Guardian article: Sperm whales in 19th century shared ship attack information
Study abstract: Adaptation of sperm whales to open-boat whalers: rapid social learning on a large scale?
Researchers studying whaler’s logbooks have come up with the theory that Sperm whales learned to swim upwind to escape sail-powered whaling ships and passed the knowledge on. Of course it didn’t help once steamships came along, but the idea that they came up with and communicated an avoidance strategy is pretty amazing.
Sperm Whale: “Contact, bearing zero nine zero, range 8000 meters, designating Sierra One!”
Crane
March 31, 2021, 2:12pm
3
Thanks for the link. Very interesting article.
Some of them are still alive, so there could be something to this.
digs
March 31, 2021, 11:16pm
5
So they could be interviewed for follow up articles, and talk shows!
Hmmm … Googling seems to suggest a max age of around 70 years.
Well, their descendants are still with us, so they couldn’t have all died back then.
Right - Sperm whales are doing reasonably well these days: the total worldwide population is ~400,000.
And now there is some new research on how sperm whales communicate.
Popular article:
The way sperm whales communicate may be more similar to human language than previously thought. The acoustic properties of whale calls resemble vowels, a defining feature of human language, according to a new study from UC Berkeley’s Linguistics...
The actual study:
The sperm whale communication system, consisting of groups of clicks called codas, has been primarily analyzed in terms of the number of clicks and their inter-click timing. This paper reports spectral properties in sperm whale vocalizations and ...
LSLGuy
November 18, 2025, 5:42pm
10
I trot this out every time we read about research on cetacean communication. It still tickles me every time:
