Dynamic Horizontal Cultural Transmission of Humpback Whale Song at the Ocean Basin Scale

Cultural transmission, the social learning of information or behaviors from conspecifics [1–5], is believed to occur in a number of groups of animals, including primates [1, 6–9], cetaceans [4, 10, 11], and birds [3, 12, 13]. Cultural traits can be passed vertically (from parents to offspring), obli...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Current biology 2011-04, Vol.21 (8), p.687-691
Main Authors: Garland, Ellen C., Goldizen, Anne W., Rekdahl, Melinda L., Constantine, Rochelle, Garrigue, Claire, Hauser, Nan Daeschler, Poole, M. Michael, Robbins, Jooke, Noad, Michael J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animals
Cetacea
Humpback Whale - physiology
Imitative Behavior
Learning
Male
Marine
Megaptera novaeangliae
Pacific Ocean
Social Behavior
Sound Spectrography
Time Factors
Vocalization, Animal
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Summary:Cultural transmission, the social learning of information or behaviors from conspecifics [1–5], is believed to occur in a number of groups of animals, including primates [1, 6–9], cetaceans [4, 10, 11], and birds [3, 12, 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” [14–17] that functions in sexual selection (through mate attraction and/or male social sorting) [18–20]. 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, 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. ► Humpback whale songs have repeatedly moved east across the South Pacific ► The songs moved across the region in a series of cultural waves ► The waves frequently caused complete “cultural revolution” of the song ► The scale, rate, and repetition of these cultural changes are unparalleled
ISSN:0960-9822
1879-0445
DOI:10.1016/j.cub.2011.03.019