Whale hello!
Beluga whales have surprisingly complex social structures
As well as spending time with their close relatives, beluga whales also frequently associate with individuals they have no relation to, a study at Florida Atlantic University’s Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute has found. Belugas make friends with others outside of their family groups, and beluga communities have similarities to human societies where social networks, support structures, cooperation and cultures involve interactions between kin and non-kin.
The study brought together decades of research using molecular genetic techniques and field studies spanning locations across the Arctic from Alaska to Canada and Russia to Norway. The team found that belugas form several different group types, each with associated behaviours that were consistently observed across different populations and habitats.
“Unlike killer and pilot whales, and like some human societies, beluga whales don’t solely or even primarily interact and associate with close kin,” said lead author Dr Greg O’Corry-Crowe. “Beluga whales exhibit a wide range of grouping patterns, from small groups of two to individuals to herds of or more from apparently single-sex and age-class pods to mixedage and sex groupings, and from brief associations to multi year affiliations". he added. "This variation suggests a fission fusion society where group composition and size are context specific but it may also reflect a more rigid multilevel society of stable social units that regularly coalesce and separate. The role kinship plays in these groupings has been largely unknown.”
These results differ from earlier predictions that belugas have a matrilineal social system of closely bonded groups of female relatives. They also differ from the behaviour of the larger toothed whales. Killer whales, for example, form groups of both males and females with close maternal kin and they remain in them for their entire lives.
“This new understanding of why individuals form social groups, even with non-relatives, may promote new research on what constitutes species resilience and how species like the beluga whale can respond to emerging threats, including climate change,” said O’Corry-Crowe.