ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Evidence from sperm whale clans of symbolic marking in non-human cultures.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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17 citing papers in PubMed, 46 citations in OpenAlex.
- Review
- Extreme Rhythm Keeping in Long-Range Slow Click Communication of Sperm Whales.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- Description of a collaborative sperm whale birth and shifts in coda vocal styles during key events.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Animal cultures matter for conservation, but also to animals.Learning & behavior · 2026Review
- Mapping nonhuman cultures with the Animal Culture Database.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Animal culture: conservation in a changing world.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Integrating cultural dimensions in sperm whale (Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Automatic detection and annotation of eastern Caribbean sperm whale codas.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Language-like efficiency in whale communication.Science advances · 2025Article
- Vowel- and Diphthong-Like Spectral Patterns in Sperm Whale Codas.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Female African elephant rumbles differ between populations and sympatric social groups.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Cetaceans are the next frontier for vocal rhythm research.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Human and nonhuman norms: a dimensional framework.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Sperm whale clans and human societies.Royal Society open science · 2024Review
- Multimodal imitative learning and synchrony in cetaceans: A model for speech and singing evolution.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Review
- Evidence from sperm whale clans of symbolic marking in non-human cultures.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Integrating space, time, and culture in animal conservation practice.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
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Authors and funding
27 authors at 11 institutions in 11 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
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 hierarchically clustered coda repertoires into seven clans based on similarities in coda usage; then we evaluated whether coda usage varied with geographic distance within clans or with spatial overlap between clans. Similarities in within-clan usage of both "identity codas" (coda types diagnostic of clan identity) and "nonidentity codas" (coda types used by multiple clans) decrease as space between repertoire recording locations increases. However, between-clan similarity in identity, but not nonidentity, coda usage decreases as clan spatial overlap increases. This matches expectations if sympatry is related to a measurable pressure to diversify to make cultural divisions sharper, thereby providing evidence that identity codas function as symbolic markers of clan identity. Our study provides quantitative evidence of arbitrary traits, resembling human ethnic markers, conveying cultural identity outside of humans, and highlights remarkable similarities in the distributions of human ethnolinguistic groups and sperm whale clans.
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