Potent Social Learning and Conformity Shape a Wild Primate’s Foraging Decisions

Animal Culture Cultural transmission of information occurs when individuals learn from others with more experience or when individuals come to accept particular modes of behavior as the local norm. Such information transfer can be expected in highly social or long-lived species where contact and time for learning are maximized and are seen in humans (see the Perspective by de Waal ). Using a network-based diffusion analysis on a long-term data set that includes tens of thousands of observations of individual humpback whales, Allen et al. (p. 485 ) show that an innovative feeding behavior has spread through social transmission since it first emerged in a single individual in 1980. The “lobtail” feeding has…