Hal Whitehead

Cultural Lives of Sperm Whales

About the Speaker

Hal Whitehead is a Professor in the Department of Biology at Dalhousie University.  He holds a BA in Mathematics (1972), Diploma in Mathematical Statistics (1977), and PhD in Zoology (1981) from Cambridge University in England.  His research focuses on social organization and cultural transmission in the deep-water whales, but he also works on their ecology, population biology and conservation.  Field work is mainly carried out in the North Atlantic (particularly off eastern Canada), Caribbean and South Pacific Oceans from a 12-m sailing boat. He has developed statistical tools and software for analyzing vertebrate social systems.  He uses individual-based stochastic computer models to study cultural evolution, gene-culture coevolution and mating strategies.   Hal has published 240 articles in refereed journals, coedited "Cetacean Societies: Field Studies of Whales and Dolphins" (University of Chicago Press; 2000) and has written "Sperm Whales; Social Evolution in the Ocean" (University of Chicago Press, 2003), "Analyzing Animal Societies: Quantitative Methods for Vertebrate Social Analysis" (University of Chicago Press, 2008), and, with Luke Rendell, “The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins” (University of Chicago Press, 2015).  He has served on the IUCN Species Survival Commission Cetacean Specialist Group since 1983, has been co-chair of the COSEWIC Marine Mammal SSC between 2001-2004, and 2016. In 2007 he received the Marsh Award for Marine and Freshwater Conservation from the  Zoological Society of London, and the Conservation Award of the European Cetacean Society in 2016. Talk Overview: The sperm whale is a highly social animal. Their culture is a vital part of their lives, ecology and nature. The basis of sperm whale society is the social unit consisting of about ten females and their offspring, usually kin.  The females in social units travel together over thousands of km, babysit, suckle each others’ young, and defend themselves communally against predators. Young sperm whales learn behaviour from their mothers and other members of their social unit, creating distinctive cultures among these social units. However, social units group together into larger cultural clans that have similar vocal repertoires and other behaviour.  Social units only group with members of their own clan, even though clans overlap in space.  Over the past 20 years we have seen cultural turnover in the clans using the waters off of the Galapagos Islands.  We have also seen sperm whale cultures evolve.  A particularly dramatic case of rapid and widespread cultural evolution, occurred in the 1820’s. Sperm whale social units across the North Pacific learned effective defensive measures from each other within five years of their first experience of whalers. Culture is a vital part of the lives, the ecology and the nature of sperm whales.