Whales and Dolphins: Culture and Human Interactions | 593 their behavior from each other in such a way that groups of individuals acquire distinctive behavior When behavior becomes determined by culture rather than by genes or individual learning, then it can take some unusual forms and have immense consequences Humans are the prime example Human culture includes some wonderfully useful features that enrich our lives These include language, technology, art, and music But some forms of culture, such as Kamikaze cults, guns, and fast-food restaurants are harmful to individual humans, and others, such as nuclear weapons, rabid religious beliefs promoting violence, and fossil-fuel burning, threaten us, and in many cases others, as a species Because of the capabilities of our brains and the opposability of our thumbs, human culture has reached extraordinary heights and depths, literally and figuratively But other animals have culture It has been found in fish, rats, and many other species, but is best known in songbirds, primates, and cetaceans The cultures of different species vary characteristically For instance, songbirds seem to be cultural primarily in their songs, whereas culture has a particular role in the foraging and social behavior of chimpanzees In one important respect, whale and dolphin culture seems closest to that of humans In several species of whale and dolphin, social groups that use the same habitat behave differently, in an analogous fashion to multicultural human societies And as human culture profoundly affects our interactions with others species, their cultures may also influence interspecies relationships Here are some examples that have arisen over recent years during our dealings with whales and dolphins The bottlenose dolphin is the beststudied cetacean It is found in many parts of the world, and has been studied in several of them The site of one of the longest and most detailed studies is Shark Bay, Western Australia The dolphins in Shark Bay have a wide diversity of feeding strategies, ranging from using sponges as tools to probe beneath the surface, to stranding intentionally on beaches, to attacking very large fish It seems as though these strategies are largely passed on through social learning, perhaps principally from mother to offspring, and so are a form of culture One of the strategies, begging for fish from beachgoers, has important negative consequences: the calves of the dolphins who exhibit this behavior have higher mortality, and the behavior only involves a few animals On the other side of Australia, in Moreton Bay, there are two communities of bottlenose dolphins They use the same waters, but one regularly feeds on discards from prawn-trawlers, probably a cultural behavior The other does not The communities rarely interact They will be differentially affected by human activities, such as changes in trawling activity due to overexploitation of the prawns On a more positive note, 25–30 bottlenose dolphins in Laguna, Brazil essentially run a fishing cooperative with local human fishermen, in which the dolphins and fishermen follow a strict protocol, with the dolphins herding the fish into the nets and feeding on the entrapped fish, to the benefit of both This has been going on for generations, the cooperative fishing culture apparently passed from mother to daughter in the dolphins, and father to son in the humans There are other dolphins in the Laguna area who not participate in the cooperative fishing, and sometimes try to disrupt it There are