From what I understand, thinking of orcas as distinct cultural units might not be appropriate at all. The population genetics show that it's more likely that they're separate species that just happen to look incredibly alike...

There are, however lots of other cetaceans that show unique 'cultural' attrbutes.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas makes a similar argument for culture in various cat species such as Lions in her book The Tribe of Tiger.
I think it's ridiculous to assume that humans have made some discrete evolutionary leap in culture that distinguishes them from every other species on the planet. Granted, the complexity of our culture is far greater than most animals, but it's a difference of degree rather than kind.
Most of the great apes have now been observed to use tools. Some chimps have even been observed to fabricate tools out of multiple materials. Many animals show varying food preferences and hunting styles depending on the group. Learned behavior is common because it provides an evolutionary advantage in a wide spectrum of environmental conditions.
Rather than focusing on one trait (i.e. culture or language) that makes us human, we should recognize that what makes us unique is a constellation of traits (bipedalism, toolmaking, culture, language, etc.) that has resulted in the often amazing and occasionally dreadful character of human civilization.

I've always thought it was rather pompous of people to think that we were "better" than other animals. We certainly are unique, but we are not better-than; nature treats us the same as other creatures on earth.
But that seems to be the minority opinion among humans. Makes sense; seems speciesism exists naturally among sentient and non-sentient beings.

Okay, that seal and walrus video totally just made my day. I loved watching the seal point to the letters! She was so intense! XD

What is enough to make a culture?

Geese, cranes, and some other birds transmit information regarding migration routes by means of a tradition. Population groups will follow the same path each year and make the same rest-stops. They are led by an elder who remembers the way. Conservationists have discovered that they can teach a tame captive group a route by having a human in a small aircraft lead them. This gets televised, or made into semi-biographical movies. When human activity destroys or makes unsafe certain rest-stops along a traditional migration route, the population can be destroyed, and conservationists are trying to use that same small-aircraft-as-flock-elder-substitute to teach segments of the population alternate routes. Is this 'cultural diversity' as a mechanism for species survival, or? They don't appear to innovate much, the way they act it's as if they want to migrate at the right time, but they don't know how to go and so just bumble about a bit and, unless they meet up with and join a knowledgeable population, they winter where they were born.

Heck, house cats (extensively studied animals, as they are so readily available) learn their hunting preferences from their mothers if they don't learn them by chance. If a cat favours birds over rodents or meadow voles over mice or learns to fish for minnows or how to take on large prey like rats it may be innovation but it may be that she's doing it the way mother did. Is that culture?

Then there was that thing in Florida with the researcher who watched, over several years, a population of Florida Jays learn, all from watching one couple, to use a plastic six-pack holder as a nesting platform. On pair tried it, their offspring did it, their neighbors picked it up, everybody was doing it, six-pack holders became more rare, it stopped. Culture? OMFG, was that a Florida Jay FAD?

As much as we've tried to erase sexism, racism and even homophobia, we just can't get over our superiority complex when it comes to our own species (also known as "speciesism"). Scientists and laymen alike are quick to explain away animal behaviors that are obviously parallel to our own as just "dumb animal instinct".

Unfortunately, this attitude has caused a lot of pain and suffering and unnecessary death. As with our use of other races as slaves (or worse) or even the subjugation of females in our society, we have used animals for truly horrible things that no one would ever dream of doing to human beings.

Of all the movements for rights, tolerance and understanding that the human race has been through throughout the years, the one for the animals seems to be taking the longest. I guess it's just harder to understand and empathize with beings you can't communicate with, even if they communicate in amazingly complex ways with themselves all the time.

So this big part of this idea that I latch on to is the gradual erosion of humanities belief that we are above or better than other animals, and therefore have the right (many would say god-given right) to do with them whatever we please.

Like when they said you have to whip a slave harder because Negros have thicker skin.

Given this (along with elephant burial and mourning rituals and signing Apes) are we justified in treating Animals like animals ?

I recently watched a documentary about elephants in two different game reserves in Africa.

In one reserve, a lot of male rhinos were showing up dead, having been mauled by elephants.

It turned out that in the first group it was young bull elephants who'd become sexually mature years early. When the park had been established they'd brought in elephant calves but hadn't had the technology to transport adult elephants. The young males were hitting adolescence early because there were no adult males, and it turned out that in their confusion they were making sexual advances to the male rhinos (one attack was eventually witnessed). When the rhinos rejected them, they got angry and attacked them.

It was basically a Lord of the Flies situation, but with elephants.

The solution? The park imported some fully grown elephants bulls. With proper adult male role models, the boys stopped misbehaving and the rhinos stopped getting attacked.

Really enjoyed the article :) I wish this sort of information was front news on the papers instead of what some so-called celebrity did to her ex-husband or whatever. Thankgod for soc images!

Anyway what this reminds me of is how, when I was pretty young, I came to the conclusion that every species of animal (human included) on this planet thinks of themselves as 'superior' to the rest. And it made me wonder how true our own feelings of superiority are.

And to look at the discussion of superiority even further, you could say that we feel superior because animals can't communicate with us. The same could be said to how we view deaf people who might have difficulty communicating through normal means. Or with a foreigner.

For some silly reason we constantly associate a lack of intelligence with those who can't communicate with us. Despite being constantly proven otherwise. Why is this?

