Visual Laterality of Calf–Mother Interactions in Wild Whales

• Main Authors: Karina Karenina, Andrey Giljov, Vladimir Baranov, Ludmila Osipova, Vera Krasnova
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: White Sea; Beluga; Beluga*; Delphinapterus leucas
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.348.8980

Background: Behavioral laterality is known for a variety of vertebrate and invertebrate animals. Laterality in social interactions has been described for a wide range of species including humans. Although evidence and theoretical predictions indicate that in social species the degree of population level laterality is greater than in solitary ones, the origin of these unilateral biases is not fully understood. It is especially poorly studied in the wild animals. Little is known about the role, which laterality in social interactions plays in natural populations. A number of brain characteristics make cetaceans most suitable for investigation of lateralization in social contacts. Methodology/Principal Findings: Observations were made on wild beluga whales (Delphinapterus leucas) in the greatest breeding aggregation in the White Sea. Here we show that young calves (in 29 individually identified and in over a hundred of individually not recognized mother-calf pairs) swim and rest significantly longer on a mother’s right side. Further observations along with the data from other cetaceans indicate that found laterality is a result of the calves ’ preference to observe their mothers with the left eye, i.e., to analyze the information on a socially significant object in the right brain hemisphere. Conclusions/Significance: Data from our and previous work on cetacean laterality suggest that basic brain lateralizations are expressed in the same way in cetaceans and other vertebrates. While the information on social partners and novel