Bruck couldn’t do that unless he found a second way dolphins could identify each other. Luckily, he remembered that a fellow scientist had previously observed wild dolphins swimming through what the website called “plumes of urine” and he figured the creatures might be using it as an ID technique.“It was a shot in the dark,” Bruck said. “And I was not expecting it to work, to be honest.”But it did.Dolphins don’t have a sense of smell, so the way they would identify each other went like this: When one dolphin peed or pooped, the others would swim through the excretions with their mouths to get a big taste of their friend, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Company.“In other animals, it’s very difficult to separate the sense of smell from the sense of taste. So this is a really exciting opportunity to just study how taste works in this really unique way,” Bruck told the network.The researchers noticed the participating dolphins spent three times longer analyzing urine they recognized than pee from strangers.Bruck also noticed the dolphins seemed to be as fascinated with the experiment as he was.“The dolphins were very, very keen to participate,” Bruck told National Geographic. “Usually, dolphins get bored with my experiments. We were tapping into something that is part of the dolphins’ world.”
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