Humpback Whale Songs Spread Eastward Like the Latest Pop Tune
“... "Our findings reveal cultural change on a vast scale," said Ellen Garland, a graduate student at The University of Queensland. Multiple songs moved like "cultural ripples from one population to another, causing all males to change their song to a new version." This is the first time that such broad-scale and population-wide cultural exchange has been documented in any species other than humans, she added.”
Hopefully we can crank out a few more of these studies before we've finished eating the whales' choicest cuts and consigning the carcass remnants to the briny deep.
Dynamic Horizontal Cultural Transmission of Humpback Whale Song at the Ocean Basin Scale
Cultural transmission, the social learning of information or behaviors from conspecifics [[1], [2], [3], [4] and [5]], is believed to occur in a number of groups of animals, including primates [[1], [6], [7], [8] and [9]], cetaceans [[4], [10] and [11]], and birds [[3], [12] and [13]]. Cultural traits can be passed vertically (from parents to offspring), obliquely (from the previous generation via a nonparent model to younger individuals), or horizontally (between unrelated individuals from similar age classes or within generations) [4]. Male humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) have a highly stereotyped, repetitive, and progressively evolving vocal sexual display or “song” [[14], [15], [16] and [17]] that functions in sexual selection (through mate attraction and/or male social sorting) [[18], [19] and [20]]. All males within a population conform to the current version of the display (song type), and similarities may exist among the songs of populations within an ocean basin [[16], [17] and [21]]. Here we present a striking pattern of horizontal transmission: multiple song types spread rapidly and repeatedly in a unidirectional manner, like cultural ripples, eastward through the populations in the western and central South Pacific over an 11-year period. This is the first documentation of a repeated, dynamic cultural change occurring across multiple populations at such a large geographic scale.
“... "Our findings reveal cultural change on a vast scale," said Ellen Garland, a graduate student at The University of Queensland. Multiple songs moved like "cultural ripples from one population to another, causing all males to change their song to a new version." This is the first time that such broad-scale and population-wide cultural exchange has been documented in any species other than humans, she added.”
Hopefully we can crank out a few more of these studies before we've finished eating the whales' choicest cuts and consigning the carcass remnants to the briny deep.
Dynamic Horizontal Cultural Transmission of Humpback Whale Song at the Ocean Basin Scale
Cultural transmission, the social learning of information or behaviors from conspecifics [[1], [2], [3], [4] and [5]], is believed to occur in a number of groups of animals, including primates [[1], [6], [7], [8] and [9]], cetaceans [[4], [10] and [11]], and birds [[3], [12] and [13]]. Cultural traits can be passed vertically (from parents to offspring), obliquely (from the previous generation via a nonparent model to younger individuals), or horizontally (between unrelated individuals from similar age classes or within generations) [4]. Male humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) have a highly stereotyped, repetitive, and progressively evolving vocal sexual display or “song” [[14], [15], [16] and [17]] that functions in sexual selection (through mate attraction and/or male social sorting) [[18], [19] and [20]]. All males within a population conform to the current version of the display (song type), and similarities may exist among the songs of populations within an ocean basin [[16], [17] and [21]]. Here we present a striking pattern of horizontal transmission: multiple song types spread rapidly and repeatedly in a unidirectional manner, like cultural ripples, eastward through the populations in the western and central South Pacific over an 11-year period. This is the first documentation of a repeated, dynamic cultural change occurring across multiple populations at such a large geographic scale.
Edited: 2011-04-17, 7:33 pm