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It’s a Group Thing

February 28, 2019

WHOI researcher Amy Van Cise and Annie Gorgone of the Cascadia Research Collective photograph pilot whales during field work in the Hawaiian Islands. The study found that short-finned pilot whales there have their own sorts of vocal dialects, much like different human social groups do. “It’s sort of like if you’ve got hipsters and prep kids in the same high school—each group has different slang,” said Cise, a postdoc scholar in the Sensory Ecology and Bioacoustics Lab at WHOI. “They identify themselves with certain speech to maintain that separation.” (Photo courtesy of Robin Baird, Cascadia Research Collective, NMFS permit #15530.)