Weird Science: Oddest Science Stories of 2006

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"but that doesn’t explain why animals from different regions speak in dialects."

That's a stupid quote. One because earlier it said 'on self-imposed borders'. If people lived in the himilayas then they would still sound different to the French, even if there were no territories. Humans speak different dialects in different regions due to the core population, and that people coming into that core do less to convert the core to speaking diffently than the core does to the individual. That means that dolphins would have regional accents, even with a reasonable turnover of core population, just like humans.

"The reason? Still unknown." What? Humans are animals too and if we evolve regional accents then other animals could easily and seemingly do. Interesting story, poorly presented.
 
And ANOTHER thing. Why is the story about whales but the picture is of dolphins? Madness.
 
inkysquid12 said:
And ANOTHER thing. Why is the story about whales but the picture is of dolphins? Madness.
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I believe dolphins are considered small toothed whales just like orca are. Having said that, a picture of dolphins next to an article mentioning blue whales is just poor editorial work.

I am seriously trying to avoid comment about the spider cries while mating and the penis transplants. 0.o;
 
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I always thought of dolphins and porpoises (small toothed whales) as the cetaceans, but i wasn't aware 'traditional' whales (baleen whales (eg: blue whale) and large toothed whales (eg: sperm whale)) were classified as cetaceans too, with all cetaceans being given the generic term 'whale'. So you're completely correct.

You learn something new every day.
 
What? Humans are animals too and if we evolve regional accents then other animals could easily and seemingly do.

Human intelligence far surpasses that of animals, including apes and dolphins. Higher animals can communicate with each other, yet animals other than man do not appear to have structured grammatical language.
 
Barb said:
What? Humans are animals too and if we evolve regional accents then other animals could easily and seemingly do.

Human intelligence far surpasses that of animals, including apes and dolphins. Higher animals can communicate with each other, yet animals other than man do not appear to have structured grammatical language.
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So. All you need for an accent is one word. I should think every accent in the world can be broken down into the fact that single worlds are pronounced differently. You can tell some accents from hearing someone say a single word. Prairie dogs have many 'words' (http://www.livescience.com/animalworld/prairie_dogs_041206.html) and considering how intelligent cetaceans are supposed to be they should be able to form standardised words too. Just as animals evolve in isolation, so does language, and it would be invariable that different accents and possibly different languages would evolve within any pockets of species capable of forming a handful of words.
 
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