The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

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Overview

“An astonishing, unconstrained exploration of the nature and practice of cetacean culture . . . a revolutionary book.” —Philip Hoare, author of The Whale

In the songs and bubble feeding of humpback whales; in young killer whales learning to knock a seal from an ice floe in the same way their mother does; and in the use of sea sponges by the dolphins of Shark Bay, Australia, to protect their beaks while foraging for fish, we find clear examples of the transmission of information among cetaceans. Just as human cultures pass on languages and turns of phrase, tastes in food (and in how it is acquired), and modes of dress, could whales and dolphins have developed a culture of their very own?

Unequivocally: yes. In The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins, cetacean biologists Hal Whitehead, who has spent much of his life on the ocean trying to understand whales, and Luke Rendell, whose research focuses on the evolution of social learning, open an astounding porthole onto the fascinating culture beneath the waves. As Whitehead and Rendell show, cetacean culture and its transmission are shaped by a blend of adaptations, innate sociality, and the unique environment in which whales and dolphins live.

Drawing on their own research as well as a scientific literature as immense as the sea—including evolutionary biology, animal behavior, ecology, anthropology, psychology, and neuroscience—Whitehead and Rendell dive into realms both humbling and enlightening as they seek to define what cetacean culture is, why it exists, and what it means for the future of whales and dolphins. And, ultimately, what it means for our future, as well.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780226187426
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publication date: 12/22/2022
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 632
Sales rank: 930,365
File size: 24 MB
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About the Author

Hal Whitehead is a University Research Professor in the Department of Biology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and the author of Sperm Whales: Social Evolution in the Ocean and Analyzing Animal Societies, both published by the University of Chicago Press. Supported by the Marine Alliance for Science and Technology, Luke Rendell is a lecturer in biology at the Sea Mammal Research Unit and the Centre for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution of the University of St Andrews, Scotland.

Read an Excerpt

The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins


By Hal Whitehead, Luke Rendell

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-89531-4



CHAPTER 1

CULTURE IN THE OCEAN?


Ocean of Song

We love wilderness, the parts of the earth where humans have little impact. So much of the planet is eroded, polluted, and dominated by people. Well, not people directly. It is rarely the mere physical presence of large numbers of humans that degrades—it is, rather, what we do, as well as our products, our methods of exploiting the land, the plants, and the animals, the effluents of our industries, and the things that we build. All these are the results of human culture, the body of knowledge, skills, customs, and materials that each generation inherits and builds on and that surround us every moment of our lives. We are born with the genetic template of Homo sapiens, but we cannot become fully human without what we learn from each other. Human culture accumulates, so the good can become very, very good—like the routine treatment of medical conditions lethal not a century ago—and the bad, such as our pollution of the earth and its atmosphere, can get worse. This feature of our societies is a large part of what makes humans unique. The effects of our cultures are very nearly omnipresent, affecting the entire earth. The one major part of our planet's surface where humans and our cultures are least apparent is the deep ocean.

So we love to sail the deep ocean. Unless crossing a shipping lane, a fishing ground, or a garbage-strewn central-ocean gyre, we see few signs of humans outside our twelve-meter sailing boat. Out here, it would be easy to believe we have managed to escape the mess humanity has made of the earth. In reality, we have not. There are far fewer turtles and sharks and whales than even a hundred years ago, before humans learned such effective ways of killing them. The deep- ocean waters are more polluted and acidic than they used to be. But it feels like wilderness. We do not directly see the lack of ocean wildlife—or the pollutants.

Far out in the ocean, we have escaped the vast dominance of human cultural impact, although to make this escape we have to use the seafaring knowledge and technology that humans have built up over many generations. This accumulation began before 5,000 B.C., when the earliest known depictions of sailing boats appeared (plate 1). Fishers in developing countries use simple sailing boats, basically logs with some piece of material for the wind to catch, which have not changed much for millennia. But during the late Middle Ages sailing ships became some of the most technologically advanced elements of human culture, and human mobility took a great stride forward. The yachts we sail for our research, with their fiberglass hulls, stainless-steel fittings, and Dacron sails, are technological descendants of those ships (plate 2). They are products of a system of cumulative cultural evolution that allow humans to cross oceans reasonably reliably, a remarkable achievement for a terrestrial mammal.

As we sail, every half hour we listen to the ocean through a hydrophone, an underwater microphone towed behind our boat on a hundred-meter cable. We hear waves, and sometimes dolphins. Quite often there is the deep rumble of ships. We can hear the ships farther than we can see them, and their rumble signifies that this is not the wilderness that it appears.

