This page was prompted by a dream on 3-13-99:

I was working on a computer, looking up words and going to the center of the page, making a square picture by having the same word pattern in all four directions. It was quite fun.

One of my kids saw me do that and said,"Do the word 'whale', then the word aquarium."  So I did.

Then one of my kids asked if I would speak to his class about whales. I said, "Sure!"  Big deal!  Big whales!

So, came the day to go to school and talk about the whales. We went to his classroom and went inside, using a special knock. The teacher let us in and said,"Oh! You didn't know we were having a special auditorium to hear you speak about your experiences with whales?"

I gulped a little!

The teacher said, "What kind of whales do you work with?"

I gulped again and finally said, " Small ones!"

The teacher wanted to know, "What kind is it?"

I gulped again and said, "Oh! It was cute! It was the size of a bathtub!"

The teacher looked puzzled, but had to do something before I went to speak to the students, so I got off her hook...so-to-speak.  I excused myself for a moment and left the room. I went out into the hall and asked a student, "Where's the school library?"  He pointed "Up!" and I ran as fast as I could up the stairs to find the school library. I had to find a book on whales. I didn't even know the names of different kinds of whales. I was totally unprepared to do this.  The teacher was asking questions, not just sitting passively and listening to what I would have to say.  I needed to know more about the subject.

I found the school library and saw that the books were alphabetized. I was at the 'Z' end, close to where I wanted to be, but then I saw that these were fiction books, alphabetized by author. I needed a book on whales...the real facts.  So, someone pointed in another direction and I went over to where the 'W' section was to find a non-fiction book on whales.  

I figured I could take a quick look at the book, hold it in one hand for a prop and wave my other hand around for emphasis and nobody would know I didn't know anything about whales. I got to the 'W' section and there was a big gap where 'whales' should be. Either a kid or the teacher had taken the book or books about whales. The whales were gone and these kids would never know what a whale was.

Now I really in a panic. I didn't want anyone to know I had been only bluffing and I didn't know anything about whales, so I had to find an excuse that I didn't have to speak at all.

I considered feigning sickness so I could leave. I thought about pretending there was a fire and pulling the fire alarm. I knew that was bad. I didn't know what to do.

I spotted a computer and went to it to look up the word 'whale'. All I knew was how to make patterns with words, I didn't know what a whale really was.

DREAM OF WHALES
by Taylor Mason - age 4

Listen To A Whale Blowing

Humpback Chorus

Humpback Whale Feeding Call

Humpback Whale Feeding Call

Humpback Male Singing

Killer Whale Call

"I used to use the C-word with some trepidation," says John Ford of the Vancouver Aquarium Marine Science Centre. But in recent years, he and other whale biologists have become emboldened by what they've found. Hal Whitehead and his colleague Luke Rendell, from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, have identified 17 types of behaviour by whales and dolphins which they say are aspects of culture. And this is just the start. "My impression is that there is a reasonable chance that a substantial proportion of whale behaviour is
culture-behaviour they learned from other animals," says Whitehead. Bold words. But mention of the C-word alongside cetaceans still provokes angry outbursts from social scientists. Even the definition of culture is hotly contested. In essence, the debate about whether animals have culture turns on the question of what they learn from each other and how they do this. At the very least, sceptics want
evidence that cetaceans can acquire new behaviours through some form of social learning-preferably clear-cut instances of imitation or teaching. And that's not easy to come by. "When you're dealing with large animals that are impossible to keep in captivity, it's hard to prove exactly how behaviour is passed on," says Whitehead. 

Few people doubt that captive bottlenose dolphins are adept at imitation. They can reproduce complex patterns of tones produced by human experimenters and can even mimic the body movements of sea lions that share their pool. There is also evidence that captive killer whales can mimic the calls of their tank mates. For biologists who want to learn about the cultural lives of any cetacean in its natural habitat, experiments are out of the question. They must rely on deduction. If members of a group share behaviours that are not the result of genetic inheritance or environmental variation, then they have almost certainly learned them by watching, following or listening to other animals.

So far, humpback and killer whales provide the best evidence of culture in cetaceans and the song of the male humpback is among the most striking examples. Humpback populations in different oceans sing distinctly different songs, but within the same ocean they all stick to much the same score. If that were all there was to it, then the song could be inherited, the males of each population programmed to sing the same song. But the song changes during the breeding season.

