Sperm whales form clans by learning vocal calls from others that sing like them. This kind of 'cultural transmission' has been seen as a mainly human trait.
Sperm-whale clans use distinct dialects of clicks to communicate. To learn how their complex societies form, Maurício Cantor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, and his colleagues used 18 years of data on the acoustic calls of sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus; pictured) from around the Galapagos Islands to build several possible models of whale populations. In their simulations, the clans that have been observed in nature did not form when the vocal calls were genetically inherited or learned from other sperm whales in general. But clans did form when the animals adopted the most common calls produced by certain individuals — mainly those with similar communication patterns.
This further suggests that humans are not the only mammals that segregate according to similarities in learned behaviour.
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Whales that click create cliques. Nature 525, 292 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/525292a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/525292a
