Dr. Denise Herzing has spent 40 years in The Bahamas studying how dolphins communicate. She records their clicks, whistles, and burst pulses, then matches those sounds to underwater video of their behavior. The goal is understanding what these vocalizations actually do. Are dolphins just expressing emotions in the moment, or are they labeling specific things in their environment?
The distinction matters because it separates two fundamentally different types of communication. A dolphin screaming during a fight is one thing. A vervet monkey's alarm call for a specific predator is something else entirely. One is emotional noise. The other is actionable information. Dr. Herzing explains this difference as referential versus graded communication, and after four decades of fieldwork, she's still working to determine which category dolphin sounds fall into.
The question has implications beyond marine biology. Understanding the difference between these two communication systems might change how you think about talking to your members.
Animal communication researchers distinguish between two systems: referential and graded.
Referential communication labels specific objects or threats. Vervet monkeys have different alarm calls for a leopard versus an eagle versus a snake. Each call refers to something concrete, allowing the group to respond appropriately. See a leopard, look down and climb up. Hear an eagle call, look up and take cover.
Graded communication expresses current emotional states. When vervet monkeys fight, they scream and scratch each other. That's emotional expression happening in the moment. The intensity might vary, the volume might change, but the sounds don't label anything specific. They just broadcast how the animal feels right now.
The distinction seems simple, but it reveals differences in communication sophistication. One system lets you talk about the world around you. The other just announces your internal state.
We rely on both referential and graded communication constantly, often simultaneously. You're reading words right now. That's referential communication. These words label concepts, objects, and ideas we've agreed to associate with specific sound patterns or written symbols.
But communication carries more than dictionary definitions. If someone tells you a story in person, you pick up on their excitement or frustration through volume, pace, hand gestures, facial expressions. That's the graded system running parallel to the referential one. The words convey specific meaning. The delivery conveys emotional state.
Both matter. Both serve functions. A parent might say "stop" in a calm voice during a game or shout it when a child runs toward traffic. Same word, different emotional intensity, completely different context. The referential part stays constant. The graded part shifts.
Dr. Herzing used herself as an example during our podcast interview. She uses words to explain dolphin communication, but she also gets excited, waves her hands, and her voice gets louder when discussing something that fascinates her. Humans bundle both systems together naturally.
Labels evolved because they solve practical problems. If you're a prairie dog and a coyote approaches, you need your colony to respond differently than if a hawk appears overhead. Prairie dogs have distinct alarm calls for ground predators versus aerial threats. That specificity saves lives.
Dr. Herzing offered a human analogy. If she yelled "look out," you'd respond with confusion. Look where? Look at what? But if she yelled "asteroid," you'd look up. The specific label tells you where to direct your attention and how to react. You can't respond appropriately to a vague warning, but you can respond to a specific one.
This makes evolutionary sense. Community animals that live in groups need to coordinate responses to threats. Graded communication tells the group something bad is happening, which creates generalized alarm. Referential communication tells the group what specifically is happening, which enables targeted response.
The animals that developed labels for specific predators gained survival advantages. Their offspring inherited those vocal patterns. Over generations, the labels became part of the species' communication toolkit. We see this in vervet monkeys, prairie dogs, and other social animals. The pattern appears across different branches of the evolutionary tree because labeling things works.
Dr. Herzing suspects dolphins might have referential communication, possibly even something approaching language. Several factors point in that direction:
They're long-lived social mammals with complex relationships. They maintain friendships, raise offspring over years, cooperate with neighbors, and sometimes compete with rivals. They have cultures that differ across populations.
Their environment rewards specific information. If you're swimming in deep water with your pod and a shark appears, it would be genuinely useful to label it as a dangerous tiger shark versus a harmless nurse shark. That distinction affects whether you flee, ignore it, or defend yourself.
They had resources to spare. The species Dr. Herzing studies had reliable year-round food sources, providing leisure time similar to how productive environments gave some human cultures time to develop complex traditions and knowledge systems.
Dr. Herzing frames language as "kind of the last bastion of intelligence" in how we think about animal cognition. Scientists have demonstrated that animals use tools, understand abstract concepts, and can plan and problem-solve. But language remains this special category we've been hesitant to attribute to non-human species.
Part of the hesitation comes from limited tools for detection. We might not have had the technology to properly examine whether animals have referential communication until recently. AI and machine learning now offer ways to detect patterns in vocalizations that human researchers couldn't spot through manual analysis. DolphinGemma might reveal structure in dolphin sounds that indicates labeling and reference rather than just emotional expression.
The question remains open. Dr. Herzing has decades of data still to analyze. But the possibility that dolphins have moved beyond graded communication into referential territory has profound implications for how we understand intelligence, society, and what communication can accomplish.
Look at your member communications from the past month. Emails, social media posts, newsletters, announcements. How much of it functions as graded communication versus referential?
Graded examples:
Referential examples:
Members can't act on graded communication alone. Urgency without specifics creates anxiety, not action. Excitement without details generates curiosity that goes nowhere. Concern without reference to what you're concerned about just spreads vague worry.
They need referential communication. They need the equivalent of "tiger shark" not just "danger." They need specific labels, clear direction, and information they can use to make decisions about past performance, current options, and future plans.
This doesn't mean eliminating emotion from communications. The graded system serves a function. Enthusiasm signals that something matters. Urgency indicates priority. But emotion needs to accompany substance, not replace it. The vervet monkey screaming during a fight is expressing something real, but it's not giving the group actionable intelligence. The alarm call for a leopard does both: it conveys urgency AND identifies the specific threat.
Your members face complex professional environments. Industry changes, regulatory shifts, technology disruptions, demographic transitions. They need communications that help them understand specifically what's happening, what changed from before, what it means for their work, and what actions they might take.
Dr. Herzing has spent decades trying to determine if dolphins have labels and words, not just emotional calls. The question matters because labels represent a different level of communication sophistication. Labels mean the ability to teach, plan, coordinate, and share knowledge across time and distance. Labels mean culture that can be preserved and transmitted.
As associations, you send plenty of messages. The question is what type of communication you're providing. Are you giving members referential intelligence they can use, or just graded emotional signals about importance and urgency?
The dolphins might be having sophisticated conversations Dr. Herzing hasn't decoded yet. But she has the data, the technology, and the patience to find out. Your members are definitely trying to have sophisticated conversations about their professional challenges. The question is whether your communications give them the referential tools to do it effectively.