Bubble feeding trick spreads through humpback whale social groups

An innovative feeding behaviour has spread rapidly through humpback whales in the fjords of western Canada, in a clear example of how cultural knowledge can help animal populations to survive.

Bubble-net feeding is a group hunting technique in which whales blow bubbles to corral fish, then surge upwards together to gulp them down.

“It’s an activity that’s done cooperatively, given the level of coordination and division of labour involved,” says Ellen Garland at the University of St Andrews, UK.

The behaviour has been documented for decades among humpbacks (Megaptera novaeangliae) in Alaskan waters, and researchers have started seeing it recently in the northeastern Pacific population off Canada.

But it is tricky for researchers to establish whether complex behaviours like this are transmitted through social learning — rather than being independently discovered by multiple individuals.

To tease apart the process, Éadin O’Mahony at the University of St Andrews and her colleagues analysed field observation data from 2004 to 2023, focusing on 526 individuals living in the Kitimat Fjord System in British Columbia, within Gitga’at First Nation territory.

The team identified the whales using images of their tail flukes, which are unique to each animal. The data shows that 254 individuals performed bubble-net feeding at least once, and about 90 per cent of these events occurred in a cooperative context.

The behaviour also appeared to take off after 2014, coinciding with a major marine heatwave in the north-east Pacific that reduced prey availability.

“With the heatwave, as prey availability went down, a whale’s ability to change feeding behaviour would help it maintain its daily calorie intake,” says O’Mahony.

Whales were more likely to adopt bubble-net feeding if they regularly associated with others that already used the technique. Bubble-net feeding was probably introduced in the region by whales migrating from elsewhere in the north-east Pacific, but the pattern points mainly to the behaviour spreading through local social networks, carried by stable groups and influential individuals.

“What we see from the heatwave years onward is an increase in whales already in the area who previously didn’t take part in bubble-net feeding,” says O’Mahony.

Humpback whales’ ability to pass on knowledge through social groups may be vital to their survival, and understanding their culture could help us protect them, the researchers say.

“It’s not just about how many animals are left, but about whether the social behaviours that make the population function are coming back too,” says Ted Cheeseman, co-founder of the citizen science platform Happywhale, who wasn’t involved in the study.

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