592 | Whales and Dolphins: Culture and Human Interactions Cooper, J 2002 Animals in war: Valiant horses, courageous dogs, and other unsung animal heroes Guilford: Lyon’s Press Travis, L 1990 The mule London: J A Allen Rod Bennison and Jill Bough WHALES AND DOLPHINS: CULTURE AND HUMAN INTERACTIONS Culture is seen by many as a uniquely human attribute But if we define culture in any way that includes the generallyaccepted forms of human culture, such as religion, language, art, technology, symbolism, social conventions, political structures, and pop culture, then nonhumans have culture too The key to culture is social learning, or learning behavior from others Once behavior is imitated, emulated, taught or transferred between individuals through any form of social learning, culture can happen With culture, the processes of genetically driven evolution are changed Behavior can sweep through a population, or be entrenched in it by cultural conservatism Group-specific badges, such as ethnolinguistic markers, can evolve and drive cooperation within, and competition between, culturally marked groups These processes have dominated the recent history of humans, but they occur in other species, including oceanic species, as well, and they can affect how these species interact with humans In the centuries since humans have traveled the oceans, interactions between humans and whales have mostly involved humans intentionally killing whales The scale of the slaughter was extraordinary; whaling was the principal cause of death among most large whales in the 20th century But as whaling ran its course in the 1970s, human-caused deaths did not cease Whales are killed, often slowly and painfully, by entanglement in fishing gear, by ship strikes and, as has been recently discovered, by noise Humans can affect whales in ways other than through a fast or slow death We can injure them, disturb them, and affect their behavior Humans’ profound alterations of the marine habitat have closed some niches and opened others In the North Pacific, gray whale calves seem to be an important food for some killer whales In the North Atlantic there have been no gray whales since their extirpation several hundred years ago During the course of whaling, killer whales in all oceans scavenged the carcasses of other species of whale killed by whalers But when whaling virtually stopped in the 1970s, the killer whales moved on In many parts of the world they have started removing fish from long lines, to the consternation of fishermen The destruction of sea otter populations along the Alaskan Aleutian archipelago in the 1980s, and consequent restructuring of almost the entire near-shore ecosystem, seems to have been the result of a prey shift by just a few killer whales, perhaps some of those that had subsisted largely on whale carcasses in the heyday of whaling That diet shifts by just one nonhuman predator should have such significant conservation and management consequences is partially a tribute to the killer whale’s power, size, and intelligence But as with another voracious predator, the human, there is another important factor: culture Culture is defined in many ways, but the essence is that individuals learn