flâneur

Contextual and combinatorial structure in sperm whale vocalisations | Nature Communications

nature.com · 7,039 words · saved by 1 readers

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript. Advertisement Nature Communications volume  15, Article number: 3617 (2024) Cite this article 33k Accesses 4083 Altmetric Metrics details Sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus) are highly social mammals that communicate using sequences of clicks called codas. While a subset of codas have been shown to encode information about caller identity, almost everything else about the sperm whale communication system, including its structure and information-carrying capacity, remains unknown. We show that codas exhibit contextual and combinatorial structure. First, we report previously undescribed features of codas that are sensitiv

Introduction The social complexity hypothesis1,2 posits that animals in complex societies—featuring coordination, distributed decision-making, social recognition, and social learning of cultural strategies3,4,5,6—require complex communication systems to mediate these behaviours and interactions1,7. In humans, communication plays a particularly large role in complex social behaviours like strategising and teaching8,9,10. These behaviours require the ability to generate and understand a vast space of possible messages. For example, the sentence ‘Let’s meet next to the statue of Claude Shannon…

saved by

related reading