Evidence from sperm whale clans of symbolic marking in non-human cultures.

ABSTRACT: Culture, a pillar of the remarkable ecological success of humans, is increasingly recognized as a powerful force structuring nonhuman animal populations. A key gap between these two types of culture is quantitative evidence of symbolic markers-seemingly arbitrary traits that function as reliable indicators of cultural group membership to conspecifics. Using acoustic data collected from 23 Pacific Ocean locations, we provide quantitative evidence that certain sperm whale acoustic signals exhibit spatial patterns consistent with a symbolic marker function. Culture segments sperm whale populations into behaviorally distinct clans, which are defined based on dialects of stereotyped click patterns (codas). We classified 23,429 codas into types using contaminated mixture models and hierarchicall

SUBMITTER: Hersh TA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9478646 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature