Low culture

Andrew Whiten, from the home of golf in the far north, starts off the paper at reference 1 by telling us that culture, the inheritance of behavioural traditions through social learning from others, was once thought to be specific to humans. That animals didn’t do it.

It seems that we now know that animals do do it, it having been demonstrated over the past hundred years or so that a wide range of learned behaviour is shared through a group and passed down through the generations in a wide range of vertebrates and in some insects. Learned behaviour which is not simply a more or less forced response to some change in the environment and which is learned too quickly to be the result of some change in the genome. He even goes so far as to say that some of this learning cumulates, as it does so spectacularly in the case of humans.

So, for example, one can track the way that a new whale song propagates through a whale population, or a new bird song propagates through a bird population. Some primates pass on to their friends and to their children good ways to get termites out of underground nests.

It seems that the only requirements are to have complicated enough behaviour to make learning something new worthwhile and to have a big enough brain and to be sociable enough to make that learning possible. Protracted nurturing helps. It does not seem to be necessary for the newly learned behaviour to be particularly useful, although it often is. It might just be an acquired habit which, for some reason or another, the animal in question finds attractive. Maybe someone will detect waves of fashion rolling across troops of chimpanzees, rather as they do in school playgrounds.

And having been articulated in this way, it seems perfectly sensible and reasonable that this should be so. Why ever would we have thought otherwise before? Perhaps we just did not bother to watch animals and their behaviour carefully enough.

Along the way I have learned a new phrase and a new word. First, lobtail feeding seems to mean humpback whales smacking the water around shoals of prey fish with their flukes, thus creating bubbles around the shoals. Whale then dashes through the bubbles and grabs a good mouthful of fish. Or something like that. Second, aposematism is the conspicuous advertising by an animal to potential predators that either attacking or eating is not a good idea. So once the predator learns about the advertisement and has found from experience – or perhaps from the experience of its friends – that it does what it says on the tin, it lays off. A win-win outcome.

References

Reference 1: The burgeoning reach of animal culture - Andrew Whiten – 2021. From where the snap above has been lifted, with thanks.

Reference 2: https://www.cambridgenetwork.co.uk/news/humpbacks-share-new-feeding-technique/.