Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: I'm Lauren vogel Bomb. And as it turns out, humans
Speaker 1: aren't the only creatures that create and riff on catchy tunes.
Speaker 1: Whales have pop music too. During breeding season, as male
Speaker 1: humpback whales swim along, they sing the same song. Females
Speaker 1: never sing, only males do to find a mate or
Speaker 1: to posture for other males. The song is passed back
Speaker 1: and forth between the members of a pod, each whale
Speaker 1: adding his own little flourishes, and as that pod meets
Speaker 1: other pods, they pass the tunes along until whole oceans
Speaker 1: ring with the song of the moment. In the world
Speaker 1: of human pop music, what was the hot song of
Speaker 1: the summer will be dropped by every radio staged in
Speaker 1: the fault to make room for the new hot thing.
Speaker 1: Research published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B
Speaker 1: suggests that the same is true for whale songs. The
Speaker 1: popular tune becomes gradually more and more complex as it's
Speaker 1: altered by different populations of humpbacks. But after a few years,
Speaker 1: the whales were tired of their complicated ditty and start
Speaker 1: from scratch again. The research team based out of the
Speaker 1: University of Queensland, rated the complexity of song recordings of
Speaker 1: back whales from different populations in the Indian Ocean of
Speaker 1: the course of thirteen consecutive years. They found that over
Speaker 1: the course of a couple of years, the same songs
Speaker 1: spread all the way across the South Pacific, from East
Speaker 1: Australia to French Polynesia. Lead author Jenny Allen, a marine
Speaker 1: biologist in the Cetacean Ecology and Acoustics Laboratory at the
Speaker 1: University of Queensland, said in a press release. Typically these
Speaker 1: songs changed gradually, possibly through embellishments by individual singers. We
Speaker 1: suspect the embellishments allowables to stand out from their peers,
Speaker 1: much like teenage boys trying to stand out from the crowd.
Speaker 1: But every few years the songs are replaced, always by
Speaker 1: something simpler, suggesting there's a limit to the whales' capacity
Speaker 1: to learn new material. Although there is evidently a limit
Speaker 1: to how much whales can learn, the build up and
Speaker 1: abandonment of particular songs signifies a rapid cultural change over
Speaker 1: thousands of miles of ocean in Alan said that's basically
Speaker 1: unparalleled in non human culture. Dolphins do have fads too,
Speaker 1: though they have only been observed on a smaller scale.
Speaker 1: An individual named Billy, who learned to walk backwards on
Speaker 1: her tail and captivity, later taught the trick to some
Speaker 1: wild dolphins. After she was released, the dolphin moonwalk really
Speaker 1: took off for a while. Today's episode was written by
Speaker 1: Justlin Shields and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on
Speaker 1: this and lots of other catchy science topics, visit our
Speaker 1: home planet, how Stuff Works dot com.