According to a new study, sperm whales have taught each other how to avoid harpoons after hunting for them.
Published Wednesday by the Royal Society, the research was based on newly digitized logbooks from American whalers, which recorded details of their expeditions to the North Pacific in the 19th century, such as the number of spotted or harpooned whales.
Although they had a high demand for whale bone, ivory and fat and almost 80,000 “travel days” were recorded, there were only 2,405 successful whale sightings, a success rate of only 3%.
The study’s authors, cetacean researchers, Professor Hal Whitehead and Dr. Luke Rendell, and data researcher Dr. Tim D Smith also found that the strike rate of whale harpoons fell by 58% in less than two and a half years after they first hunted in the region.
In Halifax, Canada, said Professor Whitehead of Dalhousie University The Owen Sun Sound Times: “It was very remarkable. I thought it might be a drop, but not so much and not so fast.
“Usually you expect them to grow as they realize things and be more successful. Usually that’s how wildlife exploitation works. We become more efficient as we learn how to do it.”
The study concluded that sperm whales found out how they were killed, shared this information with their pods and changed their behavior accordingly, displaying “cultural evolution”.
The species live with their offspring in pods or groups only for women, allowing them to form close bonds and share tips to evade hunters.
Hunters have acknowledged that sperm whales have developed tactics to steal them. Instead of forming defensive squares used to fight their natural predators, the killer whale, sperm whale, understood that swimming against the wind would allow them to overtake the ships of wind-powered hunters.
The advent of steam power and grenade harpoons in the last years of the nineteenth century meant that even the dog sperm whale was doomed to mass sacrifice.
“This was a cultural evolution, far too fast for genetic evolution,” says Whitehead.
Puppy whales have the largest brains of all the animals on the planet, and researchers have pointed out that if they could adapt 200 years ago, they could probably face the challenges of the ocean today.
This article was originally published by Business Insider.
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