Behavior & Culture

Each pod has its own dialect — a repertoire of calls shared by family members and different from neighbouring pods. Calves learn these calls from their mothers, not from instinct. Related pods share partial repertoires, and the overlap maps onto how closely related they are.

Hunting techniques are taught too. Some populations beach themselves deliberately to take seals and spend years teaching calves to do it safely. Others coordinate to wash seals off ice floes. None of these behaviors are universal; they are local traditions.

This matters for conservation. When a small population loses older females, it loses knowledge — which rivers run early, where the fish hold in a dry year. Post-reproductive females live for decades after their last calf, and the evidence suggests they are functioning as the pod's memory.