Washington, October 27 Whales are polite conversationalists, as they can spot rhythms in the ocean filled with the calls of marine animals, scientists claim.

The marine biologists at the Littoral Acoustic Demonstration Center have come up with a device that can spot these rhythms and identify individual animals.

With the help of this latest technique they have learnt that whales make a specific effort to keep their calls from overlapping.

They will present their study at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) in San Antonio.

Also, Natalia Sidorovskaia with her colleagues at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette have noted that whales change the intervals between these echolocating clicks in a way that seems to prevent cluttering the echoes from these calls.

"In other words, whales are polite listeners; they do not interrupt each other," Sidorovskaia said. (ANI)