3 ms·
Such complex social behaviors are taught from generation to generation. And makes even more important the need for conservation to protect pods of dolphins so
by aritmo 6y ago
Such complex social behaviors are taught from generation to generation.
And makes even more important the need for conservation to protect pods of dolphins so that they do not lose this collective knowledge. If these pods gets destroyed, then other pods have to figure out the technique from scratch.
Apart from humans, some whales go into menopause. The evolutionary benefit is to have experienced females help raise their grandchildren and pass knowledge to them. This makes it even more important to protect older animals.
- pcl 6y agoThis article discusses peer (“horizontal”) learning of the technique. They distinguish this from parent-child (“vertical”) learning and older-younger non-parental (“oblique”) learning. Certainly protection of pods is important in this case as well, but the interesting thing here is not the fact that the behavior is learned, but that it is learned from a peer. Evidently this is the first such finding in toothed whales.