329 — Individual, unit and vocal clan level identity cues in sperm whale codas

Alright folks I remembered I hadn’t read my paper for today as I was downing some NyQuil so bear with me, this reading might get a bit dicey

Sperm whales self-identify and self-organize into “clans” — large social groupings of whales that share a societal identity and hierarchy. These clans share dialects of communication, and in particular, they tend to sing a particular signal known as a “coda.”

(Other animals also “sing”, but for different reasons. Here’s a paper I read about fruit fly courtship ‘songs’: [#307])

Codas — a series of broadband clicks — are used as a sort of “handshake,” passing back and forth between members of the same or differing social groups. When two groups of whales coincide in the ocean, they’ll tend to congregate only with those with whom they share a coda-type. (This holds more for the Pacific Ocean than the Atlantic, where it seems that codas covary closely with geography. Perhaps only one clan of whale covers a certain territory in the Atlanic Ocean? Or maybe Atlantic sperm whales know a library of codas, and only use the lingua franca when traveling?) Because sperm whales’ societies are matrilineal, these codas tend to evolve alongside the females of the society.

Aside from this being interesting on its own merits, this understanding of whale codas can also inform the social complexity hypothesis, which states that more complicated communication correlates with the presence of highly organized societies. For example, frogs don’t have a particularly complex communication system, nor is their societal hierarchy particularly complex. Humans, on the other hand, are very complex, oh there’s the nyquil good night