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The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins PDF

1644 Pages·2014·6.66 MB·English
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THE CULTURAL LIVES OF WHALES AND DOLPHINS THE CULTURAL LIVES OF WHALES AND DOLPHINS HAL WHITEHEAD AND LUKE RENDELL The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London Hal Whitehead is a University Research Professor in the Department of Biology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. 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. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2015 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2015. Printed in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-89531-4 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-22618742-6 (e-book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/ 9780226187426.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Whitehead, Hal, author. The cultural lives of whales and dolphins / Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell. pages ; cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-226-89531-4 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-226-89531-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0- 22618742-6 (e-book) 1. Whales. 2. Dolphins. 3. Social behavior in animals. 4. Animal communication. I. Rendell, Luke, 1973– author. II. Title. QL737.C4W47 2015 599.5—dc23 2014020610 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper). Dedicated to the memory of CHRIS RENDELL and FRANKIE WHITEHEAD 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 Plates 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 1 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 2 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 3 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 4 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 5 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

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Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.