Whales Teach One Another Hunting Skill

Whales Teach One Another Hunting Skill
鲸鱼教其他同类如何打猎
Chimps show other chimps how to use tools. My roommate showed me some tricks to make better scrambled eggs. Group members teaching each other is called cultural transmission. And a study finds that cultural transmission is behind the spread of a hunting technique among humpback whales off New England. The research is in the journal Science. [Jenny Allen et al., Network-Based Diffusion Analysis Reveals Cultural Transmission of Lobtail Feeding in Humpback Whales]
猩猩教其他星星如何使用工具。我室友教我如何炒蛋。群组成员互相学习称为文化传递。一项研究发现，这种文化传递行为在新英格兰的鲸鱼狩猎行为背后起到了传播技术的作用。研究发表在in the journal Science. [Jenny Allen et al., Network-Based Diffusion Analysis Reveals Cultural Transmission of Lobtail Feeding in Humpback Whales]
It’s called "lobtail" feeding: a humpback whale slaps the surface of the water with its tail. The resulting bubbles pen in prey fish, which the whales gobble up. Researchers first saw lobtail feeding in 1980. Within 30 years, 37 percent of observed humpbacks had picked up the technique.
这被称为拍打捕食：鲸鱼用自己的尾巴拍打水面。引起的泡沫中包含要猎取的鱼，随后鲸鱼会吞下他们。研究人员1980年第一次观察到拍打捕食。三十年后，37%的鲸鱼会使用这种技术。
To create mathematical models for the spread of lobtail feeding, researchers used 27 years of data from whale-watching boats in the Gulf of Maine. And the models that included cultural transmission as a factor best matched the data. Those models assumed that humpback whales that spend more time with lobtail feeders were more likely to pick up the method themselves.
为了给拍打捕食创建数学模型，研究人员使用在Gulf of Maine的鲸鱼观察船观测到的27年的数据。考虑了文化传播的模型对数据的匹配最好。这些模型假设成年鲸鱼使用拍打捕食的方法的时间越长，就越容易学会。
Clearly, whales are capable of sophisticated social interactions—and we've only seen the tip of the tail.
显然，鲸鱼之间有复杂的社会交往——而我们看到的只是冰山一角。