Animals
How Whales Communicate: Songs, Dialects, and Culture Beneath the Waves
Humpback whales sing songs that can last 30 hours and travel hundreds of kilometers. Fin whales produce calls at 20 Hz — below the threshold of human hearing — that propagate across entire ocean basins. Sperm whales use click-based dialects specific to family groups. Whale communication is not simple signaling. Biologists now argue it bears hallmarks of culture, the transmission of learned behaviors across generations.