ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Gene-culture coevolution in whales and dolphins.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers.
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Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed.
- Not by Selection Alone: Expanding the Scope of Gene-Culture Coevolution.Evolutionary anthropology · 2025Review
- The effect of habitat health and environmental change on cultural diversity and richness in animals.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Geographical distribution of two acoustic fin whale (Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Reduced Representation and Whole-Genome Sequencing Approaches Highlight Beluga Whale Populations Associated to Eastern Canada Summer Aggregations.Evolutionary applications · 2024Article
- Do beluga whales truly migrate? Testing a key trait of the classical migration syndrome.Movement ecology · 2023Article
- Historical Mitogenomic Diversity and Population Structuring of Southern Hemisphere Fin Whales.Genes · 2023Article
- The relevance of genetic structure in ecotype designation and conservation management.Evolutionary applications · 2022Article
- Species information in whistle frequency modulation patterns of common dolphins.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Article
- Foraging behaviour alters with social environment in a juvenile songbird.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Group structure and kinship in beluga whale societies.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Competition for resources can promote the divergence of social learning phenotypes.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Host-microbiome coevolution can promote cooperation in a rock-paper-scissors dynamics.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Why intergroup variation matters for understanding behaviour.Biology letters · 2019Article
- Migratory convergence facilitates cultural transmission of humpback whale song.Royal Society open science · 2019Article
- Character displacement of a learned behaviour and its implications for ecological speciation.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- The reach of gene-culture coevolution in animals.Nature communications · 2019Review
- Migratory culture, population structure and stock identity in North Pacific beluga whales (Delphinapterus leucas).PloS one · 2018Article
- The extension of biology through culture.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- Song hybridization events during revolutionary song change provide insights into cultural transmission in humpback whales.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
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Abstract
Whales and dolphins (Cetacea) have excellent social learning skills as well as a long and strong mother-calf bond. These features produce stable cultures, and, in some species, sympatric groups with different cultures. There is evidence and speculation that this cultural transmission of behavior has affected gene distributions. Culture seems to have driven killer whales into distinct ecotypes, which may be incipient species or subspecies. There are ecotype-specific signals of selection in functional genes that correspond to cultural foraging behavior and habitat use by the different ecotypes. The five species of whale with matrilineal social systems have remarkably low diversity of mtDNA. Cultural hitchhiking, the transmission of functionally neutral genes in parallel with selective cultural traits, is a plausible hypothesis for this low diversity, especially in sperm whales. In killer whales the ecotype divisions, together with founding bottlenecks, selection, and cultural hitchhiking, likely explain the low mtDNA diversity. Several cetacean species show habitat-specific distributions of mtDNA haplotypes, probably the result of mother-offspring cultural transmission of migration routes or destinations. In bottlenose dolphins, remarkable small-scale differences in haplotype distribution result from maternal cultural transmission of foraging methods, and large-scale redistributions of sperm whale cultural clans in the Pacific have likely changed mitochondrial genetic geography. With the acceleration of genomics new results should come fast, but understanding gene-culture coevolution will be hampered by the measured pace of research on the socio-cultural side of cetacean biology.
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