They're widely considered some of the most charismatic animals in the ocean. Now, it turns out bottlenose dolphins actually'smile' at each other while surfing, chasing and playfighting, according to a new study. Until now, little has been known about how the species - famed for their intelligence and playfulness - interact during playtime. But experts have finally revealed that these dolphins use the'open mouth' facial expression – comparable to a smile – to communicate during social play. The dolphins almost always use the facial expression when they are in their playmate's field of view, the researchers found, and playmates responded by'smiling' back a third of the time.

Dolphins are among the most playful and social animals on Earth, yet we don't know much about how they communicate during games and other more light interactions. New research of captive bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncates) indicates that they use an "open mouth" facial expression similar to a smile to communicate during social play. This expression was most consistently used when a dolphin is in their playmate's field of view and some respond with a similar expression. The findings are detailed in a study published October 2 in the Cell Press journal iScience. For dolphins, play can include acrobatics, surfing, playing with objects, chasing, and playfighting.

An armature drone photographer captured stunning footage of a dolphin pod swimming through the crystal-blue waters off the coast of Florida. Local restaurant owner Paul Dabill, 48, filmed approximately 50 dolphins while'looking for life to film' around Jupiter last week. The mesmerizing video shows the marine animals diving in and out of the sea and playing keep-away with a strand of sargassum seaweed. Dabill said he spent 30 minutes filing the pod, one of the largest he had seen. The clip was captured on January 18, when the skies were clear and the ocean was blue.

Stranded dolphins have been discovered with brain changes associated with Alzheimer's disease in humans. Researchers from the University of Glasgow studied the brains of 22 odontocetes - toothed whales - thathad died in coastal waters off Scotland. One bottlenose dolphin, one white-beaked dolphin and two long-finned pilot whales had accumulated amyloid-beta plaques, which is a hallmark of dementia. The researchers say these ill creatures could have led their otherwise healthy group, or pod, into shallow waters by mistake after getting confused or lost. Whales, dolphins and porpoises are regularly found stranded in shallow waters or beaches around the UK coastline, and often in pods.

Animals communicating with each other might seem simplistic at first glance. Compared to human communication, animals do not appear to be using any particular language but merely noises to communicate with each other. Several noises that animals make are less of a conversation in the present, and more of a call for predicting natural changes such as rain, water, or signals for food some distance away. When it comes to artificial intelligence, plenty of progress has been made in the development of AGI using machine learning and neural networks on animals and through the understanding of animal behaviour. However, understanding the language of animals and communicating with them is one of the longest-running fields of study in technology and biological sciences alike.

Here we review them with the help of quantitative linguistics and information theory.

New research suggests dolphins are even smarter than first thought and can coordinate their behaviour with one another with'extreme precision'. In a new experiment, bottlenose dolphins had to press an underwater button at the same time as their partner. Scientists found they could synchronise their actions almost perfectly. The marine mammals were working so closely they pressed the button within an average of 370 milliseconds of their partner doing the same. Pictured is a triple synchronous dive by a trio of male bottlenose dolphins.

Dolphins are known to be highly intelligent creatures, and have even been found to construct'sentences' from patterns of clicks and pulses to communicate with each other. And, using artificial intelligence, researchers are now hoping to figure out what they're talking about. Researchers in Sweden are set to begin creating a dolphin-language dictionary using technology from language-analysis startup Gavagai AB – and, it could one day allow humans to communicate with the animals. The program launched by researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Gavagai AB plan to monitor captive bottlenose dolphins at a wildlife park. The language-analysis software has already proven capable in 40 human languages. And, it's hoped that the artificial intelligence system can similarly decode the dolphins' 'dictionary.'

"Researchers photograph dolphins in their natural surroundings and compare new dorsal fin photographs against a catalogue of previously identified dolphins," explains Kelly Debure, professor of computer science at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida. "These catalogs are often organized into categories based on either distinct fin shape or location of predominant damage. The manual photo-identification process, although effective, is extremely time consuming and visually stressful, particularly with large collections of known dolphins." It was time to bring dolphin identification into the digital age. Debure, along with Eckerd students, developed DARWIN, or Digital Analysis and Recognition of Whale Images on a Network, a computer program that simplifies photo-identification of bottlenose dolphins by applying computer vision and signal processing techniques to automate much of the tedious manual photo-id process.

If one is looking for signals from an extraterrestrial civilization, why not practice on some of the non-human communication systems already known on our own planet? Whales have had a global communication system for millions of years--longer than Homo sapiens has even existed. Bees, which communicate in part by dancing, had democratic debates about the best places to swarm millions of years before humans came up with democracy as a political system. No person I know of who has studied another animal's communication system has ever concluded that the species was dumber than they'd previously thought. Through the study of animal communication, my colleagues and I have developed a new kind of detector, a "communication intelligence" filter, to determine whether a signal from space is from a technologically advanced civilization or not.