Nick Miles

speaker

3,281 appearances 60 recordings 3 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard 2 Sep

Nick Miles’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 18 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 9.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Global News Podcast · Ukraine knocks out power in Russian-occupied Crimea · 24 Jun 2026 podcast

And that is the sound of a sperm whale from Cyprus in the eastern Mediterranean.

Now, those two sets of sounds tell us that sperm whales living on opposite sides of that sea have developed distinct vocal dialects, a bit like regional accents in human speech.

The findings are part of a new study giving us a rare insight into how new dialects emerge within animal societies.

Luke Rendell from the Sea Mammal Research Unit at the University of St Andrews in Scotland is co-author of the study and he's been speaking to Rajini Vaidyanathan.

We use small research vessels with toad hydrophones that detect the animal's echolocation clicks and we can use that to locate and track the animals.

So we would follow them for about a day, taking photographs of their tails to identify them as individuals and also recording any of the social sounds that were being made.

Sperm whale social sounds are vocalisations that we call coders and they're kind of stereotyped patterns of clicks like sort of the shave and a haircut coded knock that people do on doors and things like that.

So they sound very distinctive.

And what we showed by recording a lot of these in different parts of the Mediterranean is that actually, whereas we previously thought that all of the Mediterranean had one vocal dialect, one set of patterns that they used, in actual fact, there's a subgroup that live in the east

that have developed their own version of that dialect that's clearly related to the Western one, but is also distinctively modified from it.

So it gives us an illustration of how the dialects that we know about in sperm whales around the world kind of come to be and how that cultural evolution happens.

Okay, so it tells us that the vocal dialects appear to develop in isolation.

So when a group becomes somehow separated from the other, so there is a distinct gap between the population in the East and the population in the West.

While males do appear to travel between the two populations so they don't diverge genetically very much, there's a very clear difference in their behaviour.

So it tells us that behavioural patterns structure populations before the genetics do.

It tells us that these behavioural patterns develop very slowly because we think sperm whales have been in the Mediterranean for around 20,000 years.

So the entire span of human history, it has taken them to evolve one new dialect culturally.

In the Mediterranean, we have a kind of Petri dish where we know the population is quite small and quite isolated.

We think that it serves to help sperm whales identify other animals that they might want to cooperate with.

So they might want to join up in a group and defend against predators together or something like that.

Showing 1561–1580 of 3,281 · page 79 of 165