The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

1644 Pages·2014·6.66 MB·English

by  Hal Whitehead, Luke Rendell

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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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