One male might add an extra set of groans; another might drop a series of grunts. Soon all the other males have altered their own rendition to incorporate the changes until they are once again all singing the same song. The change is obviously not the result of a genetic mutation, nor can it be a response to some factor in the animals' environment-thousands of whales spread across a vast part
of the planet sing along to the same tune. The only way all these animals can keep up with the latest version of the song is by learning  the new song parts from other whales-almost certainly by imitation.

Culture plays an even bigger part in the life of killer whales. Nowhere is this more obvious than along the north-west coast of America where killer whales are split into two distinct populations-"residents" and "transients". They live in the same stretch of water, but they don't mingle. Their social structure and lifestyles are very different. They eat from a different menu and have devised their own
specialised hunting strategies. And they communicate in different ways. In effect, they belong to two quite separate cultures. "Learning and behavioural traditions direct their lives more strikingly than genetic programming," says Ford, who has been studying these whales since the 1970s 

Residents live in stable pods made up of two or three mothers and their offspring-perhaps 20 whales in all. Calves stay with their mothers for life, and in more than 20 years of observation no one has ever seen a whale switch pods. Transients travel in smaller, more changeable groups of between three and six.
One of the most obvious differences between the two cultures is the way they communicate. Killer whales detect prey with the familiar echolocating clicks, but communicate with a variety of squeaks, whistles and whines. Transients have only a few such calls, and all transient pods share the same ones. Residents have a much larger repertoire of squeaks and whistles, and each pod has its own
distinctive dialect, a set of calls unique to the pod. Despite regular interaction between pods, each sticks firmly to its own dialect. Ford has shown that a pod maintains its dialect for at least 40 years. 

To qualify as a part of killer whale culture, dialects must be learned from other members of the pod. Animals with different dialects share the same waters, so the variation can't be a product of the physical environment. "And we can toss out the notion that dialects are inherited," says Lance Barrett-Lennard of the University of British Columbia. He has spent the past seven years analysing DNA from 270 whales. His paternity tests reveal that female killer whales invariably
mate with males from outside their own pod-males with a very different dialect. If dialects were programmed by genetics a calf would inherit call patterns from both father and mother. "A calf uses its mother's calls very precisely. There's no input from the father," says Barrett-Lennard.

Then there are the whales' various food preferences and the strategies they have developed to satisfy them. Resident whales are fish eaters and make good use of their echolocating clicks. Along the Canadian coast, resident pods home in on the large, oil-rich chinook salmon, ignoring the more plentiful pink and sockeye salmon. Some take salmon offshore, but other pods have learned to corral the fish up against the rocky shoreline where they have little chance of escape. Chinook salmon turn up at different places at different times,  and resident pods each have their customary hunting spots. "To be successful salmon predators, the whales must have a pretty good road map to intercept the salmon at particular times and places along the convoluted Canadian coastline. This information is no doubt learned and passed on across generations," says Ford.

Transients eat mammals, mainly seals but occasionally dolphins and sea lions. Hunting mammals requires stealth, so they hunt in small groups and in silence-suppressing the echolocating clicks that might warn off their quarry. This is undoubtedly a skill they learn from other members of their pod, says Ford.
Killer whales round the world have adopted many innovative techniques for capturing their preferred food. Most famously, off the Crozet Islands in the southern Indian ocean, and along the coast of Patagonia, some specialise in snatching the pups of elephant seals and southern sea lions from beaches. It's not an easy trick to learn,  yet it is clearly a long-established local custom. And, according to Christophe Guinet from the French National Scientific Research Centre in Chiz, calves don't just imitate their mothers, they are actively taught
by them during an apprenticeship that lasts several years.

Cows encourage their calves by pushing them up the beach and pointing them towards prey, and they help them out if they become stuck by creating wash to lift them off the shore.

Points of view

While Guinet and other whale biologists are convinced that cetaceans teach and imitate, others are more cautious. Teaching and being taught both require some understanding of another individual's point of view, and imitation also implies a degree of mind-reading. Some primatologists doubt that even chimps have such insight (New Scientist, 14 October 2000, p 38). However, Whitehead and other
whale biologists argue that imitation and teaching are not the only forms of social learning. Cetaceans could pick up new ideas and behaviours by emulation: a killer whale, for instance, might watch a pod-mate remove a fish from a long line, and then find its own way of extricating the fish. Or the whale's compatriots might merely draw its attention to the food. Primatologist Frans de Waal from Emory
University in Atlanta argues that it doesn't matter what form social learning takes, what's important is that it has tremendous advantages. 

