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LONDON – Two dolphins have been recorded for the first time having a conversation, after scientists developed an underwater microphone which could distinguish the animals’ different “voices.”

Researchers have known for decades that the mammals have an advanced form of communication, using distinctive clicks and whistles to show they are excited, happy, stressed or separated from the group.

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But they have now shown that dolphins alter the volume and pitch of pulsed clicks to form individual “words” which they string together into sentences in much the same way as humans speak.

Researchers at the Karadag Nature Reserve, in Feodosia, Russia, recorded two Black Sea bottlenose dolphins, Yasha and Yana, talking to each other in a pool. They found that each dolphin would listen to a sentence of pulses without interruption, before replying.

This language exhibits all the design features present in the human spoken language. This indicates a high level of intelligence and consciousness in dolphins, and their language can be ostensibly considered a highly developed spoken language

Vyacheslav Ryabov, the lead researcher, said: “Essentially, this exchange resembles a conversation between two people. Each pulse that is produced by dolphins is different from another by its appearance in the time domain and by the set of spectral components in the frequency domain.