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Pilot Whales Use Different Dialects And Teach Them To Their Children

Short-finned pilot whales maintain social groups using different dialects.
Espinya, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://tinyurl.com/ycb8vkvg
Short-finned pilot whales maintain social groups using different dialects.

People in different countries often speak different languages. And even within a community, different groups may have distinct dialects or slang. Turns out, the same is true of pilot whales.

“Short-finned pilot whales are actually often referred to as the ‘canaries of the ocean’ because they have such sing-songy type whistles,” said Amy Van Cise, a Postdoctoral Scholar at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and lead author on a new study documenting distinct dialects among pilot whales. 

Their creaking and clicking calls sound a lot like dolphin noises, which makes sense because pilot whales are actually a kind of dolphin, she explained.

Twenty years of data collected near Hawaii shows that pilot whales spend their entire lives in small social groups, which are made up of their immediate family members. They also spend time with their extended families, such as aunts, uncles, and cousins. There’s not any sign of inbreeding, so they do leave the group to breed, it appears.

There is a large database of recorded pilot whale calls that was available to Van Cise.

“We went through and manually identified every single [pilot whale] call we found in every single recording,” Van Cise said. “It was a good bit of time.”

What they found was that each family had its own distinct set of calls. Some of the groups shared certain calls, but it was clear that every group had a dialect.

This is useful when two or more groups of 70 to 100 whales come into contact with each other. When it's time to go, they all have to figure out who they’re supposed to leave with. 

“These animals are living in an area where there are no barriers to mixing at all. They share the exact same space, and yet they have to maintain their own groups,” she said.

The whales are taught the dialects by family members, Van Cise said, showing a real learning capacity among marine mammals. This is not unexpected. Orcas in captivity have even been known to learn to make dolphin sounds, mimicking the nearby animals that they can hear.

There may be some evolutionary strategy at work among the social groups of pilot whales, Van Cise said. It's not yet clear what that strategy is.

“As far as we know, there's no geographic, oceanographic, or ecological barrier that would stop these animals from mixing with each other,” she said. “They are simply choosing not to mix.”

Web content by Elsa Partan.

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Elsa Partan is a producer and newscaster with CAI. She first came to the station in 2002 as an intern and fell in love with radio. She is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. From 2006 to 2009, she covered the state of Wyoming for the NPR member station Wyoming Public Media in Laramie. She was a newspaper reporter at The Mashpee Enterprise from 2010 to 2013. She lives in Falmouth with her husband and two daughters.