[Fish]

Whales use rhymes in their long complex songs..

"When scientists talk about whales singing songs, they're not talking about mere noise. They're talking about intricate, stylized compositions - some longer than symphonic movements - performed in medleys that can last up to 22 hours. The songs of humpback whales can change dramatically from year to year, yet each whale in an oceanwide population always sings the same song as the others. How, with the form changing so fast, does everyone keep the verses straight? Biologists Linda Guinee and Katharine Payne have been looking into the matter, and they have come up with an intriguing possibility. It seems that humpbacks, like humans, use rhyme."

Humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) sing long, complex songs which continually change over time. In certain time periods the songs contain repeating patterns which structurally resemble human rhyming, and which, like human rhyming, tend to occur in highly rhythmical contexts. We speculate that humpback whales may use these repetitions as mnemonic devices, much as humans are thought to use rhymes. With this speculation in mind we examine 548 humpback whale songs from 7 years in the eastern North Pacific and 12 years in the western North Atlantic oceans. We find that rhyme-like structures are most likely to occur in songs containing the most material to be remembered.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/1...718.x/abstract