Dynamic Horizontal Cultural Transmission of Humpback Whale Song at the Ocean Basin Scale
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Cultural transmission, the social learning of information or behaviors from conspecifics, is believed to occur in a number of groups of animals, including primates, cetaceans, and birds. Cultural traits can be passed vertically (from parents to offspring), obliquely (from the previous generation via a nonparent model to younger individuals), or horizontally (between unrelated individuals from similar age classes or within generations). Male humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) have a highly stereotyped, repetitive, and progressively evolving vocal sexual display or "song" that functions in sexual selection (through mate attraction and/or male social sorting). All males within a population conform to the current version of the display (song type), and similarities may exist among the songs of populations within an ocean basin. Here we present a striking pattern of horizontal transmission: multiple song types spread rapidly and repeatedly in a unidirectional manner, like cultural ripples, eastward through the populations in the western and central South Pacific over an 11-year period. This is the first documentation of a repeated, dynamic cultural change occurring across multiple populations at such a large geographic scale.
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Humpback whale songs spread in cultural waves across ocean basins, illustrating that vocal culture can evolve rapidly and even display revolutions where entire song types are replaced.
“Humpback whale songs, which spread in “cultural waves” across ocean basins, illustrate how vocal culture can evolve rapidly and even display revolutions where entire song types are replaced”
From Listening forward: emerging roles of bioacoustics in ecology, evolution, and conservation (2026) · cites this paper as Garland et al. 2011
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Self-citation
- Authors
- Garland, E. C., Goldizen, A. W., Rekdahl, M. L., Constantine, R., Garrigue, C., Hauser, N. D., Poole, M. M., Robbins, J., & Noad, M. J.
- Affiliations
- The University of Queensland (AU)
- University of Auckland (NZ)
- Center for Coastal Studies (US)
- Corresponding author
- Garland, Ellen C.
- ORCID
- Venue
- Current Biology
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2011-04
- Volume
- 21
- Issue
- 8
- Pages
- 687-691
- ISSN
- 0960-9822 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W1997119063
- Cited by
- 321
- References
- 35
- Citations by year
- 2026: 18 · 2025: 20 · 2024: 27 · 2023: 31 · 2022: 28 · 2021: 24 · 2020: 21 · 2019: 22 · 2018: 39 · 2017: 23 · 2016: 17 · 2015: 19 · 2014: 9 · 2013: 12 · 2012: 9
- FWCI
- 9.00
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Current Biology (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- ResearchSpace (University of Auckland) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Ecology › Marine animal studies overview
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Developmental Biology › Animal Vocal Communication and Behavior
- Social Sciences › Cultural Studies › Language and cultural evolution
- Keywords
- humpback whale song, cultural transmission, horizontal transmission, social learning, sexual selection, mate attraction
- MeSH terms
- Animals, Imitative Behavior, Learning, Male, Pacific Ocean, Social Behavior, Sound Spectrography, Time Factors, Vocalization, Animal, Humpback Whale
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Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
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