Whale Love Song's Have Grammatical Structure

Whale love songs have been found to have grammatical structuring.

The love song of a humpback whale sounds magnificently free-flowing and improvised to the casual human listener.
But fresh mathematical analysis of shows there are complex grammatical rules. Using syntax, the whales combine sounds into phrases, which they further weave into hours-long melodies packed with information.

Although the researchers say these songs don't meet the linguistic rigor necessary for a true language, this is the first evidence that animals other than humans use a hierarchical structure of communication. Whales have also been found to sing in dialects.


LiveScience.com

This is a pretty interesting development.

We already know whale's have dialects, and now we discover they have grammer.

Makes you think, just how smart are our behemoth cousins in the Sea.


Comments, Opinions?

very cool!

makes me think of the "birds heard singing with accents" article I found today...

dsc.discovery.com...

Menhill had this to say about the bird featured in this article :"In my opinion, the 'whip crack' sound might be the most extraordinary note produced by any beast in the animal kingdom". (Menhill is a professor of behavioral ecology at the University of Windsor in Canada, according to the article.)

Yep, animal languages are interesting.


I think that we need to go back and look at animals in a totally different perspective, I mean just because they have smaller brains does'nt neccessarily mean there not as smart.

yeah, we have large brains but we use how much (percent) of them? Not much from what I recall. I wonder what the difference would be in us using a very small percentage of our brain and an animal using 100% of its smaller sized brain.

Actually we use 100% of our brain, it's an urban myth that we use only a small percent, however we don't use all our brain at the same time.

Anyways an animal with a brain half the size of ours could in theory be twice as smart if it's neurons are more tightly packed/bundled than ours.

makes you wonder who is smarter, you dont see whales blowing each other to pieces for black gold.

Just because they have some grammatical structure, doesn't mean they are speaking.

FTFA

The amount of information expressed, however, can't compare to human speech. Whale songs generate less than one bit of information per second, while people convey about 10 bits of information per word spoken.

Could they be self aware though is the question. It's a distinct possibility.

I want to see this method used on Dolphins.

[edit on 23-3-2006 by sardion2000]

self awareness of animals could turn into a sticky legal wicket so to speak...
Imagine having to pay reparations to species you displace...

makes you wonder who is smarter, you dont see whales blowing each other to pieces for black gold. LOL LOL

Last time i looked i didnt see any evidence of whales going to the moon, haveing ipods hehe, or driving cars, ships, planes either.

I think GREED is factor of wars and humans warring on each other, so i guess whales are not greedy creatures then.

Who says all that stuff is important?

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[edit on 25-3-2006 by Benevolent Heretic]