This is scientific American's 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intagliata. Got a minute?

We humans are social creatures. We stick together. Family traditionally came first, then more distant relatives, then larger groups of unrelated individuals connected by culture. But it turns out the same could be said for sperm whales.

So usually you find the female and their mom and you

know the grandma's and the ants and they all stay together for many years.

Mauricio Cantor, a biologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

He says those closely related family groups then seek out other families with similar behavior.

They tend to hang out or stay together with those that produce the same types of sounds.

Meaning whale clicks are based on producing similar clicks.

And similarly clicking whales don't just hang out together, he says.

They also emulate each other's songs or codas, meaning clans of whales

evolve their own dialects, their own form of culture. And these dialects are key.

Cantor and colleagues built a computer simulation of generation of virtual whales,

and they found that no other factor, like genetics or mother-daughter teaching,

could explain the emergence of clans and dialects in real sperm whale society.

The study appears in the journal Nature Communications.

I'm not trying to say that the types of culture the whale has, they are the same as the human culture.

Obviously, human culture are much more diverse and complex and cumulative and

symbolic, but it's very fascinating just to see that they can have some similarities they can

have the own type of culture and maybe a better understanding of that whale

culture he says might persuade a few human cultures to be a bit more conservation-minded

when it comes to whales.

Thanks for the minute.

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