You kids and your slang these days, I can barely understand you!
Whales and monkeys have been shown to have more of a
"culture" than previously imagined. New research may have just added a huge feather in
whale culture's cap. Sperm whales live in tightly knit and very chatty clans:
The study was led from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada. It investigated sperm whales swimming off the Galapagos Islands in the eastern Pacific.
Two frequently observed clans were seen using distinct click repertoires, or codas.
"These codas sound like Morse code - patterns of three to 12 or 15 clicks that vary in rhythm and tempo," explained PhD student Maurício Cantor.
"In one clan we call the 'regular clan', we heard regularly spaced clicks, but in another vocal clan that we call the 'plus-ones', the coda types they make have an extended pause at the end before the last click."
The two clans of whales have different ways of handling themselves and the tasks their clan perform (i.e. child care). However, the differences in dialect is not the same as birds separated by geography, it's not a matter of being isolated from other clans:
The different codas cannot be driven by geographical separation - as sometimes seen in song birds - because the whales' great ranges mean clans will always encounter one another. Furthermore, the level of sophistication in the repertoires hinted strongly at the idea that the codas are learned, stressed Prof Whitehead.
"Having spent a lot of time out there with them, it's become clear to me that in many ways sperm whales are even more social than us," he said.
"They have little permanent in their environment except each other. They depend on each other for all kinds of things. You can see it - they touch each other a lot; they nuzzle. And being vocal creatures, it's not surprising they use sounds a lot.
Scientists believe that the importance of the talking amongst whales is social more than informative, they test things out with their bodies but interact with sounds all of the time.
Fascinating.