According to a new study, sperm whales were taught how to avoid harpoons after hunting them.
Published Wednesday by the Royal Society, the research was based on recently digitized logbooks of American whalers, which recorded details of their expeditions to the North Pacific during the 19th century, such as the number of whales detected or harpooned.
Although they had a high demand for their whale, ivory and fat spines and nearly 80,000 “travel days” recorded, there were only 2,405 successful whale sightings, a 3% success rate.
The study’s authors, cetacean researchers, Professor Hal Whitehead and Dr. Luke Rendell, as well as data scientist Dr. Tim D Smith, also found that the attack rate of whalers’ harpoons fell 58% in less than two and a half years after he first started hunting in the region.
In Halifax, Canada, said Professor Whitehead of Dalhousie University The Owen Sun Sound Times: “It was very remarkable. I thought there could be a fall, but not so much or so fast.
“Normally, you expect it to increase as they find out things and become more successful. That’s usually how our wildlife exploitation goes. We become more efficient as we learn to do it.”
The study concluded that sperm whales had learned how to kill them, shared this information with their pod, and changed their behavior accordingly, showing “cultural evolution.”
The species live with their offspring in exclusively female pods or groups, allowing them to form close bonds and share tips for evading hunters.
Hunters acknowledged that sperm whales had developed tactics to evade them. Instead of forming defensive squares that were used to fight their natural predators, killer whales, sperm whales, understood that swimming against the wind would allow them to overtake the boats of wind-driven hunters.
However, the emergence of the force of steam and grenade harpoons in the last years of the nineteenth century meant that even the sperm whale was doomed to mass slaughter.
“It was a cultural evolution, too fast for genetic evolution,” Whitehead says.
Sperm whales have the largest brains of all the animals on the planet, and researchers pointed out that if they could adapt 200 years ago, they could probably face the challenges of the ocean today as well.
This article was originally published by Business Insider.
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