Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Whether you're selling a little or a lot, Shopify helps you do your thing, however you cha-ching. From the launch your online shop stage, all the way to the we just hit a million orders stage. No matter what stage you're in, Shopify's there to help you grow. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash special offer, all lowercase. That's shopify.com slash special offer.
This podcast brought to you by Ring. With Ring cameras, you can check on your pets to catch them in the act. Izzy, drop that. Or just keep them company. Aw, I'll be home soon. Make sure they're okay while you're away. With Ring. Learn more at ring.com slash pets. Orcas, or killer whales, have been doing something really weird over the past few years. They are attacking and even sometimes sinking boats.
Since 2020, a group of orcas off the coast of Spain and Portugal have been swimming up to boats, headbutting the bottom of them, and kind of pushing them around. They usually go straight for the rudder, which makes it hard to steer and sometimes leaves boats stranded. There have been an increase in these encounters, and some wonder why. No one's ever been hurt, but this hasn't just happened once or twice.
There have been hundreds of reports of orcas messing with boats in the last few years. Around the world, killer whales are attacking boats in March. This recent trend may have started with one single orca.
a female with distinctive scars on her head. An orca named White Gladys suffered a traumatic injury from a boat and may be teaching other orcas how to attack similar vessels.
And then maybe other whales started learning from her. This could be, and get this, a series of coordinated attacks. All over the world, people got really excited about orcas serving up justice against humans for boat collisions. But more broadly, for kind of messing up their oceans. They're saying the whales are orcanizing. Stop!
But scientists like Hal Whitehead aren't so sure. I think it isn't things like revenge or an innate desire to destroy humans or anything like that. Hal is a whale biologist in Nova Scotia, and he thinks it's more likely that these whales are just playing games. I think they're just messing about. This is an idea that's gaining more traction. Recently, over 30 scientists studying whales and dolphins released an open letter about it.
They said that calling the orcas' actions attacks is misleading, even if it makes for compelling headlines. You know, I think a lot of it's about our psychology. What makes a great story for us? Hal says there's another story here that's not just about revenge. There's a reason why so many different orcas have joined in on playing pirate. These orcas might have their own culture.
They have these fads and whims, and it's important for them to do what everyone else is doing and to be part of the group and to show that by, yeah, we're all doing this stupid thing together. Having culture means that they can learn new behaviors from each other, like specifically going after boat rudders. And they're learning from each other all the time. I find that really interesting, and I think that
tells me about them and what they're like and how they live their lives. There's no definitive answer on why the orcas are sinking ships and why that behavior is spreading. But looking beyond this one behavior leads to bigger questions about what culture might do for orcas and all kinds of whales. They're having to deal with an ocean that's changing because of climate change. And, uh,
The fact that these are cultural beings and learning stuff from each other has important implications for how we impact them and how we can try and minimize the impacts on them. I'm Manning Wint, and this week on Unexplainable, do orcas and other whales have culture? And if so, how might it help them survive? ♪
Hal first started thinking about whale culture a few decades ago. Back in the 80s, Hal was studying sperm whales off the Galapagos Islands. He and his crew took a sailboat to follow sperm whales for weeks at a time and study their behaviors. They learned to tell the difference between each individual whale, and they recorded their sounds with an underwater microphone. Sperm whales typically communicate through clicks.
Some of the sperm whales that Hal followed sounded like this. Click, click, click, click, click. Just very simple. But in the same area, there was a group of whales that communicated a little differently. They would go click, click, click, click. Click, click, click, click, click, click. And Hal saw this distinction over and over again.
It was almost like these two groups had different dialects. As we looked further, we found they had other distinctive behaviors. One group swam in kind of a zigzag. The other swam in straighter lines. One group would roam closer to land. The other stayed a bit further away. They still shared the same geographical region, but never seemed to interact or breed with each other.
So what was so different about these two groups? You know, we thought, well, maybe different subspecies or something like that. So we did the genetics and no, there's no real genetic difference. Each of these two groups seem to have their own separate communal behaviors. But if it wasn't environmental or genetic differences keeping these sperm whales apart, what was it? The only answer was this was culture.
When Hal says culture, he basically means learned behaviors that spread across the community. So things that animals do that aren't innately coded in their genes, but are learned and absorbed from a big pool of cultural knowledge. Hal makes an analogy to dance. If you think of a dance step, behavior is the dance step. Information is knowing how to do the dance step, but not actually necessarily doing it. And in the same way that you have to learn a dance step,
sperm whales also have to learn different click dialects from each other. It didn't seem to me such a big deal to say, well, these young sperm whales are learning a lot of this stuff from their moms and the other females in their group. But when Hal and his colleague eventually published a paper arguing that whales might have culture, that they might learn from each other...
other scientists weren't very happy about it. We got lots of reactions from everyone saying what we'd done was complete nutter rubbish. One response said that Howell's conclusion was, quote, potentially treacherous because, quote, overly rich interpretation of data is dangerous in any science. The idea that whales have culture also went against the mainstream.
