Underwater Societies and Communication
The Newly Discovered Communities of Galapagos Sperm Whales
Countless times have I reminded myself and my visitors that we cannot compare our culture to those within the animal kingdom. We may want to reach out and touch a baby sea lion pup thinking we can soothe its cries as it waits for its mother who has been gone hunting for days on end. Were we to touch a hurting human baby, that baby would be nurtured. Were we to touch the crying sea lion pup, she would die from our contaminating smell because her mother would never find her again.
We always want to be careful not to anthropomorphize those in the animal kingdom, whether it involves emotions, behaviors or language. After all, animals are not human and we can’t project emotions or thoughts onto them under the assumption that they think and communicate as we do. We don’t want to impose human emotions or the need for interactive communications on them; or even try to read their minds.
On the other hand, we’ve learned that elephants do cry and that they care tenderly for one another in groups. Somehow they inform others of their species of their particular emotions and needs. We know that our own household pets communicate and love interaction. Hasn’t your cat or dog trained you have to read their “language” of gestures, looks and sounds and, from these, reach conclusions about whether they are hungry or want affection, are scared or sick or tired or content? In a brilliant new book called The Soul of an Octopus, author Sy Montgomery shares her remarkable interactions with octopuses (not octopi by the way) and even fish and eels; from her interactions she is driven to conclude that octopuses do, indeed, have feelings, connect with people, use tools, cleverly trick their humans and even plan ahead.
But all of our observations tell us nothing about how animals communicate with others of their own species. Is there a universal or even regional language that animals of a given species use with others of that same species? Scientists study language and other aspects of animal behavior all the time, forming hypotheses about what an animal’s behaviors and vocalizations mean, if anything at all. But, it’s really difficult to reach a firm conclusion. How do you get into the mind of a fish? an anemone? even a mammal much like ourselves?
In the Pacific Ocean around Galapagos we have thousands of sperm whales and calves. Scientists are intrigued by questions of sperm whale behaviors and communication. In 2015, an 18-year long published study of Galapagos sperm whales concluded that these endemic creatures actually do communicate with one another in clans, defined as a group consisting of several families. Each clan has a separate dialect or accent if you will. You can think of it as a local accent.
If brain size were the measure of intelligence, sperm whales would be geniuses. The sperm whale has the largest brain of any animal in the world, five times heavier than that of a human. But, in the end, that doesn’t make it the sharpest of all creatures; for example it’s not as brainy as a dolphin. But, when it comes to communicating among themselves, sperm whales, it turns out, are pretty exceptional.
For 18 years, the vocalizations of sperm whales were studied. From watching and listening and noticing related behaviors, scientists concluded that sperm whales operate within family units clans, something like a separate culture or community. Even though all of the whales lived within a similar geographic area, each clan developed a separate coda, or pattern of communication and vocalization. These local accents are very unusual in the animal kingdom. The accents, the scientists say, are more like local human communities.
To keep track of the whales and isolate their distinctive family and clan units, photographs of tails were matched to each whale since the ridges on a sperm whale’s tail are each unique — much like a fingerprint of a human. Computer simulations were used to follow the patterns and codas in order to define the units or communities of vocalizations.
(Chris Bangs/Guam Variety News/Associated Press)
The scientists were able to determine too that these are not instinctive vocalizations but learned cultural ones. What the team found is that social learning with bias, as opposed to pure social learning, is the most likely way whales learn codas. This means that the whales are biased towards learning certain codas, based on specific codas from whales in their own clans, or the most commonly used codas. This is similar to how human dialects evolve.
This story is based on the research study Multilevel Animal Societies Can Emerge from Cultural Transmission, authored by Mauricio Canto, Lauren G. Shoemaker, Reneil B Cabral, Cesar O. Flores, Melinda Varga and Hal Whitehead, which was published in Nature Communications, September 8, 2015. The original study may be found online in the journal Nature Communications.
Harry Jiménez, Owner and General Manager
Galapagos Eco Friendly
Av. 12 de Febrero y Av. J Roldo
San Cristobal Island
Galapagos, Ecuador SCY
Reservations: 593 052 520 124
Email: info@galapagosecolodge.net
A version of this article has been published at blog.galapagosecolodge.net.
