Quick Notes
- Humpback whales can learn songs in segments – verse by verse – like humans
- Songs are not passed on from generation to generation but learnt from peers as a social learning
- Songs may be remixed over time, with old and new songs with similar structure pattern mixed together
Humpback whales learn songs in segments – like the verses of a human song – and can remix them, a new study involving University of Queensland research has found.
Research indicated that whale songs appeared to be learnt a similar way to how humans acquire language skills, or a bird learns its warble.
Songs learnt from peers
The researchers found that all the males in a population sing the same complex song, but the pattern of song changes with time, sometimes quite rapidly, across the population.
“Learning new songs is a form of what’s known as ‘social learning’, which is where individual animals learn behaviours from each other rather than having them passed on from one generation to another genetically. Although we know that whales change their songs over time, we don’t know about how they learn the new songs. The rate of change though shows that they are constantly learning and updating their songs rapidly.”
The study was led by UQ graduate Dr Ellen Garland, and focused on whale songs that were in the process of changing from one type to another.
Read More:Why Do Whales Leap In The Air
Remixed songs
The research found whales could combine segments of songs in predictable ways if the underlying structural pattern was similar.
“We recorded many individual singers from several populations, including the eastern Australian population and other populations in the South Pacific,” Dr Noad said.
“We looked for songs that were caught in the act of changing; songs that had some of the old song as well as some of the new song.
“Ellen found a couple of interesting things. When we found these rare ‘hybrid’ songs, the themes of the songs, either old or new, were intact, showing that the whales probably learn songs theme-by-theme like the verse of a human song.
“The other interesting thing was when they switched mid-song from old to new or new to old, it was during a theme most similar to another theme in either old or new songs.
“These themes may have been used as a way of bridging the old and new songs and therefore help with social learning.
“This provides some evidence for how animals rapidly learn large, complex displays and may have relevance for understanding how human language, the most outstanding example of social learning, evolved.”
Dr Noad said changes in humpback whale songs were one of the most striking examples of the transmission of a cultural trait and social learning in any non-human animal.
Read More: Humpback Whales Sing At Night To Hunt And Communicate
Nice article..thank you so much for sharing this with us. Great work keep it up.