The general agreement at the time was that when it comes to animals, biology and genetics alone drive behavior, not culture. Hal remembers that some anthropologists in particular were fired up about this, saying that culture was a human trait.
From their perspective, biologists study genes, anthropologists study culture. And some said that culture required human-like attributes. For instance, they may require values. Values like honesty or respect for elders or individualism. Values are very hard to get at, even with humans. They're incredibly difficult to get at with non-humans, right?
What values do my sperm whales have? What values do those orcas who are messing around with the boats have? Hal's theory of whale culture was definitely controversial. But he wasn't alone. There were other researchers at the time who were looking at culture in other animals. So, I mean, not only whales, but animals like bats and birds and fish.
We're getting more and more evidence that culture is important to those species. Hal was just one of many biologists arguing that how we define culture should be inclusive of other animals. But he didn't have all the evidence he needed to convince most people that whales have culture. To do that, he'd need to show that whales can both learn stuff from each other and also that what they learn circulates in their communities. And there's a strong case for both in killer whales. That's in a minute.
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The Walt Disney Company is a sprawling business. It's got movie studios, theme parks, cable networks, a streaming service. It's a lot. So it can be hard to find just the right person to lead it all. When you have a leader with the singularly creative mind and leadership that Walt Disney had, it like goes away and disappears. I mean, you can expect what will happen. The problem is Disney CEOs have trouble letting go.
After 15 years, Bob Iger finally handed off the reins in 2020. His retirement did not last long. He now has a big black mark on his legacy because after pushing back his retirement over and over again, when he finally did choose a successor, it didn't go well for anybody involved.
And of course, now there's a sort of a bake-off going on. Everybody watching, who could it be? I don't think there's anyone where it's like the obvious no-brainer. That's not the case. I'm Joe Adalian. Vulture and the Vox Media Podcast Network present Land of the Giants, The Disney Dilemma. Follow wherever you listen to hear new episodes every Wednesday. Hal's definition of culture includes two parts. Learning new information and behaviors.
and seeing those behaviors spread in a community. And if we focus specifically on orcas, there's evidence of both. So first up, the learning. Orcas are super social creatures, and learning happens within their social groups. The smallest group of orcas is usually a matriarchal family, with offspring sticking with their mothers and their grandmothers all their lives. A few families make up a pod, a few pods make up a clan, a few clans make up a community.
And in these units, learning happens a few ways. Sometimes orcas just copy each other's actions. Other times, they watch each other to see what's okay or not. So the young orca follows her mom around, and her mom goes here, and her mom goes there. And so you learn, oh, this is a nice place. That's a horrible place, and that kind of stuff. Hal says that there's good evidence of orcas being able to teach each other, meaning that there's a deliberate action done for the benefit of the learner.
He says that scientists have observed this in a clever pot of orcas in the southern Indian Ocean. These orcas would run up on beaches to catch seals, which they would eat. And this is really dangerous because an orca isn't supposed to be on land, right? If it gets stuck there, it's dead.
But it's a good way to get a meal because the seals think, I'm on land, I'm safe. Scientists watched mother orcas help their babies practice hunting by beaching themselves even when there was nothing to catch. Some mother killer whales who would do this in areas with their baby beside them where there were no seals. It was like a training ground, a classroom. The baby goes up on the beach and learns how far you go, how you get back in the water, all that stuff.
in an environment where you're not actually trying to catch something because there's nothing to catch. And this deliberate teaching, it seemed to have a lasting impact. It seemed that the babies whose mothers did this became more effective at doing the beach stranding and catching seals later in life than the ones whose mothers didn't do that with them.
Knowledge that's shared in a community can persist over generations. And we can see that in so many ways, from how they communicate to how they hunt. So let's start with communication. Orcas communicate through complex clicks and whistles and calls. And there's a lot of nuance here. With humans, people in a particular family have sort of certain ways of speaking. And that's embedded within the way people in their village speak, which is embedded within the way that
people in their region speak and their ethnic group, and then you get completely different languages. It's not just languages. Different orca groups can have specific greeting rituals or group activities that only they do. So there's groups of orcas in the Puget Sound, Seattle, Victoria, Vancouver area.
