The Animal Kingdom Has Social Influencers Too

Meet the Other Social Influencers of the Animal Kingdom

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Culture is not a human monopoly. It turns out that culture is widespread throughout nature.

A chimpanzee named Julie stuck a long, stiff blade of grass into her ear. This new accessory soon became a fad at the Chimfunshi Wildlife Sanctuary in Zambia. Julie’s son took up the trend, then a close female friend, and then a male friend. The other chimps in the group copied it too. Sticking a blade of grass in your ear was no easy feat. They kept practicing, and once they finally succeeded, they showed it off proudly. Although more than two years have passed since Julie died, the chimps there are still carrying on the tradition, just like a human meme or fad.

Humans are not the only ones with culture, and animals do not act purely on instinct. If we define culture as a set of behaviors that a group shares and passes on through social learning, then primates, whales, birds, fish, and insects all have culture.

Genes are slow. Culture is fast. Here is an example. It happened in 1980. A sharp-eyed humpback whale discovered a new hunting technique. If you slap the water hard with your tail, the small fish bunch together. Then you can easily gobble them up. This technique spread quickly. Now 600 humpback whales use it. It was social transmission.

There is also something discovered through research into 19th-century sperm whale whaling. Whalers from New England began hunting the naive sperm whales of the North Pacific. At first, all they had to do was throw their harpoons. But within just three to five years, the whaling success rate plummeted by nearly 60%. This was before the whalers had reduced the whale population. The whales quickly learned how to evade the harpoons. Tip 1: Whalers are different from your old enemy, the orca. Abandon the strategy of huddling together with the baby whale at the center. Tip 2: Swim fast into the wind. Humans hate rowing against the wind and soon give up the chase. Tip 3: Awaken your inner Moby Dick. Dive deep, then surge up and smash the whaling ship to pieces!

There are also differences between animal groups. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, there are two bonobo groups that live close to each other. One group hunts an animal similar to a flying squirrel. The other group hunts an anteater called a duiker. It is as if these were traditions handed down from ancient times.

In the past, claiming that animals had culture was treated as nonsense. But now a golden age of animal culture research has begun. Animal migration, which was thought to be instinctive behavior, was actually cultural behavior. Bighorn sheep have to learn how to migrate from other sheep. With the whooping crane, a long-distance migratory bird, the number of adults had declined so sharply that there were no adult birds left to teach the young ones their migration route. So conservationists used ultralight aircraft to teach the whooping cranes their migration route. Even farm animals preserve cultural wisdom. Cows know where the water is and where the good grazing spots are. There is far more going on inside a cow’s head than you might think.

Bees do more than just buzz, too. A researcher at Queen Mary University of London trained bumblebees so that pulling a string would dispense sugar. Only a tiny number of bees learned the trick of pulling the string. But once even a single bee figured out how to pull the string, the other bees soon learned to do it too by observing that clever bee. The string-pulling technique even spread to other beehives. A bee’s brain, smaller than a lentil, was enough to spread culture.