How singing structures whale societies

Whales have a remarkable social structure much like that in humans and other primates. They form hierarchical societies. In the journal Nature Communications, EBIO graduate student Lauren Shoemaker and colleagues show for the first time that this hierarchical structure is formed by whale song. Their collaborative paper stems from a summer project in complex systems at the Santa Fe Institute. It combines an eighteen year data set on sperm whale sightings and songs near the Galapagos from lead author Maurício Cantor’s lab group with Shoemaker and colleagues’ expertise in mathematical biology. Using computer models, the researchers demonstrated that the complex social hierarchy observed in sperm whales is unlikely to originate by chance or through genetics. Instead, their models suggest that the social hierarchy is formed via processes associated with cultural learning of songs, such as preferential learning. Shoemaker is a student in the Melbourne lab, the Clauset lab, and the IQ-Bio program. More information about their study can be found on the BBC website.                                                   Photo credit to M Cantor Whitehead Lab Dalhousie