It’s a very beautiful story, and it has just been confirmed by Scottish and Ecuadorian ethologists. Hervé Poirier, editor-in-chief of the scientific magazine Epsiloon looks back at the musical culture of whales and the diffusion of their song, across the oceans of our planet. Researchers have just discovered that a whale song heard off the coast of Australia can therefore become a musical hit off the coast of Ecuador.
franceinfo: Whales invented cultural globalization?
Herve Poirier: It is an exceptional case of cultural transmission, a unique case even, without equivalent in the animal world – it has been observed in certain birds, but never with this magnitude, never with this complexity. Scottish and Ecuadorian ethologists have patiently listened to, recorded and analyzed the songs of humpback whales for three years, in the waters of French Polynesia, in the heart of the Pacific, as well as off the coast of Ecuador, 8000 km further ballast.
They were able to confirm what we already knew: most males, within the same population, sing the same song – the females do not sing. A song that can last about thirty minutes, with a melody, musical themes, a rhythm, a specific complexity. They were also able to measure that this song of the sea is a real culture: it is learned through the exchange between congeners, within the community, and evolves by becoming more complex little by little.
Above all, they were able to observe that this song is regularly the subject of a revolution: at some point, the male whales change their record: they adopt a totally different song, often simpler. And it’s a quasi-planetary revolution: supporting recordings, the researchers have shown that the new songs adopted in Polynesia during the southern winter begin to be sung by other whales the following year, in off the equator…
A bit like an Elvis Presley or Pharell Williams hit that crosses the Atlantic?
Yes. The song of the whales remains quite mysterious. We don’t really know what it’s for: love parade? Communication ? Signage? Still, their musical culture seems to follow the same dynamic as ours. These new hits seem shared during large transient gatherings for breeding or hunting. It would seem that the big annual festival takes place off the coast of New Zealand. It would be from there, that the new fashionable songs are adopted and spread throughout the Pacific, to the South American coasts, 20,000 km to the east – it could even spill over into the Atlantic!
Since the second half of the 20th century, humans, too, have been experiencing this type of phenomenon, with the new tube, which everyone is adopting. But cultural globalization was invented by whales!