Despite this, on recent voyages through the Sargasso Sea in the western North Atlantic, we heard another type of sound more often than the whistles of dolphins or the throb of ships. Not one sound, but an extraordinary range of sounds, high sweeping squeals, low swoops, barking, and ratchets. All are part of the song of the humpback whale. In February 2008 we heard humpbacks at 45 percent of our half-hourly hydrophone listening stations over two thousand kilometers of ocean between Bermuda and Antigua. As we will explain later, we think that humpback song is a form of nonhuman culture. A humpback whale learns the song from other humpback whales and passes it on. Some liken it to human music, others to the songs of birds; it has elements of both. Within the frequencies that we can hear on our hydrophone and over thousands of kilometers of ocean, the culture of the humpback whale dominates the acoustic environment of the ocean, as it has for millions of years. Human cultural supremacy over the surface of the earth is recent and not quite complete. If we could have listened at lower frequencies, below the limits of the human ear, we would have heard rumbles and groans of other whales—the finback and the blue—their songs competing in the lowest frequency bands with the recent sound of ships. Could these be other nonhuman cultures?

This book is about the culture of the whales and dolphins, known collectively as the cetaceans. What is it? Does it even exist? If it does, why? What might it mean? It is also about our evolving understanding of nonhuman societies and, through them, what it means to be human. We are carried by rafts of insights hard won from the oceans by scientists all over the world.


"Culture Changes Everything"

To biologists like us, culture is a flow of information moving from animal to animal. The movement of information is the basis of biology. Life happens and creatures evolve because information is transferred. Every new piece of life is built from templates of other life. Most of these templates are genes, and we have learned an immense amount about the living world from biologists' focus on genes. But there are other ways of moving information around. The great evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith identified cultural inheritance, this process of learning from others, as the most recent major evolutionary transition in the history of life on earth. He labeled it "much the most important modification" of genetically based evolutionary theory. So an animal may eat a certain food because of preferences largely coded in its genes or because it learned from others that the food is good. An animal may also develop preferences through individual learning, for instance, working out that something is good to eat through its own experimentation. In fact, virtually all the information that moves around through cultural processes originates in this way. However, individual learning on its own does not involve information transfer between organisms and so cannot transform biology in the manner that cultural transmission does.

These processes can interact in different ways. A bird may have the genetically driven instinct to migrate but learn the route from others. Some behavior can be acquired either way. For instance the calls of cuckoos (and many other birds) can mostly develop without social inputs, whereas canaries, finches, and other birds in the oscine suborder learn at least some aspects of their song from others, so their song is a form of culture. Genetic determination and social learning are, however, fundamentally different processes. Tellingly, the cultural songs of the oscine birds are generally more complex, sometimes much more so, and more diverse than the genetically driven nonoscine calls.

We use the phrase "genetic determination" with respect to behavior here and will do so again. However, we do this as shorthand. What we really mean is a large genetically inherited causal component. Genes do not code for behavior—they code for proteins and control the production of those proteins. How genes come to affect behavior is a complex process, intertwined with other factors such as development, maternal effects, and environmental experiences, a system that we still do not fully understand. Biologists have left behind the nature/nurture debate, for good reason, and we have no desire at all to resurrect it here. Unfortunately, discussing the various ways an animal comes to behave the way it does quickly becomes tedious in the extreme without using shorthand in this way. Nearly all behavior that has been well studied is found to require some form of experience to develop properly. It is also true that there are species-typical behaviors that develop even among animals raised in isolation and that vary across populations in ways that are completely consistent with a relatively large genetically inherited causal component. This is what we mean by "genetic determination." It can be contrasted with behavior that requires a significant social input to develop fully. It does not mean we should expect to find a gene "for" that behavior. Contrary to what you might read in the popular press, things are just more complicated than that.

Human language is another example of these complex interactions. While still arguing about the details, most who have studied its evolution conclude that we are born with a genetic template that allows us to learn a language effortlessly between the ages of one and four, but the language we learn is completely determined by social input during this period—we learn it from others. It is part of our culture.

Animals, including humans, acquire their culture in fundamentally different ways from their genes. During sexual reproduction the genes from two parents shape the new offspring, and in asexual reproduction there is just one parent. These genes are present at the beginning of a life and stay more or less unchanged until death or before being passed on. In contrast, culture may be acquired at any age, from a wide range of models, including parents, siblings, peers, teachers, role models, and, in our material-based culture, media like books and web servers. In many cases recipients actively choose the culture giver. Cultural information from various sources may be combined and altered and then passed on with different content or in a different form. A mother teaches her daughter a recipe for a cake. From watching TV chefs and talking to her friends the daughter adds new ingredients. One day she accidentally cooks the cake at a higher temperature. It tastes better. The improved cake recipe is passed on to her son. In contrast the genes the son received from his mother that, together with those from his father, determine his eye color are virtually identical to those she received from her parents. As another example, we trace many of the methods that we use to study sperm whales at sea, such as identifying individuals using photographs and tracking groups using directional hydrophones (underwater microphones), to innovations made our colleague Jonathan Gordon during the 1980s. With Jonathan aboard, the sailing was a backdrop to tinkering, as he worked on methods that could allow us to begin to understand the whales. Wires ran hither and yon, devices were attached here and there. Jonathan would climb the mast to take photographs of the whales lying parallel to the horizon and thus measure them—that worked—and attach underwater cameras to the boat to watch them underwater—that didn't. Many of Jonathan's techniques were inspired by field methods introduced by the American scientists Roger and Katherine Payne for right and humpback whales a decade earlier, and these in turn had roots in the work of terrestrial scientists like Jane Goodall. Both the photo- identification and tracking of sperm whales have increased in efficiency since the 1980s with experience and technical developments such as digital cameras and on-board processing of sounds, as well as the incorporation of new research methods such as the collection of sloughed skin for genetic analysis. These are the techniques we show to our students, who will develop them further in the decades to come. Cake baking, sperm whale science, and most other human behavior develops from a complex blend of cultural inputs.

