A lone dolphin has been yelling into Baltic Sea for years

A solitary dolphin swimming off Denmark’s frigid coast is chirping and yelling into the vast nothingness, and no one is responding. The 17-year-old bottlenose Dolphin, which locals named “Delle,” was first spotted roaming the Svendborgsund channel around five years ago. That’s odd because the area is far outside the region dolphins normally traverse. Odder still, Delle appeared all on his own, a rarity for a highly social species that almost always travels in pods. 

Marine biologists from the University of Southern Denmark heard about Delle and noticed a unique opportunity to listen to sounds made by an isolated dolphin in the wild. When they dropped a microphone in the area where Delle traveled for several months, they expected to hear few, if any sounds. They were shocked by what they found. 

“Contrary to our expectations, we found that the solitary dolphin was highly vocal,” the researchers wrote in a paper published in the journal Bioacoustics last month. 

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