Whales: Human?

I found this article about whales. I like whales. In fact, the Blue Whale has long been my favorite animal.

So during this debate about whaling, at which there was no consensus reached in the debate of Whaling: To do or not to do, scientists proposed that whales exhibit astonishingly "human" characteristics in their social life (exhibit A: they have a social life).

First of all, sorry to interrupt myself, but how is there even debate in regards to whaling? Like... Don't Do It. That's really all there should be to that topic. They're highly endangered, so lay off, hunt something else that procreates much more often and isn't an endangered species.

On to the important stuff... We've known for quite a while now that Chimpanzees, Gorillas, and Bonobos are capable of self-awareness, feelings, and high-level cognitive abilities. According to some research, so are whales and dolphins. Not only is this pretty astounding, but apparently they've been able to do this for some time. According to Lori Marino, an evolutionary neurobiologist, “If an alien came down anytime prior to about 1.5 million years ago to communicate with the ‘brainiest’ animals on Earth, they would have tripped over our own ancestors and headed straight for the oceans to converse with the dolphins,”. That's pretty impressive, considering we looked roughly similar to this at that time:



The article goes on to say that the most commonly studied species of animals: bottlenose dolphins, killer whales, sperm whales and humpback whales, show individual distinction and social complexity. Even within one species, there can be notable differences in child rearing, pack formation, and hunting between social groups. Groups have even shown that they communicate in their own specific dialect.

“Based on what we know, I’d guess that cetacean culture is intermediate between humans and chimpanzees. Not in material culture, but in most other respects,” said Whitehead.
(Note: Cetacea- whales, dolphins, porpoises.)

That's some pretty deep stuff. The animals that we learned at childhood were cute friendly creatures that liked to eat fish and play with people in unitards are now coming out of the woodwork (waterwork?) as some of the smartest creatures on the globe (besides us, of course).

A big problem we run into as pathetic landlubbers is that we can't study this aquatic life the same way we can land mammals like chimps, gorillas, etc. Even with this massive hurdle in place, though, we have been able to find that dolphins, sperm whales, and humpback whales can pass songs and codas on through generations. The rest of the article has some of the coolest parts, and any attempt to paraphrase will just be bland or blatant copyright infringement, so I'm just going to paste in these quotes from the scientists and hope that Sir Peter Houlihan trusts that I read this fantastic article.

This guy Hal Whitehead (quoted above) has been doing some pretty cool research, and this is a pretty impressive statement from him:

“My strong suspicion is that a lot of sperm whale life revolves around social issues,” said Whitehead. “They’re nomadic, live in permanent groups, and are dependent on each other for everything. Social structure is vital to them. The only constant thing in their world is their social group. I’d guess that a lot of their life is paying attention to social relationships.”

These relationships would be “interestingly different from ours, for a variety of reasons,” continued Whitehead. “There’s nowhere to hide, they can use sound to form an image of each other’s insides — whether you’re pregnant, hungry, sick. In a three-dimensional habitat, it’s probably much harder to say something is mine, or yours, whether it’s a piece of food or a potential mate.”

-So I think that is one of the most daunting aspects of water life. They have to depend on each other so strongly because it's just them in an open ocean, yet at the same time there has to exist competition for mates, food, etc.

This last statement is one of the funniest, by Whitehead again:

“He found that in one group, most of the animals had a similar repertoire of calls, but the mother of a baby had a different one,” said Whitehead. “As we analyze the data, we’ll be able to figure out whether that was the mother’s originally vocabulary, and she was a weirdo, or if maybe that was just baby talk. We all know women who change their vocabularies when they have babies.”

So that's my article, and unfortunately I couldn't find a video of Lori Marino's dolphins noticing themselves in the mirror, so instead I found this funny, terrible commercial from the 80's. Enjoy.



-Alex Mojcher

orig. article: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/06/whalepeople/

**EDIT** (i.e. comment responses)

I'll start off by saying WOW girls, way to pick some really fun questions to try and find the answers to. Really though, great questions, and here are my attempts at answering them.

Jess- From what I could find online without doing seriously extensive research, the number of dolphins in a group (a.k.a. a "pod", as I'm sure you know) average around a dozen. As far as the size of their repertoires, it varies from species to species, but they must be pretty large. Most of the information I found online had phrases like "research is still ongoing" in them, so as far as I can see no one really knows.

Sarah- I found some info on a dolphin research foundation website about their communication, and according to what I found there are proven and specific differences in the way certain groups communicate. The way I keep picturing it in my head is like one of us 'mericans going to Australia or England... we're speaking essentially the same language, but when it comes to things that may be important, such as using the bathroom or something like that, we can have trouble understanding each other. On wikipedia I found the following terms used for "toilet" in other countries: Loo (England), Privy (Scotland), and Dunny (Australia). Also, on the topic of animals with opposable thumbs, a loosely related artistic interpretation of animals with different parts:


Kristy- I DID hear about that!! I am so pumped about it. Some articles I found said that there are around 20,000 of them estimated to be living in the oceans, versus only about 1500 in the 1960's (and the hippies thought they were doing something good, jeesh). Supposedly their status is under review in the US but some people are saying that we shouldn't get too hasty because of how rapidly ocean conditions are changing due to the infamous global warming.