Gene–culture coevolution in whales and dolphins
Edited by Marcus W. Feldman, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, and approved May 1, 2017 (received for review January 14, 2017)
Abstract
Whales and dolphins (Cetacea) have excellent social learning skills as well as a long and strong mother–calf bond. These features produce stable cultures, and, in some species, sympatric groups with different cultures. There is evidence and speculation that this cultural transmission of behavior has affected gene distributions. Culture seems to have driven killer whales into distinct ecotypes, which may be incipient species or subspecies. There are ecotype-specific signals of selection in functional genes that correspond to cultural foraging behavior and habitat use by the different ecotypes. The five species of whale with matrilineal social systems have remarkably low diversity of mtDNA. Cultural hitchhiking, the transmission of functionally neutral genes in parallel with selective cultural traits, is a plausible hypothesis for this low diversity, especially in sperm whales. In killer whales the ecotype divisions, together with founding bottlenecks, selection, and cultural hitchhiking, likely explain the low mtDNA diversity. Several cetacean species show habitat-specific distributions of mtDNA haplotypes, probably the result of mother–offspring cultural transmission of migration routes or destinations. In bottlenose dolphins, remarkable small-scale differences in haplotype distribution result from maternal cultural transmission of foraging methods, and large-scale redistributions of sperm whale cultural clans in the Pacific have likely changed mitochondrial genetic geography. With the acceleration of genomics new results should come fast, but understanding gene–culture coevolution will be hampered by the measured pace of research on the socio-cultural side of cetacean biology.
Acknowledgments
I thank Andrew Foote, who helped write and validate parts of this article, particularly the parts involving genomics, contributed alternative explanations, and also reviewed the article; two anonymous reviewers who provided detailed and constructive comments; and Francisco J. Ayala, Marcus W. Feldman, Kevin N. Laland, and Andrew Whiten for organizing such an interesting colloquium.
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Published online: July 24, 2017
Published in issue: July 25, 2017
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Acknowledgments
I thank Andrew Foote, who helped write and validate parts of this article, particularly the parts involving genomics, contributed alternative explanations, and also reviewed the article; two anonymous reviewers who provided detailed and constructive comments; and Francisco J. Ayala, Marcus W. Feldman, Kevin N. Laland, and Andrew Whiten for organizing such an interesting colloquium.
Notes
This paper results from the Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium of the National Academy of Sciences, “The Extension of Biology Through Culture,” held November 16–17, 2016, at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center of the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering in Irvine, CA. The complete program and video recordings of most presentations are available on the NAS website at www.nasonline.org/Extension_of_Biology_Through_Culture.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
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The author declares no conflict of interest.
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Gene–culture coevolution in whales and dolphins, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.
114 (30) 7814-7821,
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1620736114
(2017).
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