Sometimes, natural events happen that lay a great backdrop for scientists to learn more about the natural world. In 2007, New England’s humpback whales all across the population were preforming a new technique that had originated only 27 years earlier. Jenny Allen and her colleagues took this opportunity to determine how behaviors are spread through a population. In April of 2013, these scientists published a report called “Network-Based Diffusion Analysis Reveals Cultural Transmission of Lobtail Feeding in Humpback Whales” in Science, which looked into this new behavior and how it became so widespread in the New England humpback whale population.
Before 1980, the humpback whales of the New England area primarily preyed on herring. When the herring population crashed in this area in the early 1980’s, the whales turned to a new fish as their primary prey: the sand lance. After this change in primary prey, a whale was seen preforming an all-new foraging technique, wherein it slapped the surface of the water right before eating. This technique creates bubbles underwater that group the sand lance together into a cluster, which makes it easier for the whales to hunt them. By 2007, forty percent of the population was using this technique. Allen and her colleagues hypothesized that the high prevalence of the technique was due to either social learning or widespread individual discovery.
Deciding if a behavior is socially transmitted is difficult, especially because it is hard to track and observe marine animals such as whales. Allen and her co-researchers went about their study by taking 27 years of data on the observed behaviors of humpback whales and making a model, which compared the spread of the technique with the network of social relationships in the population. If the spread of the technique matched the network of social relationships, it would be postulated that the whales had learned this behavior socially. The results of their model demonstrated that there was in fact a significant correlation between social networks and behavior spread among these whales. Therefore, Allen and her team concluded that social learning was the most probable explanation for the spread of the behavior, rather than individual discovery of this technique. Very little evidence of this type of learning in animals had been seen before in nonhuman animals. This evidence can provide information on how animals communicate and progress as species.
Shortly after the publication of this study, the University of St Andrews, the original source of the research, put out a press release in Science Daily, which described the study and presented it to a general audience. The press release displays all of the information accurately. It differs, however, in that it is more readable than the original report because of its use of common language and short length. In addition, it focuses much more on the results than on the methods. This mode of presentation is effective because a reader can quickly read the press release and then move on to the report if the press release was effective in gaining their interest. The press release provides a screening process that allows someone to learn about the study from a reliable source without having to commit to the entire scientific report. In this case, I think many readers from the general public will find the press release very interesting, and proceed to read the entire paper. Since the two sources work very well together and cover a very interesting topic, I believe that the producers of this research did a good job creating a final product. I found this topic to be very exciting, because it provided evidence of widespread behavioral changes that were able to pass around a population through socialization.
Works Cited
J. Allen, M. Weinrich, W. Hoppitt, and L. Rendell. (2013) Network-based diffusion analysis reveals cultural transmission of lobtail feeding in humpback whales. Science, 340 (6131): 485-488. DOI: 10.1126/science.1231976
University of St. Andrews. “Whales are able to learn from others: Humpbacks pass on hunting tips.” ScienceDaily. 25 April 2013. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130425142353.htm.
Tags: foraging, learning, social behavior, whales