Culture, he argues, is not the opposite of nature-a magical concept that sets us apart from other animals-but is just another biological adaptation that has evolved in many creatures. One advantage of viewing culture in this way is that you can start to understand how and why it might have arisen among cetaceans. Cetaceans, and in particular the more advanced toothed whales such as dolphins, killer and sperm whales, have several biological attributes that improve their prospects for social learning. Apart from their advanced mental abilities, they live to a ripe old age. Some species spend years rearing their young. Killer and sperm whales also live in small, stable societies containing several generations of animals, a social system that provides ample opportunity for teaching and learning.

But why would it benefit cetaceans to evolve the ability to learn from other group members? Whitehead believes that ecological factors and the need to adapt to sudden changes in the environment played a large part in the emergence of culture. Although the ocean is a relatively stable habitat in many ways, it is highly changeable in one crucial respect-the availability of food. One moment there might be a plentiful supply of fish, the next they've disappeared. When that
happens, past experience-and the ability to share knowledge-is a huge asset. When a super El Nino strikes the waters around the Galapagos Islands-a once-in-a-century event-the squid vanish and sperm whales must move or starve, says Whitehead. "If grandma remembers where they went during the last big El Nino, they can all head straight there instead of aimlessly blundering about looking for food."

The nature of the marine environment also explains why cetaceans have become adept at recognising and learning sounds. Sound travels well in the sea and is an ideal way to communicate, so natural selection would favour individuals that were good at distinguishing sounds. Once in possession of such skills, they can be used to great advantage. The dialects of killer whales, for instance, allow members
of a group to identify each other, which brings big benefits for animals that hunt cooperatively and share both food and information on food hot spots. Among resident killer whales, it also allows females to avoid inbreeding by picking a male with a strange dialect from outside their pod, says Barrett-Lennard.

The importance of sharing cultural information seems to have led to  changes in the biology of at least some species of whales. Female killer whales, like humans, are very unusual in that they live up to a quarter of a century after they had their last offspring. This only makes sense if they have something useful to offer their
descendants-and the most important something is cultural information. "Knowledge must pass directly from one generation to the next. That makes older animals valuable," says Barrett-Lennard. Once equipped with the capacity to learn from each other, cetaceans can rapidly exploit new opportunities. With behaviours that are learned rather than innate, animals can be more flexible. This almost certainly explains the huge range of foraging strategies among killer whales-including some very recent innovations. In the Bering Sea, for example, killer whales take fish from long lines, while just north of the Shetland Islands some pods have taken to picking up the fish discarded by freezer trawlers. "If they learn from each other, only one has to figure it out and all the others get the idea faster," says Whitehead.

Such behaviours are not innate. But if a variation in behaviour becomes a permanent part of a group's culture, then it can influence the genetic evolution of the group. Animals that are especially adept at particular innovative behaviours-those which improve their chances of survival-are more likely to pass their genes on than animals that lack such skills. Culture and genes become inextricably linked, and if groups of whales remain separate then eventually they will begin to diverge, both culturally and genetically.

Among the killer whales of the north-east Pacific, this process is well advanced. Kept apart by their two cultures, the transient and resident killer whales are becoming increasingly different. Barrett-Lennard's DNA tests show slight but consistent genetic differences between the two types. As long as they stick to their own traditions and their different menu, the gap between them will widen.
"Ultimately," says Barrett-Lennard, "they will become two separate species."

MIKE NOAD has been eavesdropping on the humpback whales that breed around the Great Barrier Reef since 1995. Each year he records them singing as they travel up a narrow corridor along the Queensland coast. The first year, all the males sang the same distinctive song. The next year, he heard something odd. Of the 82 voices picked up on his tapes, two were singing a very strange song. "At first I thought maybe they were sick. I put it in my notes as a mystery song, something weird," says Noad. He thought no more about it.

