New research suggests that dolphins have a unique sense of taste that allows them to sense friends and family members through pee and other excretions, according to The Guardian.
Researchers at the University of St Andrews have discovered that the mammals can recognize friends and family members without seeing or hearing them. They believed it was the dolphins’ unique sense of taste allows them to tell between their peers through their urine and other excretions.
To prove it, Prof. Vincent Janik, director of the Scottish Oceans Institute, and his colleagues Jason Bruck and Sam Walmsley tested how dolphins reacted to urine samples from different individuals.
According to the study published in the journal Science Advances, the sea creatures were far more interested in urine from animals they recognized than ones they did not know.
Due to this finding, the researchers believe dolphins have a different experience of taste to other mammals.
Janik added: “We still know very little about how the sense of taste works in dolphins. Other studies have shown that they lost a lot of the common tastes that we find in other mammals such as sour, sweet, umami or bitter. But they have unusual sensory cells on their tongue that are probably involved in this detection of individual tastes of other animals.”