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Conservation practitioners and scientists around the globe are highlighting the importance of studying and understanding the learned behaviors of nonhuman animals—particularly those at risk of extinction, such as great and small apes—as a way to improve their chances of survival.

This new approach was the focus of “Flourishing Diversity & The Importance of Nonhuman Cultures in Conservation,” a session hosted in September by Arcus Foundation, Synchronicity Earth, and Flourishing Diversity at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) World Conservation Congress.

“Before the mid-20th century, [Western science] assumed that culture was unique to humans,” Andrew Whiten, an emeritus professor in the School of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of St. Andrews, told the audience in a video presentation. But “people have discovered that the social form of inheritance”—as distinct from genetic inheritance—“is actually much more widespread in the animal kingdom than we could have imagined.”

Once researchers began demonstrating cultural transmission through rigorously designed experiments in the field and in captivity, they saw culture everywhere. It existed not only among nonhuman primates, like Jane Goodall’s termite-fishing chimpanzees, but among birds, marine mammals, reptiles, and even invertebrates. Whiten described much of this research in The Burgeoning Reach of Animal Culture, a recent review paper published in the journal Science.

Social learning abounds

In Western cultures, perhaps one of the best-known examples of social learning, from the early 1900s, is England’s blue tits. These colorful perching birds not only discovered they could pierce the foil tops of milk bottles left on doorsteps, then suck out the cream; they soon taught other blue tits throughout Wales and Scotland to do the same.

Another famous example, from the 1960s: the macaques of Japan’s Koshima Island. After a young female began rinsing the sand from her sweet potatoes—provided by researchers—in a stream, the habit quickly spread through the colony. When the same female began dipping tubers in saltwater, presumably to add flavor, the rest of the colony also adopted the technique. The adaptation, said scientists, was clearly social, not ecological.

Moreover, Whiten said, “decades of research on chimpanzees document as many as 39 different traditions or cultural variations,” including a discovery in the 1990s that chimpanzees in western Africa survive dry periods by eating nuts they smash open with stones or wood—a behavior not seen elsewhere.

In the 1980s, oceanographers noticed that humpback whales in the Gulf of Maine had begun smacking the water’s surface with their tails to gather sandlances, a food source. That behavior has now spread to more than 40 percent of the humpback population in regions where sandlances are relatively abundant.

Integrating culture with conservation

This sort of social learning, said another session presenter, Philippa Brakes, a research fellow at Whale and Dolphin Conservation, “is ubiquitous across a huge range of taxa because it’s very useful for organisms to be able to respond to changes in their environments.” In recognition of this shift in thinking, the Convention on Migratory Species in 2017 acknowledged, for the first time, that a population unit may be defined by its cultural distinctiveness, rather than its genome alone.