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According to a new study, potfish taught each other 200 years ago how to avoid harps.
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It was based on newly digitized logbooks of hunters in the North Pacific in the 19th century.
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The newspaper concluded that the decline in harpoon strike rates was due to whales communicating with each other.
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Sperm whales have taught each other how to avoid harps after being hunted for them 200 years ago, according to a new study.
The research, published Wednesday by the Royal Society, is based on newly digitized logbooks of American whalers, which recorded details of their expeditions in the North Pacific during the 19th century, such as the number of whales spotted or placed in the harpoon. is.
Although they recorded a huge demand for their whale, ivory and blubber and almost 80,000 ‘travel days’, there were only 2,405 successful whale watching, only a success rate of 3%.
The authors of the study, researchers on whales, Professor Hal Whitehead and dr. Luke Rendell, as well as the computer scientist dr. Tim D Smith, also found that the strike rate of whalers had dropped by 58% in less than two and a half years had first begun hunting in the region.
In Halifax, Canada, Professor Whitehead of Dalhousie University told The Owen Sun Sound Times: “It was very remarkable. I thought there would be a decline, but not so much and not so fast.
“Usually you expect it to increase as they invent things and become more successful. This is usually how we exploit wildlife. We become more efficient as we learn how to do it.”
The study concluded that potfish learned how to kill them, shared this information with their pods and changed their behavior accordingly, with ‘cultural evolution’.
The species live with their children in pods or groups that are only female, so they can form close links and share tips to evade hunters.
The hunters acknowledged that the potfish had developed tactics to evade them. Instead of forming defensive squares that were used to ward off their natural predators, the orca, the potfish, understood that they would swim against the wind by exceeding hunters’ ships.
The advent of steam power and grenade harpoons in the later years of the 19th century meant that even the tinplate whale was doomed to mass slaughter.
“It was cultural evolution, too fast for genetic evolution,” says Whitehead.
Sperm whales have the largest brain of any animal on the planet, and the researchers stressed that if they could adapt 200 years ago, they could probably also face the challenges of the ocean today.
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