So as a child I figured that if we held this belief that those who can't communicate with us are stupider than us, then there's a fair chance that animals might feel the same way. My horse probably thinks I'm a total idiot because I don't just tell her what I want. Ants probably see us building structures on fault lines they can recognise in an instant and think we're the biggest fools around.

Or maybe animals are better than us and understand that we lack their communication skill and try to make up for it as best they can. Cats are constantly trying to teach us how to hunt by showing us their kills. My horse will buck me off when something isn't right. Sometimes it feels as though our domesticated animals are doing their best to bridge the communication gap. While we just use and abuse them however we like.

Also see Robert Sapolsky's talk on the uniqueness of humans at http://www.ted.com/talks/robert_sapolsky_the_uniqueness_of_humans.html

You are stumbling into my territory (anthropology) here, and perhaps a little clumsily. I wish I could read some of those papers but sadly, I don't have the time.

Because the first question I would ask is: how do we define culture? Everyone above seems to define it simply as something learned from one's parents, but I believe that it is something more than that. Smarter people than me have already picked this question apart, I'm sure, but there needs to be an element that I'm not even sure we can identify in animals because of our inability to communicate with them: the ability to symbolize. By which I mean, to take two things that are not connected at all and have one signify the other. Because when we talk about other people's cultures, we are talking about the ways in which they attach meaning to things that are actually inherently meaningless. Check out 'semiotics' if I'm not explaining it well enough; but if you look at even a simple explanation of human culture - http://anthro.palomar.edu/culture/culture_1.htm - you can see that meanings are a huge part of it.

I'm not saying that animals CAN'T have culture. I don't know if they can, and it certainly would be interesting if they do (I'm imagining what an archaeology-of-whales would be like) but I'm not ready to concede that point to biologists quite yet. Maybe we could get some cross-discipline action going on and at least make sure that our definitions of "culture" are the same first.

Agreed. Also an anthropologist here. Language, symbolism, and meaning are central to human culture, and our uniqueness. And not just language as a form of communication, but everything that goes into the complexity of human speech. For example, the how the language center of the brain, among others, develops largely outside the womb because of the adaptations to bipedalism, resulting in a higher propensity for it. Also the general complexity of language, and the symbolism and abstraction that goes along with it, and (one thing that I find very important) the possibility of conditionals.

"Culture" is too loaded and subjective a word to argue that "we're not the only ones with it." Communicating general ideas, creating hunting strategies, and passing learned skills on to offspring are all elements of 'culture,' but the term itself is generic and in my opinion an archaic one-word description of the uniqueness that has been perplexing humans for millennia.

I think animals probably do have culture, because I do not see humans as essentially anything other than very unique animals. However, as thewhatifgirl put it, we just don't know, and if we want to call other animal social groups 'cultures,' there has to be a better all-encompassing model/definition. Because as it stands, the generic term 'culture' itself is an idea that is built specifically around elements of human existence. I think if we really want to prove the similarities of species on earth, we have to stop anthropomorphizing them.

I don't think conservation is worth pursuing at the species level, much less the cultural level.

The majority of species that have existed so far are already extinct; the majority that ever will exist have yet to evolve. What's so special about the ones that happen to be alive right now, and why should we favor them over the potential species that would evolve in their place if they did go extinct?

As far as I'm concerned, the existence of humanity is just part of the ever changing environment that life much adapt to, and that we should not feel bad about other species' inadequacy in that regard.

I thought this was relevant:

http://www.marriedtothesea.com/archives/2010/Feb/?#582

The capacity to learn behaviour or show signs of cognitive understanding do not in any way constitute a 'culture'.

What is more interessting is that the two groups of Orca are unable to learn or adapt the others strategies and will continue to perform by rote what they learned when very young.

Man is not inherently 'superior' to other species but to not recognise that we are markedly different is plainly unhelpful.

I found Dave Slater's comment very interesting - it is interesting that the Orcas don't learn anything from their counterparts in the other group. Are they incapable or are there 'lifestyles' in some way self perpetuating - e.g. could eating the red meat of mammals be increasing testosterone (or the Whale equivalent) and therefore aggression, whilst the diet of fish be providing lots of brain building fishy oils? Or is it anthropomorphic to see the mammal eating Orcas as aggressive hunters and the fish eaters as playful?

Fundamentally, however, I think the point is that, as the anthropologists have pointed out, that if we want to describe what these animals have as 'culture', then it is only as a kind of culture which is very different to humans. It isn't vanity to think that our culture is radically different to that of animals; rather it is vain to think that the acquisition of something parallel to our culture would somehow make animals better.

Just because we use cultured as a term of approval amongst humans (generally), doesn't mean that animals would derive any value from a human type culture.

Anyway, the curious thing is that all the animal 'lovers' who have written here about animal cultures have observed and valued them in a totally anthropocentric way.

That is why they don't exist - animal cultures I mean.

If Americans, for example, could find a stick-shift Orca pod as opposed to an automatic-shift pod that would be the clincher.

Now there is culture, in spades!!!

Go seek, young warriors!

(That is probably a video game, by the way )

Another interesting sighting - Animal drug use in the wild - Lemur's get high

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzaUA2-nHR4

Very nice. What is more interessting is that the two groups of Orca are unable to learn or adapt the others strategies and will continue to perform by rote what they learned when very young. Lagwagon T-Shirt

Great, thanks. The Cramps T-Shirt

Wonderful post, thank you. Bombay Bicycle Club T-Shirt

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