Monday, November 26, 2007

Now Your Speaking My Language


Everyone is familiar with the beautiful and hilariously awkward song of the humpback whales. The humpback whale song is very complex, as compared to other species of the cetacean family, and is exhibited only by males during the mating season. Therefore, the purpose of the song has always been hypothesized to supplement a way for sexual selection in an environment of low visibility. However, recent exploration into the complex song of the humpback whale reveals that maybe there is more to the song than originally perceived. Mathematical plotting suggests that humpback whales are coding information in the songs using similar methods to the human structure of language.

No, this doesn’t mean that that whale was hitting on you the last time you went whale watching. However, it does open an immense field of exploration and study. Whale song evaluation and mathematical plotting, performed by Ryuji Suzuki and colleagues, revealed that humpback whale song is broken down into a hierarchal system of coded information. Just as the human language can be broken down into paragraphs, paragraphs into sentences, sentences into clauses etc, whale song can be broken down from themes, to phrases, and to units of information. While whale song only emits coded information at about one bit of information per second (humans can communicate at ten times that rate), this does not detract from the possible variation or immense nature of humpback whale song. While this discovery cannot yet be qualified as a “language” further study will be performed in an attempt to understand this mode of communication, and understand its implication on whale behavior and evolution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_song
http://animal.discovery.com/news/briefs/20060327/whalesong.html

Posted by David Mahoney

1 Comments:

At 6:24 PM, Blogger PWH said...

It's interesting to find that whales could have a primitive form of language. I wonder why some species use language in comparison to species that rarely ever vocalize if not at all. I wonder how social are these animals? Do they rely on a family system or a group? Where is this research leading and what is being done to further the research in these marine mammals?

Posted By:
Antonio Hernandez (9)

 

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