WEBVTT - Do Whales Have Pop Songs? 0:00:02.040 --> 0:00:07.080 Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff, 0:00:07.120 --> 0:00:09.800 I'm Lauren vogel Bomb. And as it turns out, humans 0:00:09.800 --> 0:00:12.960 aren't the only creatures that create and riff on catchy tunes. 0:00:13.400 --> 0:00:17.160 Whales have pop music too. During breeding season, as male 0:00:17.200 --> 0:00:21.480 humpback whales swim along, they sing the same song. Females 0:00:21.560 --> 0:00:24.079 never sing, only males do to find a mate or 0:00:24.079 --> 0:00:27.200 to posture for other males. The song is passed back 0:00:27.200 --> 0:00:29.760 and forth between the members of a pod, each whale 0:00:29.760 --> 0:00:32.960 adding his own little flourishes, and as that pod meets 0:00:32.960 --> 0:00:36.360 other pods, they pass the tunes along until whole oceans 0:00:36.440 --> 0:00:39.040 ring with the song of the moment. In the world 0:00:39.040 --> 0:00:41.680 of human pop music, what was the hot song of 0:00:41.680 --> 0:00:44.159 the summer will be dropped by every radio staged in 0:00:44.159 --> 0:00:46.159 the fault to make room for the new hot thing. 0:00:46.920 --> 0:00:49.600 Research published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B 0:00:50.080 --> 0:00:52.920 suggests that the same is true for whale songs. The 0:00:52.960 --> 0:00:56.080 popular tune becomes gradually more and more complex as it's 0:00:56.080 --> 0:00:59.440 altered by different populations of humpbacks. But after a few years, 0:00:59.440 --> 0:01:02.280 the whales were tired of their complicated ditty and start 0:01:02.280 --> 0:01:05.440 from scratch again. The research team based out of the 0:01:05.520 --> 0:01:09.120 University of Queensland, rated the complexity of song recordings of 0:01:10.080 --> 0:01:13.080 back whales from different populations in the Indian Ocean of 0:01:13.160 --> 0:01:16.600 the course of thirteen consecutive years. They found that over 0:01:16.600 --> 0:01:18.640 the course of a couple of years, the same songs 0:01:18.680 --> 0:01:21.280 spread all the way across the South Pacific, from East 0:01:21.319 --> 0:01:25.440 Australia to French Polynesia. Lead author Jenny Allen, a marine 0:01:25.480 --> 0:01:28.600 biologist in the Cetacean Ecology and Acoustics Laboratory at the 0:01:28.640 --> 0:01:32.040 University of Queensland, said in a press release. Typically these 0:01:32.080 --> 0:01:36.840 songs changed gradually, possibly through embellishments by individual singers. We 0:01:36.920 --> 0:01:39.959 suspect the embellishments allowables to stand out from their peers, 0:01:40.240 --> 0:01:42.559 much like teenage boys trying to stand out from the crowd. 0:01:43.000 --> 0:01:45.840 But every few years the songs are replaced, always by 0:01:45.880 --> 0:01:49.000 something simpler, suggesting there's a limit to the whales' capacity 0:01:49.040 --> 0:01:52.520 to learn new material. Although there is evidently a limit 0:01:52.520 --> 0:01:54.720 to how much whales can learn, the build up and 0:01:54.800 --> 0:01:58.760 abandonment of particular songs signifies a rapid cultural change over 0:01:58.840 --> 0:02:02.320 thousands of miles of ocean in Alan said that's basically 0:02:02.400 --> 0:02:06.720 unparalleled in non human culture. Dolphins do have fads too, 0:02:06.760 --> 0:02:09.240 though they have only been observed on a smaller scale. 0:02:09.680 --> 0:02:12.960 An individual named Billy, who learned to walk backwards on 0:02:12.960 --> 0:02:15.440 her tail and captivity, later taught the trick to some 0:02:15.520 --> 0:02:18.799 wild dolphins. After she was released, the dolphin moonwalk really 0:02:18.800 --> 0:02:25.880 took off for a while. Today's episode was written by 0:02:25.919 --> 0:02:28.400 Justlin Shields and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on 0:02:28.440 --> 0:02:30.800 this and lots of other catchy science topics, visit our 0:02:30.880 --> 0:02:43.959 home planet, how Stuff Works dot com.