Dynamic horizontal cultural transmission of humpback whale song at the ocean basin scale

• Published in: Current Biology
• 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 in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: 2011
• Subjects: Megaptera-novaeangliae; Breeding grounds; Chimpanzees; Pacific; Humpback Whale; Megaptera novaeangliae
• Online Access: https://research-portal.st-andrews.ac.uk/en/publications/f4c121e6-8855-4912-9f61-f556857d975b; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2011.03.019

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.