Cover Picture and Issue Information

This issue’s cover image shows three sperm whales ( Physeter macrocephalus ) beginning to dive in calm waters off the Galápagos Islands. As they descend, these whales will make Morse‐code‐like patterns of clicks, called codas, that convey their cultural identity. In their article, Hersh et al. present a new method that uses contaminated mixture models and hierarchical clustering to detect potential biological structure in acoustic datasets, such as sperm whale coda datasets. By looking for redundant, stereotyped, and distinct ‘identity calls’, the method was able to detect sperm whale cultures, wren subspecies, and cricket species. For taxa that readily vocalize but are cryptic or difficult to access, this method could help quantify behavioural diversity and population structure. Photo credit: ©Whitehead Lab.