And they, when two groups meet, they have a particular greeting ceremony where they line up in lines and sort of nod their heads and so on. And the other killer whales a bit further to north don't do that. That's not their thing. But those killer whales to the north like going to beaches with pebbles and rubbing on the pebbles, which the ones to the south don't do. Another way culture is expressed is through food, what they eat and how they hunt.
Some of the groups of orcas are incredibly specialized. So there's groups on the West Coast of U.S. and Canada who really only eat salmon or really only eat deepwater sharks. And that's all they eat. That's their thing. They'll stick to eating that specific food, even if other things are more available.
and orcas belonging to a group that eats one kind of food also avoid orca groups that eat other kinds of food. They don't typically interact with or even mate across these food-based groups, even if they can have fertile offspring together. And some scientists think that whale culture could have even bigger impacts. We see culture driving biology. This is Lori Marino, a marine mammal neuroscientist and founder of the Whale Sanctuary Project.
Laurie says that you can already see the differences in the bodies of orcas that eat different things. For example, a group of orcas that specializes in eating salmon tend to have smaller teeth. Their digestive systems develop to process salmon, and they get really good at hunting them.
Like Hal said, that's their thing. And they don't typically eat anything else. You can't just say, oh, I'm going to eat seals. There's plenty of them. It just doesn't work that way because they are very specialized for eating salmon. And these gradual adaptations might lead to groups of killer whales eventually becoming different species.
The influence of their culture is so strong that another scientist I spoke to said that it might even be possible that these groups of killer whales don't even recognize each other as the same species because of their distinct cultures that have taken shape over millions of years.
and old cultures like this can be hard to change. So it's really hard for people to go against their culture or do something that's outside of their culture. It's the same for workers as well. This potential cultural stubbornness leads us to a bigger issue.
If the world is changing, can whales adapt? And the question, the real important question is, what is the level of flexibility around that culture? We know that orcas can pick up new skills that help them get food, just like the orcas that learn to beach themselves to get seals. Other orcas have learned to catch birds or follow different migration routes or even steal fish from boats.
But orcas seem to be pretty conservative compared to other whales, meaning they're less likely to try new things or experiment.
And this is something that could backfire on them. So, for instance, if a group of orcas depends entirely on one way of eating, and that way of eating is eliminated or is not available, what happens? For example, Lori is worried about a group of orcas called the Southern Resident Orcas in the Salish Sea off of Vancouver. They
They eat mostly Chinook salmon, but the Chinook are not coming down to where they are because of the dams, because of a lot of different reasons. And the question is, are they starting to take different kinds of salmon, different kinds of fish? How are they responding to the change in resource availability? How does their culture reflect that?
Humans are also changing their habitats in more drastic ways than they typically might be able to adapt to. And Laurie says that we shouldn't just expect orcas to switch up their food sources in response and be suddenly okay with whatever becomes available to them. It's not a question of stubbornness as much as
How important a culture is to them. And that's something very important for us to understand. You know, people might say, well, the Southern resident orcas, you know, there's only 72 of them starving and they may go extinct because of that. So why don't they just switch to eating something else? It's not healthy.
That's not understanding who they are. And this is getting pretty speculative, but Laurie says that orcas might have something like a sense of identity. Just like how culture in our families or ethnicities or nations make us who we are, culture might have something to do with how they define themselves.
All of us are part of a culture and it is part of our identity. We are the this people or the that people. And what's interesting to think about is what culture means to them in terms of their identity as individuals and as members of a group. Culture might make them do things like use different dialects, mate only within their groups, and even ram into boats and tear off their rudders. The media has just
jumped on it and colored it with human psychology. And we need to just stop doing that and just let them be orcas and not necessarily see it through the lens of our own species, but just for what it is.
These are mysterious animals who might have their own sense of family and language and culture, but we can at least respect that it might mean something important. I think that it's really important to have a healthy respect for the culture of other animals and how that shapes their survival.
We are a species who sometimes thinks about conservation in numbers, right? Well, there's X number of orcas left, X number of lions left, X number of elephants left. But that's not the whole story. It's not even the most important part of the story. The story is, who are those individuals? Who are those elephants? Who are those orcas?
This episode was produced by me, Manning Nguyen. It was edited by Brian Resnick and Meredith Hodnot, who also manages our team. We had sound design and mixing from Christian Ayala and music from Noam Hassenfeld. Serena Solon checked our facts and Bird Pinkerton kept listening to the octopus's story. It wasn't just us. The birds attacked turtles, platypuses, even pufferfish. They couldn't tolerate any animal with a beak that wasn't a bird, which is exactly where you come in. Additional thank you to Deborah Giles and Andy Foote.
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