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Science Quickly

Do Sperm Whales Have Culture?

Science Quickly

Scientific American

Science

4.41.4K Ratings

🗓️ 15 April 2024

⏱️ 10 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

These marine mammals are very hard to observe, but in the past two decades the roughly 20 or so people in the world who study sperm whales have found some compelling evidence of culture among them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

You can sense to glory.

0:02.0

Is this distorted something?

0:04.0

Feel it in your bones.

0:06.0

The quarterfinals.

0:08.0

Unstappable. Full of vivid nerve-wracking moments

0:10.0

where every decision costs more, means more and makes history.

0:17.0

This is where the season is defined.

0:19.0

Oh, it's matching.

0:20.0

Every game.

0:22.0

Total unmissible. Every game. Total!

0:23.0

Total amissable.

0:24.0

The U-Afor Champions League, Europa League, and Conference League quarterfinals,

0:28.0

only on TNT sports.

0:30.0

Hal Whitehead can tell you exactly where he was when he discovered that sperm whales don't all speak the same dialect.

0:35.2

Luke Rendel and I made our big discovery of the Galapic Asylum.

0:39.2

The sperm whales they were studying seem to live in two adjacent but distinct groups, each with its own dialect.

0:45.0

One clan whose social vocalizations, which were coders, went kind of click, click, click, click, and the other went click, click, click, click, click,

0:57.0

click, click, click, with a pause before the last one.

1:01.0

I'm Hal Whitehead, I'm a professor of biology at Dalhousie University in Canada.

1:07.0

That was a fundamental discovery and then we began to show that there were a number of other behavioral characteristics which differed between the clans.

1:20.0

How they travel, how they feed and reproduce, how they

1:23.4

babysit their calves and then clan started being found in other parts of the world

...

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