       I can see that dolphins might enjoy using cellphones, but I think that the dolphins might get easily bored of playing with other animals.
pocmloc, Jun 15 2011
  

       Giving advanced technology to creatures that may well be as smart as us and are only held back by their lack of opposable thumbs and realization that pandering to us by performing simple tricks results in being hand-fed tasty fish. Great. Next, somebody will be proposing flipper-operated firearms, "just to see what happens."
Alterother, Jun 15 2011
  

       Ah, not a reference to the Dolphin browser.
LoriZ, Feb 27 2012
  


 

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