The bottlenosed dolphin's (Tursiops truncatus) understanding of gestures as symbolic representations of its body parts

We assigned gestural symbols to nine body parts of a bottlenosed dolphin (T ursiops truncatus). The dolphin was first trained to touch any floating obj ect it chose with the body part indicated by a gestural symbol. In Experime nt 1, we tested the dolphin's ability to now touch specific gesturally refe renced objects using specific gesturally referenced body parts. In Experime nt 2, we tested its ability to either touch or toss gesturally referenced o bjects with gesturally referenced body parts or to simply display those bod y parts or shake them back and forth. The acts of touching, tossing, displa ying, and shaking were each associated with specific gestures and appeared in random sequences within test sessions. The results demonstrated highly s ignificant levels of performance throughout these tasks, including many suc cesses on the first occasions of new body-part uses. These findings provide d strong evidence that the gestural symbols we used for body parts were sem antically processed and understood by the dolphin as representing those bod y parts.