So the cultural transfer of information is, potentially at least, much more flexible than genetic reproduction. The products of genes change only on intergenerational timescales. In some cases, especially when a culture is conformist and learned largely from parents, it can be as stable as the products of genes—elements of Judaism, for example, have changed little over thousands of years, but few would argue that the religion could exist without cultural transmission. At the other end of the scale, when culture is learned primarily from peers, it can be highly ephemeral, spreading fast and dying faster—think pop music or fashion. For a short time such cultures—whether a boy band or a "seasonal look"—can have immense influence on behavior, and then they are gone. The abilities to meld cultures and modify them before passing them on allows for the rapid evolution of extraordinary cultural products: jumbo jets and the Internet, hip-hop and nouveau cuisine. Even when culture does not accumulate it can be very useful, basically because other individuals are a rich vein of information about what works and what does not.

So, when culture takes hold of a species, everything changes. Extraordinary new ideas are developed from old ideas and passed on. Things are produced. The things can be technology or art or language or political systems. Interactions with the environment change. New ways of exploiting, polluting, or caring for the earth arise. Nations and ethnicities are formed. And it all feeds back into genetic evolution as those able to deal effectively with all this information and its consequences do better, living longer and having more offspring survive. But there is more. In the words of Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd: humans' "extreme reliance on culture fundamentally transforms many aspects of the evolutionary process. The evolutionary potential of culture makes possible unprecedented adaptations like our modern complex societies based on cooperation with unrelated people, and some almost equally spectacular maladaptation, such as the collapse of fertility in these same modern societies." The result is the extraordinary evolutionary and ecological trajectory of modern Homo sapiens over the past ten to twenty thousand years. Culture is the principal reason why humans are so different from other species. But, in terms of the significance of culture, are we so different from all other species?


The Idea of Whale Culture

In the 1960s people started to study whales and dolphins in the wild, spending significant time observing their behavior. Over the next twenty years, they grew to know cetaceans a little, but that little was enough for the beginning of speculation on the role of culture in their lives. Most prominent among these pioneers was Ken Norris (fig. 1.1). The American zoologist inspired numerous friends, colleagues, and students—the next generation of whale and dolphin scientists, many of whom he supervised—as well as interested members of the public. He gave us a new view of cetaceans as intensely social animals. A superb naturalist, fine scientist, and generous teacher, Norris spent a good part of his life with whales and dolphins, both wild and captive. He observed carefully and devised new ways of looking at the animals. He talked and wrote in a folksy way, but he was clear and careful in what he said. In 1980 Norris felt that dolphin "learning capabilities provide for a high level of flexibility in nature and this is translated into local variations in group behavior that we might call culture." By 1988 he went further, concluding that some of the social patterns that he observed were "clearly cultural."

That cetacean social patterns are cultural is a radical concept, but, despite Norris's insight and eloquence, the idea of cetacean culture stayed mostly beneath the surface of cetology, the study of whales and dolphins, during the remainder of the twentieth century. However, over the last decade or so, the idea of whale culture has taken a stake in the awareness of scientists and reached the general public. The idea may be out there, but there is little clarity as to its extent or what it means. In 2001 we published a scientific review titled "Culture in Whales and Dolphins." It received thirty-nine commentaries from academics in a wide range of disciplines with perspectives ranging from "a whale of a tale: calling it culture doesn't help" to "culture among cetaceans has important philosophical implications ... [they] should now be included with us in an extended moral community." These reactions emphasize both the difficulties some scientists had with our interpretation of the evidence, as well the potentially profound implications if it were to be accepted.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins by Hal Whitehead, Luke Rendell. Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1
Culture in the Ocean?

Chapter 2
Culture?

Chapter 3
Mammals of the Ocean

Chapter 4
Song of the Whale

Chapter 5
What the Dolphins Do

Chapter 6
Mother Cultures of the Large Toothed Whales

Chapter 7
How Do They Do It?

Chapter 8
Is This Evidence for Culture?

Chapter 9
How the Whales Got Culture

Chapter 10
Whale Culture and Whale Genes

Chapter 11
The Implications of Culture: Ecosystems, Individuals, Stupidity, and Conservation

Chapter 12
The Cultural Whales: How We See Them and How We Treat Them

This Book Came From and Is Built On . . .

Notes
Bibliography
Index

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