Luke Rendell

@lrendell.bsky.social

2243 Followers 985 Following

Reader in Biology @_SMRU_ @SchoolofBiology @univofstandrews. Ocean Yachtmaster for hire! Marine conservation, cetacean & fish behaviour, cultural evolution. He/him. Thalassophile. Sailor. #Fife https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/biology/people/ler4

Screenshot of an article in the Guardian about claims regarding vowel sounds im sperm whales highlighting dubious linguistic gymnastics by the study's defenders
Homepage of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America showing our paper as an editor's pick
Dr Txema Brotons, of Asociación Tursiops the Spanish team involved in the study said “this finding reminds us that the cultural history of the Mediterranean does not belong exclusively to humans. While the civilizations of the Mare Nostrum were developing their own languages, customs and identities, sperm whales were also passing down their vocal traditions from one generation to the next. The Mediterranean is therefore a space of shared cultural diversity, where the evolution of human culture and animal culture has coexisted for thousands of years."
Comparison of our results (filled circles) with known or probable dialect group detections (colours) in previous Mediterranean sperm whale research (other symbols) [31–36,61]. Note that for other papers, assigned dialect groups represent our best guess based on the available information, but should not be regarded as definitive without further quantitative analyses. See the electronic supplementary material, table S6 for additional details on past work and our rationale for dialect group assignments of previous studies.
Representation of Mediterranean coda repertoires showing two detected dialect groups and their corresponding identity coda types. Top: average linkage hierarchical clustering dendrogram shows similarity among sperm whale coda repertoires recorded in two locations in the Mediterranean Sea. Repertoires that are more similar in terms of probabilistic coda type usage cluster closer together and have a higher correlation value (y-axis). The geographical source of each repertoire is listed below the dendrogram (red B, Balearic Islands; blue H, Hellenic Trench). This tree was constructed in IDcall using critfact = 15 and minrep = 15 (electronic supplementary material, table S3; see [17] for a full description of IDcall parameters). Middle: heat map depicts probabilistic identity coda type usage (rows) for each repertoire (columns). Arbitrary identity coda type labels are on the left and identity coda type centroid rhythm plots, where each dot represents one click and the coda type is coloured by dialect group, are on the right; 47.9% of the codas used to generate the dendrogram are represented in this heat map. Labels beneath show year of recording. Bottom: stacked bar plots show the posterior probabilities of repertoire assignments to dialect groups. Bottom labels show the social unit identity when known and the number of codas in each repertoire in parentheses. Along the Hellenic Trench, known social units include: Antikythira, Bestend, Casper, Chromo, Falasa, Ippolyti, Keri, Kythira, Lakon, Palaio, Pylos, Veneti, Zak, Zakpylos and Zante. If multiple social units were recorded together, their names are appended (e.g. PylosVeneti). If a social unit was recorded with additional unknown whales, the social unit’s name is appended with UNK (e.g. PylosUNK). Note that social unit was unknown (and is left blank) for the Balearic Islands coda repertoires.
Graph of inter-click intervals (ICIs) of all four-click codas (n = 3536) recorded off the Balearic Islands (red) and along the Hellenic Trench (blue). Each dot represents the time at which a single click is produced within a four-click coda. Moving from left to right with the first click at time 0, each coda is thus represented as a horizontal sequence of four dots. Codas are ordered by the time between the first and second clicks (i.e. the duration of the first ICI). Note the clear separation by recording location, with longer duration four-click codas recorded in the west (red) and shorter ones recorded in the east (blue). Also note the regional asymmetry, with very few short duration/fast tempo four-click codas produced by whales recorded in the west (i.e. little red within blue) but more long duration/slow tempo four-click codas produced by whales recorded in the east (i.e. relatively more blue within red).
A map showing a series of sampling points in red around the Balearic Islands and blue along the Hellenic Trench. Figure caption: Map of coda repertoire recording locations. Bottom left inset shows the Mediterranean Sea, with the relevant area boxed. Each circle denotes one sperm whale repertoire. Filled circles indicate well-sampled repertoires (with ≥25 3–10-click codas) and empty circles indicate small repertoires (with <25 3–10-click codas). Note that all filled circles have the same opacity; seemingly darker circles are spatially proximate repertoires. All repertoires were used for coda type classification but only well-sampled repertoires were used in our hierarchical cluster analysis. Balearic Islands repertoires are in red and Hellenic Trench repertoires are in blue. The dashed line is approximate and indicates the shallow waters between Sicily and Tunisia which broadly separate the western and eastern basins.
