Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren Vobblebomb here with a classic episode from our archives. I love this one about humpback whales and their haunting songs. It turns out that humpbacks repeat and build on each other's music, similar to how humans play and cover pop songs. Hey brain Stuff, I'm Lauren vogelbaumb And as it turns out, humans aren't the only creatures that create and riff on catchy tunes.
Whales have pop music too. During breeding season, as male humpback whales swim along, they sing the same song. Females never sing, only males do to find a mate or to posture for other males. The song is passed back and forth between the members of a pod, each whale adding his own little flourishes, and as that pod meets other pods, they pass the tunes along until whole oceans
ring with the song of the moment. In the world of human pop music, what was the hot song of the summer will be dropped by every radio station in the fall to make room for the new hot thing. A research published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society b suggests that the same is true for whale songs. The popular tune becomes gradually more and more complex as it's altered by different populations of humpbacks, but after a few years, the whales grow tired of their complicated ditty
and start from scratch again. The research team, based out of the University of Queensland rated the complexity of song recordings of ninety five humpback whales from different populations in the Indian Ocean over the course of thirteen consecutive years. They found that over the course of a couple of years, the same song spread all the way across the South Pacific,
from East Australia to French Polynesia. Lead author Jenny Allen, a marine biologist in the Cetacean Ecology and Acoustics Laboratory at the University of Queensland, said in a press release. Typically these songs changed gradually, possibly through embellishments by individual singers. We suspect the embellishments allow bulls to stand out from their peers, much like teenage boys trying to stand out
from the crowd. But every few years the songs are replaced, always by something simpler, suggesting there is a limit to the whale's capacity to learn new material. Although there is evidently a limit to how much whales can learn, the build up and abandonment of particular songs signifies a rapid cultural change over thousands of miles of ocean. Alan said that's basically unparalleled in non human culture. Dolphins do have fads too, though they have only been observed on a
smaller scale. An individual named Billy, who learned to walk backwards on her tail and captivity, later taught the trick to some wild dolphins after she was released. The dolphin moonwalk really took off for a while.
Today's episode is based on the article humpback Whales start simpler songs as old ones get too complex on houstuffworks dot com. Written by Jesslyn Shields. Brainstuff is production of by Heart Radio in partnership with houstuffworks dot Com and its produced by Tyler Klang. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.