Skip to content
NatureHQ

Study

Vocal clans in sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus)

Rendell, Luke E.; Whitehead, Hal

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2003

Peer-reviewedfield observationwild

What they did

Coda repertoires were recorded from many sperm whale social units across a large area of the South Pacific and Caribbean and clustered by similarity, then compared against geography and against genetic relatedness to test what actually predicts repertoire.

Studied in
Physeter macrocephalus
Sample size
coda repertoires from dozens of groups across the South Pacific

What they found

Repertoires cluster into a small number of distinct types — clans — that do not correspond to geography. Units from different clans overlap in the same waters without sharing repertoire, and units associate preferentially with others of the same clan. Clan membership is not predicted by maternal genetic lineage alone.

What it means

The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.

How the authors put it

Sperm whale coda repertoires define socially learned clans spanning thousands of kilometres, constituting culture in the sense of socially transmitted group-typical behaviour.

How NatureHQ reads it

The design is what makes this convincing. Two units in the same patch of ocean, potentially related, can have entirely different repertoires, while units thousands of kilometres apart share one — which rules out both geography and simple inheritance, and leaves social learning. Calling that culture is a defensible technical use of the word: group-typical behaviour transmitted socially rather than genetically. It does not mean the codas carry meanings, and it does not mean clans have traditions in any richer sense. What is established is that whales learn what to say from the whales they grow up with, which is a large enough claim on its own.

Limitations

  • Repertoire clustering depends on the similarity measure chosen.
  • Recording effort is uneven across the ocean basins sampled.
  • Culture is inferred from the exclusion of alternatives rather than from observed transmission.

The experiment, explained

  • Separating what a whale says from where it lives

    Do sperm whale groups sound different because they live in different places, or because they learned from different whales?

What this study is used for on NatureHQ

One study can inform several subjects. Here is everywhere this one is cited.

Finding the paper

Published by: The Royal SocietyPublished by the Royal Society.

doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2002.2239

Checked against Crossref and OpenAlex on 2026-09-28, and they agree on the title, the authors and the year.

NatureHQ summarises research in its own words and does not reproduce published text. Reviewed 2026-08-11.