A group of sperm whale adult and calves at the surface taken from above. Credit Asociación Tursiops
Aylin Akkaya in front of a title slide about sperm whales 🥳
Denise Risch and a glider PAM methods outline slide
Georgina and the talk title slide
Paul Thompson celebrating the growth in marine mammal research in previous decades
@oceangill.bsky.social in front of her title slide
Tim with a slide of Western Scotland, God's own country 🤣
@eva-mariab.bsky.social and their title slide
Seth and I standing in front of a poster describing bowhead whale song research
Alex South and his title slide about rhythmic variability in humpback song 😎
Thomas Webber telling us about Rissos dolphins in Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿
an audience fascinated by a spectrogram of bowhead song
Marine Mammal Science MSc current and past students at #ECS2026
Enrico describes a slide of controlled exposure results
Slide show rope leading from creel to seabed
Jess and a slide highlighting concerns about declining harbour seal populations interacting with tidal turbine
Leigh Hickmott in front of a title slide
Speaker and title slide seismic surveys reduce fin whale vocalisations detections
Prof Emer Rogan describing small cetacean assessments
Jeanne Merindol stands beside her poster
me Eadin Oscar Gaggioti and Morton Olsen toasting in front of the SOI Xmas tree
A yellow and blue banner with F*ck Putin written on it, the * being replaced by the Ukrainian trident
me talking about SMRU research to a class of high school pupils
A video shot from the bow of r/v Baleana under sail
Video of a northern bottlenose engaged in prolonged bout of lobtailing just before surfacing of others
Video of a bottlenose whale approaching the stern of r/v Balaena
Me at the navigation/science station on r/v Balaena with galley also in view
Dr Luke Rendel, a marine biologist at the University of St Andrews, calls this a 'poor cover for harassing animals in the wild'. Dr Rendle adds that the researchers also made 'no quantification of this behaviour and little attempt to do the hard work analyses that might give us some better insights as to why they do it.' Instead, Dr Rendle points out that this paper is more concerned with arguing that it is legitimate to keep orcas in captivity and observe them from tourist boats.
A video showing three monk seals interacting underwater with calls from our acoustic dataset being heard - they are assumed made by the seals in shot as they occur concurrently with specific proximate interactions between the seals
A video file that shows names of call types and plays the sounds concurrently
Spectrogram display showing time/frequency distribution of acoustic energy during a bout of calls identified as monk seal, showing call types croak, knock, scream and snort - the 4 most common
A post from the AltYellostonNatPark account stating that 'the keys that unlock communications [with whales] are just inches out of reach'
Dr Alec Burslem in front of his talk title slide about estimating body composition and condition in sperm whales
Dr Marie Louis in front of a slide depicting genetic population structure in Greenland narwhal
Daniel Norena in front of the title slide of his talk on body condition in Mediterranean sperm whales
Katie Rapson in front of a slide depicting how acoustically tracked harbour porpoises orient with respect to tidal flow
Joe Roman in front of a title slide about to give an inspiring plenary
Angela Amlin in front of a title slide of her talk about using neural networks to help remote monitoring of endangered monk seals
Emily Hague in front of her title slide of her systematic review of threats to marine mammals
Dr Cristina Brito in front of her title slide 'W is for World, Water, and Whale'
Ana Cañadas in front of a slide detailing the strengths of her multiple data source modelling approach
Augusta Hollers and a slide depicting energy supply and demand in humpback mothers
Anna Selbmann in front of a conclusions slide clarifying that we don't yet know if orca avoidance is due to a high cost of being 'caught' by pilot whales or a low cost of avoidance...
Anna Selbmann in front of a slide concluding that we can't know if orca avoidance is because they see pilot whales as a serious threat or the cost of avoidance is low
Bruno Diaz-Lopez in front of a title slide highlighting the talk title 'From quantity to quality'
Hal Whitehead in front of a slide describing the concept anonymous societies
Mark Simmonds stands in front of a title slide for his presentation on culture and conservation...
Marie-Anne Blanchet on stage with a slide showing whale movements tracks
Paul Wensveen summarising his results on stage in front of a slide display
Teatro Micaelense in Ponta Delgada dressed up for the 2025 ECS conference
Video of sailing in rough conditions with ironic commentary
Me jumping off anchored boat into water