Foraging behaviour of many cetacean species features the side biases at the population level. The origin of these behavioural lateralisations remains generally unclear. Here we explored lateralisation in aerial display of resident orcas in different behavioural contexts. Side preferences were analysed in lunging during foraging and breaching. One event of each type of displays per individually identified orca was used for analysis. Orcas showed a population-level preference to lunge on the right side when foraging (75% of lunges). In contrast, no lateralisation was found in breaching (54% of breaches to the right, 45% to the left). The right-sided bias in foraging found in orcas is in line with evidence from other whales, both baleen and toothed, and confirms the uniformity of feeding biases among cetaceans. In contrast to breaching, lunging in orcas was associated with fish pursuit, that is, with focused attention to and sensory perception of prey stimulus. The emergence of lateralisation in lunging and the absence of significant bias in breaching suggest that feeding biases in whales are underpinned by sensory lateralisation, that is, by lateralised hemispheric processing of sensory information about the prey. Evidence from orcas may be extrapolated to other cetaceans since right-sided biases in lunging during foraging is a very widespread phenomenon and likely to have a common origin. Our findings support the hypothesis that right-sided feeding biases are determined by left-hemisphere specialisation.

Northeast Pacific resident-type killer whales (Orcinus orca) are known to form stable associations based on kinship between maternal relatives (matrilines) with a system of vocal dialects thought to reflect kinship relationships. We analyzed association patterns and acoustic similarity to study the social organization of killer whales in Avacha Gulf (Kamchatka, Russia), in the Northwest Pacific. The resident-type killer whales of Avacha Gulf formed temporally stable units that included maternal relatives with no dispersal observed. Acoustically, the killer whale community of Avacha Gulf was characterized by a system of dialects comparable to the communities of Northeast Pacific residenttype killer whales. Different units rarely associated with each other and these associations were nonrandom. Associations at different spatial levels did not always coincide with each other and with the patterns of acoustic similarity. Associations between units could change quickly irrespective of kinship relationships. The vocal dialect of a unit, which is more stable than the association patterns between units, might better reflect the overall kinship relationships. The stability and frequency of associations between units depended on the number of mature males in a unit, which could contribute to differences in the speed of change in vocal dialects and association patterns.

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In fish-eating North Pacific killer whales, large multi-pod aggregations of up to 100 animals often occur. These aggregations are thought to be reproductive gatherings where mating between members of different pods takes place. However, killer whales are social animals, and the role of these aggregations might also be establishing and maintaining social bonds between pods. Alternatively, it is also possible that multi-pod aggregations are in some way connected with foraging or searching for fish. In this study of killer whales in the western North Pacific, we describe multi-pod aggregations quantitatively and suggest their functional role in the life of fish-eating killer whales. We show that foraging is rare in multi-pod aggregations, whether inter-clan or intra-clan, and thus they are unlikely to play an important role in cooperative foraging. Socialising occurs more frequently in inter-clan rather than in intra-clan aggregations, which suggests the higher arousal level and possible mating during inter-clan aggregations. In summary, multi-pod aggregations of Kamchatka killer whales might be both reproductive assemblages and ''clubs'' of some kind in which whales gather to establish and maintain social bonds.

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Many social animals have cultural traditions that may shape their societies while the social structure can in turn influence how the culture is acquired. Killer whales possess culturally transmitted dialects. The divergence of dialects was thought to occur simultaneously and consistently with the gradual fission of matrilines. In this paper we compare the social associations across matrilineal units, Bayesian phylogeny of dialects and similarity of particular syllables to test whether dialects affect social structure and whether associations or common origin define similarity of call types. We found that neither phylogeny of dialects nor similarity of syllables was correlated to associations between matrilineal units, but similarity of syllables was correlated to phylogeny of dialects for four of the six syllables analysed. The complexity and fluidity of social ties between matrilineal units and the variation in cultural transmission patterns produce a complex relationship between the social network and the socially learned vocalizations.

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