Whales: A journey into my obsession, part 2

Whell Whell Whell, here whe are again, whith more whales! They are sooo great. *To know how to properly read the first sentence, watch this:



On a related note, if that clip entertains you at all, or if you like Andy Samberg (especially if you only know him from "I'm on a boat") I HIGHLY recommend you go find the movie Hot Rod and watch it.

Today's article is about sperm... whales, specifically... not like last time where I was like "eh, we got some humpbacks, some dolphins, some narwhals, some unicorns...". The article is fairly short but extremely enticing, which left me wanting more, like really good french food, which is never filling... ever (the people who ordered this food were smart and doubled up on the drinks to fill the extra space).

Sperm Whales use specific sounds in their individual calls to keep calls from overlapping. They apply specific patterns of "clicks" in their calls, which not only can indentify them individually (as these researchers have found), but also let other whales know when their call will finish. So basically, whales are A) much more polite than humans (esp. girls I meet at parties that are clearly uninterested), in that they actually wait for the other to finish talking, and B) extremely intelligent, because they change the timing of the clicks in an orderly fashion according to how long their call will be.

It's as if Katy Perry warned us before she started singing "I Kissed A Girl", saying "Alright everyone, be prepared for approximately a three minute torturous repetition of the song you've heard over, and over, and over...", except in the whales case, it's probably more like "hey everyone what's up, I'm Bob, I'm trying to find this girl I met at the plankton buffet the other day, anyone seen her?".

The researchers went on to show that, like I mentioned briefly earlier, this has been shown to be the case on an individual-to-individual basis, meaning each whale has it's own specific series of clicks. It is believed that this allows them to recognize each other from afar based on these clicks, similar to our own "cocktail party effect", which is what allows us to hear our friends call our name at crowded gatherings over the hollering and hootenannies before we stumble out after them.

via: article

-Alex C Mojcher, week 5

Note: Kathleen, clearly a fellow whale lover, posted her blog before me while I was still filling mine with hyperlinks. Sorry about the double articles. I'll probably just write another post later this week.

I'm going to take this opportunity to recommend you all visit my casual blog my friends and I maintain. Hopefully Sir Houlihan will not mind this.
READ IT HERE!

Comment Replies:

Bethany- Thanks for enjoying my post, I appreciate the compliment. I'm not sure what software they used to encode the clicks, but they definitely did use something. The article says that something was developed specifically for this project- so maybe they wrote their own audio analysis, data analysis, or statistical analysis software to get the job done. As for the clicks, not all whales use clicks. Blue whales use an extremely loud, low frequency hum that we have to speed up/raise the pitch of just to be audible for humans. Check out the comparison:

Sperm Whale

Blue Whale

Humpback Whale (fast forward this one because the guy talks forever)

Carlos- The clicks are pretty awesome, I agree. Sperm whales have these things that look like lips, of course they aren't actually lips, that are thought to make the noise. From what I can find, the evidence is supported, but no one has factual evidence. Here is what they look like:

Valve
Valve (parted)

The clicks are their primary source of communication and is used for all contexts, according to a paper I found- social gathering, mating calls, migratory communication, etc.

Tricia- Thanks so much for the compliments! I try to have as much fun as possible with this assignment and I'm glad you're enjoying it. I tried to find something... anything... about similar social manners in other animals. I couldn't find anything confirming or denying this in any other animals. I'm sorry! My guess is that species that don't interrupt each other are the minority, but I'll keep my eyes out.

Sarah- Thank you too for the compliments, I'm glad you liked the article. I could find absolutely NOTHING on the evolution of this communication. Whales are some of the most mysterious creatures simply because of how hard they are to study, so we're still just figuring out the basics of their communication. Based on the massive size of these animals, I would guess that it evolved pretty early. They can't travel in large packs because there would never be enough food found for all of them to eat, so they had to spread out and still be able to communicate effectively. Hopefully this satisfies at least a bit of your curiosity.

Deysha- Ha, thank you for the compliment- it quite a useful skill, I must agree. I found a whole bunch of studies about the cocktail party effect and how the phrase was coined, but the only other phrase I could find was used on the quasi-illustrious Wikipedia: the Figure-Ground Phenomenon (though an auditory version of the phenomenon, as the real Figure-Ground has to do most often with visual cues). The "figure" is what the subject pays attention to, i.e. their own name, as far as this topic goes, and the "ground" is the "noise", or I guess in this case the cocktail party. Some dorky psychologist called it the "Party Chat brain filter".

Crystal- Thanks so much for the compliments, I'm glad you like my writing! Ok, so the simple answer to your question about why whales are so polite: because they're the coolest. Whether they want to wait to hear others, or want others to wait to hear them, is like a weird version of the "chicken before the egg- which came first" question. I have no idea if that will ever be studied, or how, but I think it probably evolved just out of necessity. If multiple whales call at the same time, they overlap, both calls are lost and energy is wasted. Maybe they have some sort of hierarchy in the system, where weaker or younger callers wait their turn after stronger/older callers... one of the researchers in a recording on the Cornell database mentions hearing strong versus weak callers, so that's my little educated guess.

Thanks again everyone.