The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins Quotes

“renowned biologist and thinker E. O. Wilson calls the study of gene-culture coevolution “one of the great unexplored domains of science.”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“then social learning is, down the line, affecting the genetic structure of the species.”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“Because culture is learned socially, we generally think of social structure as a driver of culture, but these examples suggest the reverse, that cultural behavior can shape society.”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“The cooperatives seem to have ended with the advent of Europeans along the coast, Europeans who on occasion killed the cooperative dolphins. There”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“is a specialized behavior and, as a consequence, only occurs in areas where the ecology is right—where prey and sponges are available.34”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“Removing the ink, containing the pigment melanin that inhibits secretions in the digestive system, as well as other chemicals that apparently impair taste and smell, would, the scientists state, “improve palatability and internal digestive processes.”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“This degree of specialization is not expected unless it takes some practice to drive fish well. It is not clear why certain dolphins become specialized like this—they don’t obviously seem to get more fish and surely use more energy herding than do their comrades, waiting for their food to arrive.”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“superalliance, a”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“If you’re going to run into your enemies, you better be with your friends, or have some that are close by, willing to be recruited.”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“This analysis demonstrates how ecology and culture can interact with each other—ecologically, the availability of a particular prey item, the sand lance, was varying over time. At some point, one bright, or lucky, humpback figured out that hitting the water with his or her tail did something to the sand lance (perhaps causing them to bunch together more, making the shoal easier to enclose with a bubble net), and since then this trick has been spread and maintained in the population by cultural transmission. The”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“There is one variant of bubble feeding where the case is stronger for its being culturally based, and this is because, as with the songs of humpback, bowhead, and blue whales, there has been a change in the population’s behavior over timescales of less than a generation. The behavior is called lobtail feeding, which is a variant on the bubble-cloud feeding that we described a little earlier. The”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“The scientists reviewing McDonald’s paper were fine with a discussion of a frankly tenuous hypothesis that ocean acidification could affect the frequencies of blue whale song, but would not, he felt, be open to an explanation that would be near the top of the list were this the behavior of humans, rather than blue whales: cultural drive propagating around the world.”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“This is all speculation, as are our ideas about the overall functions of the songs. However, what we do know about the humpback song is that it is an important part of the acoustic ecology of the ocean; that it is loud, long, complex, beautiful; and that it is culture.”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“The characteristics of the dynamics of humpback whale song, evolution at a rather steady rate, with occasional revolutions, match those of human art, music, and literature. In his 1990 book, The Clockwork Muse, Colin Martindale shows that trends over time in human art and music fit with laws derived from what we know of human psychology and the principles of cultural evolution.”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“In this scenario, complexity and change may be driven by female choice.83”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“Humpback song has clearly had its effects on human culture—influencing both our music and whaling practices—but what of our interest in whale culture? These discoveries are particularly important for us because there is only one way large numbers of animals can sing the same song that evolves over periods of time that are much less than an individual’s lifetime: culture. Genes”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“People listened to whale songs, and politicians listened to the whale-song listening people and, then, finally, acted on the warnings of the population biologist Cassandras. The”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“The first time I ever recorded the songs of the humpback whales at night was off Bermuda. It was also the first time I had ever heard the abyss. Normally you don’t hear the size of the ocean when you are listening, but I heard it that night . . . That’s what whales do; they give the ocean its voice, and the voice they give is ethereal and unearthly.”44”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“The bowhead lives its life extremely slowly, becoming sexually mature at about age twenty-five, with females giving birth every seven years or so; if it avoids the whalers, a bowhead has a good chance of living well past a century.19 It is definitively the”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“Culture needs a community of social relationships over which the knowledge flows. At”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“We pay large costs, particularly in energy costs and birthing difficulties, for our cognitive apparatus. Is this another cultural consequence?47”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“So, we can think of the absolute size of a brain as indicating, in a very general way, its cognitive power, while its relative size is a measure of how hard evolution had to struggle to get it that big. Hence, from this perspective, it is easier for larger animals to be smarter, and they generally are. The human brain is big in absolute terms. But it is much more remarkable in relative terms; we devote a lot of our energy to maintaining it, and human females don’t always have an easy time getting that large-brained baby through their pelvises. It seems that large brains were tremendously important to humans during our evolution, and it was worth paying considerable costs to possess them. In”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“However, there are actually few good data, or much theory, as to why relative brain size is the best indicator of cognitive ability, other than a general feeling that large animals need large brains. Instead, there is increasing evidence from structural analyses of brains, as well as from attempts to test species with different-sized brains on comparable tasks, that absolute size may be a better general measure of cognitive ability.”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“The terrestrial heritage of the marine mammals is evident in their air breathing and its consequences for metabolic rates, size, and sound production. There is one other characteristic of the marine mammals and especially the cetaceans that is remarkable among marine creatures, but is less obviously tied to air breathing: their brains.”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“The sound-producing organs of their terrestrial ancestors, their larynxes, evolved to make louder and more complex sounds. For instance, dolphins have two nasal passages and two sets of sound-producing organs and can simultaneously produce two different sounds. The”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“give birth to precocious offspring, able to swim immediately after birth and so to follow their mothers through their fluid world. For”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“Their myoglobin, which holds oxygen in the muscles, evolved to become more electrically charged and therefore better at holding onto oxygen, so their muscles became huge oxygen stores.”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“Newborns can be up to 20 percent of their mother’s mass in the smaller cetacean species. This is extreme. Few, if any, large terrestrial mammals give birth to young that are more than 15 percent of their own weight.26 The minimum size for a newborn marine mammal seems to be about 0.6 meters long and five kilograms.”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“In fact, on land the amount of change in the environment is quite similar over a wide range of scales of both time and space, once regular cycles like day-night and season have been accounted for. This pattern, in which variability is similar over a range of scales, is sometimes called white noise, as the color white is an equal mixture of short and long wavelength electromagnetic radiation. In”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

“Going down, light levels decrease so that at depths of more than a few hundred meters there is no photosynthesis, and, with a few remarkable exceptions, no primary productivity.19 Life in the dark ocean is largely dependent on what comes down from the surface waters. A few hundred meters is also the depth of the oxygen minimum layer, where dissolved oxygen is so scarce that animals with gills—that is most marine animals—are in a bind. Some, like the vampire squid, have evolved physiologies to deal with low oxygen levels, but all must use energy sparingly.”
― Hal Whitehead, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins