Song hybridization events during revolutionary song change provide insights into cultural transmission in humpback whales.

ABSTRACT: Cultural processes occur in a wide variety of animal taxa, from insects to cetaceans. The songs of humpback whales are one of the most striking examples of the transmission of a cultural trait and social learning in any nonhuman animal. To understand how songs are learned, we investigate rare cases of song hybridization, where parts of an existing song are spliced with a new one, likely before an individual totally adopts the new song. Song unit sequences were extracted from over 9,300 phrases recorded during two song revolutions across the South Pacific Ocean, allowing fine-scale analysis of composition and sequencing. In hybrid songs the current and new songs were spliced together in two specific ways: (i) singers placed a single hybrid phrase, in which content from both songs wer

SUBMITTER: Garland EC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5543391 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature