Humpback whales spread catchy tunes to each other, study reveals

Hit versions of whale song are adopted across populations, while other tunes are judged a failure and dropped

• The cultural life of whales

• Eyewitness: Having a whale of a time

guardian.co.uk, Press Association, Friday 15 April 2011

Male humpback whales often combine snippets of classic tunes with
new material. Photograph: Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images

Humpback whales spread catchy songs to each other through the ocean, research has shown.

Male whales whistle mating tunes that either prove a hit or miss. Catchy "remix" versions of the songs quickly spread across the ocean, almost always travelling east to west, scientists have found.

Usually the songs are made up of blended old and new material. But sometimes a song is judged to be a failure and dropped altogether, making way for a new tune.

Researcher Ellen Garland, from the University of Queensland in Australia, said: "Our findings reveal cultural change on a vast scale."

She said popular songs moved like "cultural ripples from one population to another", causing all the males to start singing the new version.

The scientists made the discovery after spending a decade searching for patterns in songs recorded from six neighbouring Pacific whale populations.

They found it took about two years for male mating songs to spread from Australia to French Polynesia.

"The songs started in the population that migrates along the eastern coast of Australia and then moved – just the songs, and probably not the whales – all the way to French Polynesia in the east," said Garland. "Songs were first learned from males in the west and then subsequently learned in a stepwise fashion repeatedly across the vast region."

The eastward movement may be due to differences in population size, said the researchers, whose study is reported online in the journal Current Biology. Humpback whales exist in much larger numbers on Australia's east coast than in other areas.

It is thought that either small numbers of whales take their songs to other populations, or whales in neighbouring groups hear the new songs as they swim together.

Garland described how the whales combined samples of "classic" tunes with new material.

"It would be like splicing an old Beatles song with U2," she said. "Occasionally they completely throw the current song out of the window and start singing a brand new song."

Once a new song emerges, it quickly catches on among the males, rising to the "top of the chart" over the course of one breeding season.

The scientists still do not know why the whales' songs are spread in this way.

It is unclear whether the purpose of the songs is chiefly to attract females or to repel rival males.

"We think this male quest for song novelty is in the hope of being that little bit different and perhaps more attractive to the opposite sex," said Garland. "This is then countered by the urge to sing the same tune, by the need to conform."

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