Williamsburg Regional Library

The cultural lives of whales and dolphins, Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell

eng

Includes bibliographical references (pages 351-398) and index

illustrationsplates

index present

non fiction

The cultural lives of whales and dolphins

bibliography

871670748

Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell

In The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins, cetacean biologists Hal Whitehead, who has spent much of his life on the ocean trying to understand whales, and Luke Rendell, whose research focuses on the evolution of social learning, open an astounding porthole onto the fascinating culture beneath the waves. As Whitehead and Rendell show, cetacean culture and its transmission are shaped by a blend of adaptations, innate sociality, and the unique environment in which whales and dolphins live: a watery world in which a hundred-and-fifty-ton blue whale can move with utter grace, and where the vertical expanse is as vital, and almost as vast, as the horizontal

Culture in the ocean? -- Culture? -- Mammals of the ocean -- Song of the whale -- What the dolphins do -- Mother cultures of the large toothed whales -- How do they do it? -- Is this evidence for culture? -- How the whales got culture -- Whale culture and whale genes -- The implications of culture : ecosystems, individuals, stupidity, and conservation -- The cultural whales : how we see them and how we treat them -- This book came from and is built on..

adult

Whales and dolphins