PacMam podcast: Survival of the experienced

How do prey avoid their predators?  Can an intelligent, social mammal share knowledge about what they have learned, with other unexperienced individuals and have it make a difference?  This is the question being asked in our journal pick this week, but in this case humans are the predators, and sperm whales are the prey. Utilizing data from digitized whale logs, along with what they know from decades of research on the social structure and behavior of sperm whales the authors can use mathmatical models to test hypothesises on why, in only 2.4 years, the rate of a whaler striking a whale (harpooning them) decreased by 58%!!  That is a stark decrease in a short time. So, was it due to a difference in whaler's abilities, individual whales learning from their own experience, the fact that vulnerable whales were likely taken first (and they were easier to strike), or was it because sperm whales used social learning - the unexperienced learning from the experienced?  Join us as we discuss how social learning may have played a role in the history of whaling.

Paper freely available: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2021.0030

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