Dolphins have always amazed people with their intelligence and their ability to react almost human-like in different situations.

Some new studies have shown that mother dolphins use sound waves to make music for their babies in their wombs. Every dolphin has its signature sound that they use to communicate just like people have their names. During many observations, it was found out that mother dolphins make this special signature sound for their babies a couple of months before birth and some weeks after the birth.

There have been studies about this phenomenon before, but the new studies focused on how and if the wavelengths of the sound change before and after the birth of the baby dolphin. Audra Ames, a marine researcher from the University of Southern Mississippi reported some of her findings at the American Psychological Association conference as LiveScience says. Audra thinks that the mother dolphins do these things as a part of an imprinting process that helps the baby get accustomed to the mother’s signature sound. Human babies too grow close to their mother because they hear her voice from the womb while they’re in the last three months of the pregnancy. Audra thinks that there must be similarities between these two occurrences.

Audra Ames and her team made recordings worth around eighty hours of audio. They recorded dolphins in a tank in Six Flags Discovery Kingdom in California a couple of months before and after the babies were born. The dolphin they recorded was a nine-year-old female that gave birth to a calf which was named Mira.

What they discovered was that the sounds that the mother made were unique and grew in intensity around birth time, and later during the months after the birth they slowly calmed down. They also noticed that every other dolphin that was in the area tried to be quieter which is believed to be a conscious effort of them in order not to confuse the baby dolphin with other sounds that were not coming from its mother.

But after the birth, when the mom’s sounds started to normalize, the other dolphins returned to their normal whistles too. Also, the whistle of the mother was different from all the other dolphins’ whistles. Maybe the sound waves and frequencies are like a unique name for their baby dolphin, who knows.

Source: IFLScience