What are some of the caveats or limitations of this study?

I think the most important thing to keep in mind is that what this paper has done is has documented the pattern consistent with what we see for humans. But that says nothing about how the whales are actually perceiving these different types of codas. So I think the piece of the puzzle that is still missing is to do playback experiments where you have a wild animal and you play that animal codas from its clan, codas from another clan in the area, identity codas from its clan, identity codas from the other clan, non-identity codas, and you look for a behavioral response. Because right now we have an idea, we have a suggestion of what these codas might mean to the animals. But without those types of experiments, it's really hard to say symbolic marker means that there's some sort of symbolic representation happening in the brain. And we're never going to be able to get that for sperm whales. I think what we can continue to do is to design experiments that probe at this question from different angles and that will get us potentially as close as possible without being able to ask the whales themselves.

What are the implications of the existence of cultural markers in non-human species? I think one thing

that's always good is to kind of chip away at this idea of human exceptionalism. Historic markers have long been thought to be this thing uniquely human. In the same way that culture for a while was thought to be uniquely human. But beyond that, when we think about how we conserve and manage cultural species, it's really important to include how they perceive their culture. So for example, sperm whales have historically been managed by these kind of broad geographic stocks. So drawing lines off of certain countries and saying, oh, all the whales in this part of the ocean are part of this stock. But I think what this study shows and what past work has increasingly shown is that sperm whales don't abide by those arbitrary geographic lines we're drawing. So I think the most important thing we can do is as we continue trying to best conserve these species for future oceans and future generations is to make sure that as we learn more about their cultural divisions and how they see themselves, we incorporate that into how we manage them and see them as well.

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