Dolphins can be recognized by the taste of their urine, a study found.
Researchers at the University of St. Andrews have found that mammals can recognize friends and family members without seeing or hearing them.
This unique sense of taste allows dolphins to recognize their peers through urine and other excretions.
To understand this, Professor Vincent Yannick, director of the Scottish Ocean Institute, and his colleagues Jason Brook and Sam Walmsley tested how dolphins respond to urine samples from different individuals.
According to a study published in the journal Science Advances, sea creatures were much more interested in the urine of animals they recognized than those they did not know.
Yannick, lead author, said: “Dolphins studied urine samples for longer if they came from famous animals or when they were presented with the dolphin’s unique and distinctive whistle, an acoustic identifier that works as a name.
The dolphins in the study are from the resorts of Dolphin Quest in Hawaii and Bermuda, where their “day job” is swimming with tourists.
They live in natural seawater in their social groups, so they are ideal for studying. By training animals to give urine samples when needed, the scientists were able to create a collection that is used in various facilities to present known and new flavors of dolphins.
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Because of this finding, researchers believe that dolphins have a different taste than other mammals.
Yannick added: “We still know very little about how dolphins taste. Other studies have shown that they have lost many of the usual tastes 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 detecting the individual tastes of other animals.
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