WHALING OUT

Marine biologists are increasingly accepting the idea that whales are totally multi-culti:

Humans may not be the only mammals who have different cultures. Some scientists are starting to consider the notion that whales might also.

"Whales are pretty hard to study, but evidence is coming up from quite a number of species that in a whole range of ways, they're learning things from each other and they're passing it on to other whales, and that's culture," says Hal Whitehead, biology professor at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada. He explored the topic in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences and based his conclusions on several studies including his own.

There's a whole video report to watch, I can't watch it right now but I bet it is cool as shit, WHALES, right?  The article discusses a lot of interesting-sounding work being done in this area:

"Whale culture has, like human culture, a range of types and styles," says Whitehead. "At one end, there are the fast moving what might be called 'pop' cultures," such as when male Humpback whales sing songs to attract females or ward off other males. "These songs evolve, so that at the beginning of the breeding season they're all singing one song and then it's changed a bit by the end," says Whitehead. "And after a couple of years they're singing a totally different song."

But other whale languages don't change as quickly. The dialects of killer whales, which travel in large extended-family groups called pods, "seem to change much more slowly and to be linked to particular social structures," says Whitehead. "A particular pod will have its own dialect, and that dialect will be similar to pods which are the members of the same clan, and clans will have dialects which are different from one another—just as humans from different parts of the same country may sound a bit different, but humans from different countries may be totally unintelligible to each other," says Whitehead. And these dialects will be stable. "In sperm whales which we study, we can record a group of sperm whales now, we can record them ten years from now, and we won't notice any difference in the sounds they're making."

In addition to language, Whitehead says that different behaviors among whales indicate that whales might have what we'd call a culture. He notes that different pods of whales can have distinctly different sets of behaviors and languages even though they share territory. "We find this situation where we have multi-cultural societies..."

It isn't just killer whales. Whitehead says sperm whales off the Galapagos islands have two distinct ways of speaking. These whales speak in a series of clicks, but some of them often add a pause and a final "click." Whitehead likens it to the way many Canadians often add "eh" to the end of a sentence...

I bet whales aren't the only ones, either.

While looking for a good killer whale photo (or 'cool' computer-generated graphic, as the case may be), I found this page of photos of animals looking really cute which I think is supposed to reassure you about the existence of God?  Some of the photos are pretty awesome, including/especially the one of a killer whale and a dog chilling out - the dog must've been like OMG WTF is this!?  Hahahahaha