When he lowered his hydrophones into the water the following year, he was in for a surprise. "I heard a whole lot of whales singing that strange song," he says. "By the end of the season practically all of them were singing it." This was unprecedented, says Doug Cato, of the Defence Science and Technology Organisation in Sydney. Cato has been recording the whales around the Great Barrier Reef since 1981, and in all that time the whales always stuck to the latest version of the east-coast song. It was baffling. In the space of a few months, the whales had dumped their old song and adopted a radical new one. "I had no idea
where the song had come from," says Noad. The penny only dropped  when Curt Jenner of the Centre for Whale Research in Fremantle sent him a tape of humpback song from Western Australia. "It was instantly obvious that it was the same song," he says. Whales from the west coast must have strayed slightly off course as they returned from their summer feeding grounds in the seas around Antarctica. Instead of ending up in the Indian Ocean they veered eastward and found themselves in the Pacific, heading for the Great Barrier Reef. But there
couldn't have been more than a handful of these foreign singers, so why didn't they learn the local song, instead of the locals copying theirs?

The humpback's song is some form of sexual display, probably designed to attract females. Song matching seems to be an attempt to give the females some way of assessing the quality of the male as a father, says Noad. "If you want to judge which is the best of the Three Tenors you get them to sing the same song." Paradoxically, the same old song seems to pall after endless repetition. Noad suspects that female humpbacks are attracted to novel songs, so males have
evolved to be constantly on the lookout for something new. "On the Australian east coast, they were handed a fantastically new song on a platter, short-circuiting the normally slow and cautious evolution of their own song," he says. Noad's finding could also help to explain why groups of whales at breeding grounds thousands of kilometres apart adopt the same innovations in their songs. At most, a humpback's voice might travel 300 kilometres. Recent analysis of recordings from underwater microphones dotted about the seabed, courtesy of the US Navy, indicate that not all male singers stick to well-defined breeding grounds but travel the open water between. Could they relay the changes across the ocean? There didn't appear to be enough of these roving whales to pass on changes so quickly and so accurately, but Noad's discovery suggests that whales can learn a totally new song with very little exposure to it. "You only need a small number to introduce the innovations," he says.

Stephanie Pain - From New Scientist magazine, vol 169 issue 2283, 24/03/2001, page 26

Description. Killer whales are the largest of the dolphin family. Adult males reach up to 9.4 m in length although 8.2 m is average. Females typically reach 7 m in length with the maximum about 8.5 m. Maximum weight is about 7 metric tons. Body form is stocky, the snout is blunt, and the flippers are large and paddle-shaped. In males the dorsal fin may be up to 1.8 m tall, but is considerably shorter in females. Coloration is black dorsally and white ventrally from the chin to slightly behind the anus. An area of white extends up the side posterior to the dorsal fin and an oval white patch is located just above and behind the eye. Each side of both jaws has 10-12 slightly curved teeth that are about 13 cm in length and interlock when the mouth is closed. The teeth are oval in cross section.

Distribution in Texas. Killer whales are distributed worldwide, including polar seas. They are rare in the Gulf of Mexico. Known in Texas on the basis of one stranding on South Padre Island and one sighting in waters off of Port Aransas.

Habits. Killer whales are most often observed as gentle giants of marine aquariums but they are, in fact, the supreme carnivore of the world’s oceans. At sea they are usually seen in "pods" of 5-20, although up to 150 have been seen together at one time. Large groups probably consist of several pods which have temporarily aggregated. Pods themselves appear very stable for many years, with little emigration or immigration. They are highly cooperative and the group functions as a unit when hunting, making these delphinids extremely efficient predators. Groups usually contain adults of both sexes but sometimes females with young will form their own groups.

Food items include squid, fish, skates, rays, sharks, sea turtles, sea birds, seals, sea lions, walrus, dolphins, porpoises, and large whales such as fin whales, humpback whales, right whales, minke whales, and gray whales. They are even known to attack the sperm whale and blue whale. On the Atlantic coast of South America, as well as on islands of the Indian Ocean, killer whales have been observed lunging through the surf — and coming right onto the beach — in pursuit of elephant seals and sea lions. After such an attack the whales have to wriggle and slide back into depths adequate for swimming. In captivity, killer whales eat about 45 kg of food per day but free ranging animals probably require much more. Although these are obviously proficient and voracious hunters, killer whales are not known to have ever attacked a human.

The reproductive habits of these whales are poorly known. The males may mate with more than one female and mating may occur throughout the year, although most calves seem to appear in autumn or winter in shallow waters. Their period of gestation is about 12 months. Calves are approximately 2.4 m long at birth and reach sexual maturity when 4.9-6.1 m in length.

Illustration credit: Pieter A. Folkens.

FROM: http://www.nsrl.ttu.edu/tmot1/orciorca.htm