Ahoy y’all: Sperm whale clans communicate in different, distinct dialects

SEPTEMBER 9, 2015

by Cat Wilson

The Encyclopedia Britannica defines dialect as, “[A] variety of a language that signals where a person comes from.” It also notes that class and occupation may contribute to dialects. Dialects show up in some interesting places, such as in American Sign Language (ASL), as catalogued by Ethnologue, a compendium of languages. And now, another notable variation has been discovered in a group of sperm whales around the Galapagos Islands. According to National Geographic, this group--consisting of thousands of female sperm whales and their calves--has sorted itself into clans defined by dialects, or a distinct series of clicks also known as codas.

Published in the journal Nature Communications, the study attempted to figure out what drove the clan structure, which had been observed, but whose formations were a mystery. According to the study, scientists have been observing the clans for more than 30 years. It is only in the last 18 that they have collected the empirical data which resulted in the finding.

A complex social structure

People have long debated and wondered what separates humans from (other) animals. Many theories have been proposed, among them language and the use of tools. Ars Technica reviewed a paper from the peer-reviewed journal Current Anthropology that even proposes our ability to wonder what separates humans from animals is the exact the characteristic that separates humans from animals. Thomas Suddendorf, author of The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us from Other Animals, quotes Bertrand Russell’s laundry list of aspects: speech, fire, agriculture, writing, tools, and large-scale cooperation, before neatly debunking most of them in turn.

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The dolphin who loved me

In the 1960s, Margaret Lovatt was part of a Nasa-funded project to communicate with dolphins. Soon she was living with 'Peter' 24 hours a day in a converted house. Christopher Riley reports on an experiment that went tragically wrong

Christopher Riley

The Observer, Sunday 8 June 2014

Like most children, Margaret Howe Lovatt grew up with stories of talking animals. "There was this book that my mother gave to me called Miss Kelly," she remembers with a twinkle in her eye. "It was a story about a cat who could talk and understand humans and it just stuck with me that maybe there is this possibility."

Unlike most children, Lovatt didn't leave these tales of talking animals behind her as she grew up. In her early 20s, living on the Caribbean island of St Thomas, they took on a new significance. During Christmas 1963, her brother-in-law mentioned a secret laboratory at the eastern end of the island where they were working with dolphins. She decided to pay the lab a visit early the following year. "I was curious," Lovatt recalls. "I drove out there, down a muddy hill, and at the bottom was a cliff with a big white building."

Lovatt was met by a tall man with tousled hair, wearing an open shirt and smoking a cigarette. His name was Gregory Bateson, a great intellectual of the 20th century and the director of the lab. "Why did you come here?" he asked Lovatt.

"Well, I heard you had dolphins," she replied, "and I thought I'd come and see if there was anything I could do or any way I could help…" Unused to unannounced visitors and impressed by her bravado, Bateson invited her to meet the animals and asked her to watch them for a while and write down what she saw. Despite her lack of scientific training, Lovatt turned out to be an intuitive observer of animal behaviour and Bateson told her she could come back whenever she wanted.

Continued