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. (more…)