A dolphin dubbed Delle appears to be talking to himself in the Baltic Sea’s Svendborgsund channel off the coast of Denmark. According to a team of researchers that recorded Delle, the solitary dolphin may be so desperate for social connection that he’s thinking out loud.
The researchers aren’t entirely sure why the animal produced “sounds typically considered communicative,” as they note in research
published last month in
Bioacoustics. But that makes Delle’s situation all the more compelling. Dolphins are very social animals, and chatter in a diverse array of clicks, squeaks, and other sounds. In lieu of other dolphins, Delle resorted to what the researchers call “self-talk.”