humpback whales

The newly released Wild Pacific series, from the award-winning BBC Natural History Unit that brought you Planet Earth, is here (and we're giving away ten free copies of the DVD)! This breathtaking series shows some of the surprising effects that isolation has on life, as animals evolve and adapt to their surrounding environments in unique ways.

As if the Speech Accent Archive from yesterdays blogging wasnt fascinating enough, it seems humans arent the only creatures being subjected to linguistic analysis these days. A new study appearing in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America suggests that whales may be speaking a more complex language than previously thought.

The study offers new evidence that whales, like humans, communicate in a hierarchical language—that is, one that uses building blocks such as words to form more complex constructs like clauses, the clauses then forming sentences, and so on. The studys authors analyzed recordings of Hawaiian humpback whales using a special algorithm to isolate patterns in the sounds and found that whale songs do appear to follow a hierarchical structure. Decoding the hierarchys meaning, though, is something else entirely. Will we ever know what whales are talking about? My guess is they mainly talk about food and the attractiveness of whales of the opposite sex, just like humans do. —John Mahoney

Link via New Scientist (check out the sound clips, too).