Whales’ Learned Accents

Sperm whales have the biggest brains of all animals—as well as the loudest vocal call—and they are extremely social animals. Females and their young form distinctive clans, and the vocal clicks (called “coda”) they use to communicate with one another varies from clan to clan. In fact, these clans have their own dialect regardless of how close or far apart they live from one another.

Scientists wondered how these differences in dialect emerge. Are they genetic, random, or learned? Using 18 years of recorded vocalizations and data characterizing social interactions among sperm whales living near the Galápagos Islands, researchers used a highly developed computer modeling system, called agent-based modeling, to simulate interactions between individual whales to see how these different coda are created.

The team discovered that sperm whales preferentially learn the vocalizations of other whales that behave similarly to them. Importantly, this type of “cultural transmission via social learning” seems to be the key in dividing the whales into separate clans. In fact, other than the mothers and their young, these clans often consist of unrelated whales.

This type of study could also help us understand other animals’ behavior, the scientists say, publishing their results today in Nature Communications. “Providing evidence that the processes generating the complex and diverse cultures in human populations could also be at play in non-human societies is a crucial step towards evaluating the contrasts and convergences between human and non-human cultures,” they write.

Image: Gabriel Barathieu/Réunion Underwater Photography