It has been found by researchers that sperm whales communicate in local dialects. They looked at two clans of sperm whales, which are being observed in the Pacific since the 1980’s. The clans live in the same geographic area.

In the face of the fact that they are living in the same neighborhood, each clan of whales has come up with their own ‘dialects’ that consist of patterns of clicking sounds known as codas.

The discovery that appeared this week in Nature Communication suggested that culture may be there in the marine creatures. According to Dalhousie’s Mauricio Cantor, a PhD candidate in biology, culture in animal societies is a quite arguable topic.

Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the National Geographic Society, the Killam Trusts and the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) funded the work. Cantor and Whitehead worked in collaboration with the Galápagos National Park and started exploring the deep waters.

After the completion of the fieldwork, Cantor and his colleagues merged the collected data with earlier Whitehead Lab data that was gathered in the ’80s to create virtual whale populations using computer simulations.

According to Cantor, “We try to backtrack the patterns we observe in the wild to infer how the clan segregation could have evolved. The computer will simulate the life of several sperm whale populations that acquire codas in different ways over thousands of years”. He added they are seeing that which case could lead to clans with different dialects.Sperm-whales-different-dialects-click-social-clans.jpg