Rocking and Rolling down to Sydney ...  the Great Whale Way:


The following is excerpted from The New Scientist.
Culture shock

They don't have orchestras or art galleries, tools or technology, but whales still have a rich and varied cultural life, says Stephanie Pain

THEY came. They sang. They conquered. When the Beatles first set foot in the US, they were a phenomenon.
When they sang, the girls screamed. American bands didn't wait to wonder why. They just did their best to sound like the Fab Four.

Thirty years on, a new pop phenomenon burst onto the scene--this time in Australia. In the winter of '96, a foreign group turned up singing a bizarre new song. This time the singers weren't four likely lads from Liverpool but a band of humpback whales that had accidentally strayed into the wrong ocean.

The wandering minstrels normally spent the winter in the waters of the Indian Ocean, off Australia's west coast.
That year they found themselves in the seas around the Great Barrier Reef. The song of the titanic troubadours was an instant hit. In no time at all, the east-coast males had abandoned their own song and taken up the new one. "To start with there were just a couple of whales singing a strange new song--then it just took over," says Mike Noad of the Australian Marine Mammal Research Centre in Sydney. Pop culture, fickle, faddish and unpredictable, is alive and well among Australia's humpback whales.


The notion that cetaceans have any sort of culture, popular or otherwise, is hotly disputed by some. Most social scientists stubbornly resist the idea that animals, even the great apes, have culture. After all, isn't it our languages and folklore, religion, music and all those other sophisticated strands of human culture that set us apart from the beasts? Clearly, whales and dolphins don't have art or literature; they have no architecture, agriculture or fancy cuisine. But patient observation over many years has begun to reveal behaviours that can only have been learned from other whales. And that, say whale biologists, constitutes culture.


"I used to use the C-word with some trepidation," says John Ford of the Vancouver Aquarium Marine Science Centre. But in recent years, he and other whale biologists have become emboldened by what they've found. Hal Whitehead and his colleague Luke Rendell, from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, have identified 17 types of behaviour by whales and dolphins which they say are aspects of culture. And this is just the start. "My impression is that there is a reasonable chance that a substantial proportion of whale behaviour is culture--behaviour they learned from other animals," says Whitehead.


Bold words. But mention of the C-word alongside cetaceans still provokes angry outbursts from social scientists. Even the definition of culture is hotly contested. In essence, the debate about whether animals have culture turns on the question of what they learn from each other and how they do this. At the very least, sceptics want evidence that cetaceans can acquire new behaviours through some form of social learning--preferably clear-cut instances of imitation or teaching. And that's not easy to come by. "When you're dealing with large animals that are impossible to keep in captivity, it's hard to prove exactly how behaviour is passed on," says Whitehead.


Few people doubt that captive bottlenose dolphins are adept at imitation. They can reproduce complex patterns of tones produced by human experimenters and can even mimic the body movements of sea lions that share their pool. There is also evidence that captive killer whales can mimic the calls of their tank mates. For biologists who want to learn about the cultural lives of any cetacean in its natural habitat, experiments are out of the question. They must rely on deduction. If members of a group share behaviours that are not the result of genetic inheritance or environmental variation, then they have almost certainly learned them by watching, following or listening to other animals.


So far, humpback and killer whales provide the best evidence of culture in cetaceans and the song of the male humpback is among the most striking examples. Humpback populations in different oceans sing distinctly different songs, but within the same ocean they all stick to much the same score. If that were all there was to it, then the song could be inherited, the males of each population programmed to sing the same song. But the song changes during the breeding season. One male might add an extra set of groans; another might drop a series of grunts. Soon all the other males have altered their own rendition to incorporate the changes until they are once again all singing the same song. The change is obviously not the result of a genetic mutation, nor can it be a response to some factor in the animals' environment--thousands of whales spread across a vast part of the planet sing along to the same tune. The only way all these animals can keep up with the latest version of the song is by learning the new song parts from other whales--almost certainly by imitation.


Culture plays an even bigger part in the life of killer whales. Nowhere is this more obvious than along the north-west coast of America where killer whales are split into two distinct populations--"residents" and "transients". They live in the same stretch of water, but they don't mingle. Their social structure and lifestyles are very different. They eat from a different menu and have devised their own specialised hunting strategies. And they communicate in different ways. In effect, they belong to two quite separate cultures. "Learning and behavioural traditions direct their lives more strikingly than genetic programming," says Ford, who has been studying these whales since the 1970s.


Residents live in stable pods made up of two or three mothers and their offspring--perhaps 20 whales in all. Calves stay with their mothers for life, and in more than 20 years of observation no one has ever seen a whale switch pods. Transients travel in smaller, more changeable groups of between three and six.