Whale culture case study: 19th-century whaling logs

29:15where different geographic >> populations will have different dialects and those are obviously learned socially. There was one paper that is honestly one of my favorite papers um in animal behavior. Okay, it was in 2021 out of the Royal Society. What it did was analyze 19th century American whaler log books in the North Pacific Ocean. >> Okay. And these whalers kept meticulous lab notes when they went out in the field to try to kill sperm whales. Okay. >> Love to see it. >> And back then, I think sperm whales were used for all sorts of stuff. um not only their meat, but this was before electricity. So all of the oil was being used to light up our streets and that actually caused one of the big epidemics

29:56of near extinction for these whales all across the ocean. Um and the process was whailing was as follows. In the 18th 19th century, >> you'd go you you'd go with your ship, which was um powered by a sail. You'd spot some whales and then you'd go out down in these duffies and try to harpoon them. the whales. Yes. And then if you harpooned one, you would bring it back to the ship for extraction. Yes. Okay. >> What they noticed was >> whenever they went to a certain spot, >> the success rate plummeted from when they first got there. >> Oh, okay. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> So, they go to a certain spot. On the top, you've got a map of of all of the

30:38spots that they've been in the North Pacific. This is between Japan and America. Mhm. >> And there you've got the rate at which you're you're able to kill whales. >> Yes. >> Okay. >> Yes. >> And the rate was diminishing. Now there's four hypotheses. Okay. There's four there's four ways we can think about it. One is just the first guys who went to that particular spot were just good at it. >> They were LeBron and you're not LeBron. >> Yeah. Yeah. And so everyone, that doesn't make sense because we have the log books from the same whalers that go to other spots like the North Atlantic and they get the baseline rate. Okay, the fact that this is new, right? This is the North Pacific. So this has this is a harvesting ground for whales that hasn't been extracted before, right?

31:20Whailing has been around for for centuries in the North Atlantic, right? Europeans have been at it forever. >> Yes. >> Uh so that's the first hypothesis. The first whalers were good. That's not the case. >> Yep. Second one is um the first whales that were taken out were these juvenile sort of slower, let's say, or or they they weren't they weren't very good at getting away. >> Yeah, >> that also is something that we can model, right? We can model we can we can have some type of population model that says, okay, like the the slower whales in a population die out, how would the rate decrease then if if it's some sort of random strategy? Okay, the third one is the whales learned from personal experience. Meaning

32:01>> I'm part of a pod that had this crazy thing happen to me where a bunch of our pod >> got shot. >> Yes. >> In the ocean and then and then got extracted. And so now I'm never going to have that happen to my pod again. >> This is literally I think the plot of the second or third Avatar movie. >> Yeah. [laughter] >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. One of those. >> Like it's one of them where the the ocean thingies Yeah. And then they were getting hunted and then they didn't go back to the spot. Exactly. Because that's where we lost all our people. Exactly. And then the fourth one is the is the best one. >> Okay. That I want to be true. I'll just be honest. >> And it's that the whales learned between unit learning. Meaning >> there was a pod that I ran into yesterday. >> Yeah.

32:41>> That had that experience. They told me about it and they told me how to get away. The idea is you're on the block. your your block is block two, but the but the cats from block one pull up and they're like, "Yo, yesterday was block one. >> This happened, so y'all >> watch out." >> Yeah. >> And so there's there's a transferring socially of learning without having to physically or literally experience. >> And that's the culture part. >> That's the culture part. >> That's the culture part, right? So the question is, do the whales have culture?