Question: You study the ocean right? So...do dolphins and whales use the same type of sounds to communicate? And do they sometimes get mixed up?

Hayley Evers-King answered on 12 Mar 2013:

I usually work with things that are much smaller than whales and dolphins, but I’ll have a go at an answer for you 🙂 Dolphins and whales use similar ways to communicate. But dolphins use sounds at a higher frequency than whales, who use lower frequencies which can travel a much greater distance. They can both hear sounds in a similar range, but their calls are very characteristic (it’s recently been suggested that dolphins even refer to each other by name), so I imagine they don’t get each other mixed up too often.