Sperm whales communicate using short bursts of clicking sounds, called codas.<\/p>\n
The mammals use these codas to stay in touch with members of their family groups.<\/p>\n
An international team of researchers, led by the University of St Andrews in Scotland, decided to take a closer look at sperm whales living across southern Europe.<\/p>\n
They studied recordings, collected over nearly 20 years, from whales living near Greece in the eastern Mediterranean, and near Spain’s Balearic Islands in the west.<\/p>\n
They found that whales in both areas often used groups of four clicks – however the rhythms were different. <\/p>\n
Whales in the western Mediterranean used a pattern with three clicks followed by a pause, and then a final click.<\/p>\n
While whales living further east used a faster version of the same pattern.<\/p>\n
Scientists think the whales’ ancestors first settled in the western Mediterranean around 20,000 years ago, before some moved east. <\/p>\n
Over thousands of years, their clicking patterns then slowly changed.<\/p>\n
Experts say this is the first time they have been able to spot signs about how a new type of sperm whale communication may have developed.<\/p>\n
The team added that it shows that how whales interact with each other can evolve when groups spend long periods of time apart.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sperm whales communicate using short bursts of clicking sounds, called codas. The mammals use these codas to stay…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":663853,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":["post-663852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/663852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=663852"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/663852\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/663853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=663852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=663852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=663852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}