Can Preserving the Cultural Lives of Animals Save Them?

Bottlenose dolphin in Adelaide tail-walking. A behaviour learned by one female by observing other dolphins whilst being rehabilitated in captivity. Subsequently, this behaviour spread across the wild population some time after she was re-released.

Source: Mike Bossley/with permission.

Increasing amounts of comparative research clearly show that diverse species of non-human animals (animals) display cultural traditions (such as tail-walking, above, and song-sharing, below) and that understanding their rich social, cognitive, emotional, and creative lives and saving them depends on preserving these traditions.¹ Recently, I learned about an open-access special issue of the prestigious journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B titled “Animal culture: conservation in a changing world,” compiled and edited by Philippa Brakes, Lucy Aplin, Emma L. Carroll, Alison L. Greggor, Andrew Whiten, and Ellen C. Garland. Dr. Brakes, Chair of the Expert Group on Animal Culture and Social Complexity, graciously agreed to answer a few questions about this important and blossoming field of research.

Marc Bekoff: Why did you and your colleagues put together this special edition, and how did you select the contributors?

Philippa Brakes: A large group of us has been exploring evidence on social learning and culture, and what it means for conservation, since 2014 under the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species. We started by looking at cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises), but soon realized that we needed to expand to look at evidence from a much wider group of species.

Taking a broader approach, looking at evidence of social learning from species as diverse as meerkats to birds, whales, and elephants helped us understand what culture means for species conservation. It turns out that this shared information is important in a range of different ecological environments and conservation settings. Contributors to our special issue are a mixture of those who have been working on particular species or specific conservation issues for decades and early-career researchers who are some of the rising stars in this field.

MB: How does this collection of papers relate to your backgrounds and general areas of interest?

PB: I am a behavioral ecologist, and I’m fascinated by how learning from others can shape behavior, from the individual to social groups and wider societies, right up to the population level. As well as the consequences for conservation, I’m also interested in how socially learned information can impact individual welfare—sometimes positively, but sometimes negatively.

Take, for example, orcas or killer whales: These whales often develop specific foraging strategies. Actually, there has been some great research published just last week on orcas cooperating to fashion a tool from kelp. In Aotearoa, New Zealand, where I live, orcas have developed a clever specialization of foraging on sting rays by carefully handling the rays so that they don’t get caught on their barbed sting. Orcas are fairly unique in that their cultures can be very conservative, which can mean that they are much less likely to switch to new foraging behaviors. This can put their population at risk when prey becomes depleted.

Humpback whales share their song through cultural transmission, and some groups also have unique foraging cultures.

Source: Tim Stenton/with permission.

MB: Who do you hope to reach?

PB: I think that work on animal culture should make us all pause for thought. Learning from others in the wild can be important for resilience to new threats. It is a second inheritance system, which can operate both within and between generations. This can provide an invaluable opportunity for real-time adaptation to environmental threats, but only if a species is able to learn and then share new behaviors.

However, as with our societies, sometimes shared information can actually cause vulnerability, or may even be harmful. For example, when elephants or primates learn crop raiding, or sperm whales learn to remove fish from longlines in a process known as depredation. Being able to connect conservation practitioners and policymakers with the emergent scientific understanding in this field will help the development of precise conservation and welfare interventions that account for—or even target—specific processes of social learning, thereby improving efficiency, rather than working against these natural behavioral processes.

MB: How does your work differ from others that are concerned with some of the same general topics?

PB: Conservation bodies generally consider populations in terms of their genetic diversity and where they are located. This work expands our horizon of the natural world beyond genes, to also consider the value of what non-humans know about their habitats and ecosystems. We provide important scientific evidence that knowledge matters for survival and reproduction in other species, too.

This is important for their conservation, but I’m also interested in what culture means for all aspects of non-humans’ lives. Not just the conservation of species and populations, but also how cultural behavior relates to individual and group-level welfare, innovation, and creativity, as well as sentience and sapience. With other colleagues, we have recently published on the increasing phenomenon of “Out of Habitat Marine Mammals,” where we examine the increasing incidence of marine mammals that are appearing a long way from their usual habitat range or type. As habitats come under increasing pressure due to changes in climate and ocean circulation, something that is particularly intriguing to me is whether some of these individuals might turn out to be pioneers, locating new habitats, and whether—through the processes of social learning—this might eventually lead to range expansion or range shifts for some of these species.

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MB: What do you hope people can learn from factoring culture into conservation efforts?

PB: Conserving animal cultures is complicated, and the closer we look, the more complicated it seems to be. This I think is the grand challenge for this field: to distil salient advice on conservation targets that adds value to existing conservations efforts. The answer is very different in different conservation settings, social systems, and for different threats. There are so many imperiled species, with threats mounting by the day, that we need to be smart about incorporating all the information sources we can to make the best conservation decisions.

Sometimes, the processes of social learning and culture may be able to help us fast-track certain interventions or provide early indicators of vulnerability. If we treat all populations as homogenous gene pools, rather than as the granulated, modular cultural societies that many are, we can miss important opportunities.

But I think culture in other species also tells us something more about who these other species are, and is an important reminder that we aren’t the only species to have specific ways of life. It is humbling to think that although we are only just beginning to document in detail the wondrous diversity of non-human cultures across our shared planet, many of these cultures may have been in existence and evolving a great deal longer than Western science.