08/13/2026
Amazing that s***m whales learned that swimming into the wind was their best hope of survival against whalers!
S***m whales in the nineteenth-century North Pacific learned how to defeat American whalers and taught each other how to do it. Within a few years of the first whale ships arriving in a new region, the probability of successfully harpooning a sighted whale dropped by 58 percent. The whalers did not get worse at their jobs. The whales got better at surviving them. And the method the whales adopted was something that required understanding a limitation of their predator that the predator could not change: its sails. The whales started swimming directly into the wind, the one direction a sail-powered ship could not follow.
Hal Whitehead at Dalhousie University and Luke Rendell at the University of St Andrews are the two leading researchers on s***m whale culture. In 2021, they published a study in Biology Letters that digitized 77,749 daily entries from American whalers' logbooks covering North Pacific operations between 1819 and 1844. Of those entries, 2,405 included s***m whale sightings. The researchers tracked what happened during each sighting: how many whales were spotted, how many the whalers attempted to harpoon, and how many they successfully struck. Then they plotted the strike rate over time from the moment whaling first reached each new region of the North Pacific.
The drop was steep and fast. In the first years of exploitation in a given area, whalers struck sighted whales at a high rate. Within a few years, the rate fell by more than half and stayed low. Whitehead and Rendell tested three hypotheses to explain the decline.
The first was that the earliest whalers were simply better at their jobs and later crews were less skilled. The data killed this. The same whalers who showed high strike rates in the North Pacific during the early years showed no such elevation in other oceans where they had been hunting longer. They were not exceptional hunters. They were hunting naive whales.
The second was that whalers killed the most vulnerable individuals first, leaving behind the naturally harder-to-catch animals. This would produce a decline, but a gradual one spread over many years as the population composition shifted. The observed decline was too fast. It happened within a few seasons, not a few decades.
The third was social learning. S***m whales live in kin-based social units of roughly 10 females and their calves. Units that encountered whalers and survived carried the experience. When those experienced units later aggregated with naive units at the surface, the naive units learned defensive behavior from the experienced ones. The models built around social learning fit the observed data better than either alternative.
The whalers themselves recorded what changed. In the early years, harpooned s***m whales reacted by grouping together at the surface in what later researchers called a marguerite formation: heads pointed inward, tails out, the whole group clustered tightly in a defensive rosette. This response probably evolved against orcas. Against whalers, it was fatal. A cluster of whales at the surface meant multiple targets within rowing distance of the same open boat. The whalers killed them in groups.
The whales stopped doing it. The logbooks describe a shift. Instead of grouping and holding position, the whales began fleeing. Instead of fleeing in random directions, they fled upwind. A nineteenth-century whale ship was powered by sails. It could not chase directly into the wind. A whale swimming upwind at speed opened a gap that the ship could not close without tacking, and tacking takes time that a diving whale does not give. The whales had identified the one vector their predator could not follow and chose it repeatedly, across multiple regions, within a few years of first contact.
Whitehead and Rendell described the finding as an unusual instance of rapid and large-scale cultural change outside humans. The whales did not evolve a new instinct. They learned a new behavior, spread it through their social network, and changed the economics of an entire industry within a few hunting seasons.
Image is for illustration purposes only
Source: Whitehead and Rendell (2021), Biology Letters, Royal Society / ABC News / Live Science / Oceanbites / Envirobites / PMC.
