Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren Vobblebomb here with a classic episode from our archives.
Speaker 1: I love this one about humpback whales and their haunting songs.
Speaker 1: It turns out that humpbacks repeat and build on each
Speaker 1: other's music, similar to how humans play and cover pop songs.
Speaker 1: Hey brain Stuff, I'm Lauren vogelbaumb And as it turns out,
Speaker 1: humans aren't the only creatures that create and riff on
Speaker 1: catchy tunes.
Speaker 2: Whales have pop music too. During breeding season, as male
Speaker 2: humpback whales swim along, they sing the same song. Females
Speaker 2: never sing, only males do to find a mate or
Speaker 2: to posture for other males. The song is passed back
Speaker 2: and forth between the members of a pod, each whale
Speaker 2: adding his own little flourishes, and as that pod meets
Speaker 2: other pods, they pass the tunes along until whole oceans
Speaker 2: ring with the song of the moment. In the world
Speaker 2: of human pop music, what was the hot song of
Speaker 2: the summer will be dropped by every radio station in
Speaker 2: the fall to make room for the new hot thing.
Speaker 2: A research published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society
Speaker 2: b suggests that the same is true for whale songs.
Speaker 2: The popular tune becomes gradually more and more complex as
Speaker 2: it's altered by different populations of humpbacks, but after a
Speaker 2: few years, the whales grow tired of their complicated ditty
Speaker 2: and start from scratch again. The research team, based out
Speaker 2: of the University of Queensland rated the complexity of song
Speaker 2: recordings of ninety five humpback whales from different populations in
Speaker 2: the Indian Ocean over the course of thirteen consecutive years.
Speaker 2: They found that over the course of a couple of years,
Speaker 2: the same song spread all the way across the South Pacific,
Speaker 2: from East Australia to French Polynesia. Lead author Jenny Allen,
Speaker 2: a marine biologist in the Cetacean Ecology and Acoustics Laboratory
Speaker 2: at the University of Queensland, said in a press release.
Speaker 2: Typically these songs changed gradually, possibly through embellishments by individual singers.
Speaker 2: We suspect the embellishments allow bulls to stand out from
Speaker 2: their peers, much like teenage boys trying to stand out
Speaker 2: from the crowd. But every few years the songs are replaced,
Speaker 2: always by something simpler, suggesting there is a limit to
Speaker 2: the whale's capacity to learn new material. Although there is
Speaker 2: evidently a limit to how much whales can learn, the
Speaker 2: build up and abandonment of particular songs signifies a rapid
Speaker 2: cultural change over thousands of miles of ocean. Alan said
Speaker 2: that's basically unparalleled in non human culture. Dolphins do have
Speaker 2: fads too, though they have only been observed on a
Speaker 2: smaller scale. An individual named Billy, who learned to walk
Speaker 2: backwards on her tail and captivity, later taught the trick
Speaker 2: to some wild dolphins after she was released. The dolphin
Speaker 2: moonwalk really took off for a while.
Speaker 1: Today's episode is based on the article humpback Whales start
Speaker 1: simpler songs as old ones get too complex on houstuffworks
Speaker 1: dot com. Written by Jesslyn Shields. Brainstuff is production of
Speaker 1: by Heart Radio in partnership with houstuffworks dot Com and
Speaker 1: its produced by Tyler Klang. For more podcasts my heart Radio,
Speaker 1: visit the heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
Speaker 1: listen to your favorite shows.