Greetings,
We are pleased to announce the publication of our new article in the Journal of
Comparative Psychology:
“Mercado, E. III, & Perazio, C. E. (2021). Similarities in composition and
transformations of songs by humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) over time
and space. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 135(1), 28–50.”
ABSTRACT
The complex songs produced by humpback whales have been cited as evidence of
prodigious memory, innovativeness, sophisticated auditory scene analysis, vocal
imitation, and even culture. Researchers believe humpbacks learn their songs
culturally because songs appear to change rapidly, consistently, and
irreversibly across whales within a population. Here, we present evidence of
similarities in song structure both across populations and decades that
strongly challenge claims that social learning is the main driver of variations
in humpback whale songs over time. Groups of humpback whales that were not in
acoustic contact (recorded in Puerto Rico in 1970, Hawaii in 2012, and Colombia
in 2013–2019) produced songs in acoustically comparable cycles, suggesting that
progression through sound patterns within and across songs is not simply
determined by vocal imitation of innovative patterns, but may instead be
controlled by production templates that prescribe how singers construct and
transform songs over time. Identifying universal constraints on song production
is critical to evaluating the role of vocal imitation and cultural transmission
in the progressive changes that humpback whales make to their songs and for
evaluating the functional relevance of such changes. The current findings
illustrate how information theoretic analyses of vocal sequences can
potentially obscure key acoustic qualities of signals that may be critical to
understanding how vocalizers produce, perceive, and use those sequences.
Sincerely,
Eduardo Mercado
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