Whales’ alliances, their intricate conversations, and how they attract mates or care for their young seem eerily familiar. The mysteries we’re unraveling reveal creatures a lot like us
, and in the Pacific Northwest’s killer whales. The possibility is prompting new thinking about how some marine species evolve. Cultural traditions may help drive genetic shifts, altering what it means to be a whale. But this idea is also reshaping our view of what separates us from these aquatic beasts. Whale culture, it seems, is rattling timeworn conceptions of ourselves.A sperm whale calf scientists named Hope rests in a sargassum patch.
While genes determine the shape and function of a creature’s body, encoding instructions for essential traits and behaviors, social learning is received wisdom, the development of neural connections that let animals learn from the knowledge of those around them. Scientists generally agree that culture requires that behaviors be socially learned and shared widely, and that they persist.
For years scientists thought animals were incapable of broad, sustained, intergenerational sharing. That notion began changing in 1953. That year, a young macaque, Imo, was spotted on Koshima island, Japan, washing a sweet potato in a stream. Before then, the island’s macaques simply wiped dirt off their food. Soon, scientists documented macaques by the dozens washing them instead. Long after Imo died, macaques still carted potatoes to shore to dunk them in the sea.
Since 2005, the adjunct professor at Denmark’s Aarhus University and Canada’s Carleton and Dalhousie Universities has come to this glittering swirl of sargassum and spray to study these leviathans. Rather than finding a “monomaniac incarnation” of “malicious agencies” as Herman Melville described the sperm whale inGero sees peaceful, playful animals. He can identify dozens on sight.
Sperm whales use the world’s largest brains to operate nature’s largest sonar system. They send pressurized air through their snout, creating clicking sounds. They string these clicks together in rhythmic codas, rather like Morse code. Each coda lasts seconds or less. Some are three clicks; some may be a dozen or more. Over decades Whitehead recorded clicks by the thousands.A killer whale off New Zealand hunts rays.
The idea that whales have cultures at all, let alone that they segregate themselves into cultural groups as humans do, was controversial when Whitehead and Rendell presented it in 2001. “It is sad to see such rich empirical material, about such wonderful creatures, harnessed to such an impoverished theoretical agenda,” one British anthropologist sneered.
Every unit does this differently. Some let the young slip beneath their bellies to suckle. In some units, calves get watched by nonrelatives, but get milk only from mom. In Rounder’s group, moms and grandmothers share babysitting and nursing duties, but only for calves in their bloodline. In another, one female plays wet nurse to two calves at once—even though neither is hers.
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