ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Song hybridization events during revolutionary song change provide insights into cultural transmission in humpback whales.
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 29 papers.
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Who cites it
29 citing papers in PubMed, 106 citations in OpenAlex.
- Dogs as a model to study the emergence of concept manipulation skills for language-readiness.Biologia futura · 2025Review
- On the interface between cultural transmission, phenotypic diversity, demography and the conservation of migratory ungulates.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Network indicators of cultural resilience to anthropogenic removals in animal societies.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Language-like efficiency in whale communication.Science advances · 2025Article
- Humpback whale song complexity and evolution on a northwestern Pacific breeding ground: Okinawa, Japan.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Cetaceans are the next frontier for vocal rhythm research.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Quantum Leaps in Human Biocultural Evolution and the Relationship to Cranial Capacity.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Humpback whale song revolutions continue to spread from the central into the eastern South Pacific.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Song complexity is maintained during inter-population cultural transmission of humpback whale songs.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Event parsing and the origins of grammar.Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science · 2022Article
- All units are equal in humpback whale songs, but some are more equal than others.Animal cognition · 2022Article
- When does cultural evolution become cumulative culture? A case study of humpback whale song.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Efficiency fosters cumulative culture across species.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- A socio-ecological perspective on the gestural communication of great ape species, individuals, and social units.Ethology, ecology & evolution · 2022Review
- Global cultural evolutionary model of humpback whale song.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Kin relationships in cultural species of the marine realm: case study of a matrilineal social group of sperm whales off Mauritius island, Indian Ocean.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
- Migratory insights from singing humpback whales recorded around central New Zealand.Royal Society open science · 2020Article
- How Culture and Biology Interact to Shape Language and the Language Faculty.Topics in cognitive science · 2020Article
- Syntax and compositionality in animal communication.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Cultural Transmission, Evolution, and Revolution in Vocal Displays: Insights From Bird and Whale Song.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
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: (
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