Sperm Whales Taught Each Other How to Escape Hunters’ Harpoons, Study Says

The new study suggests whales learned how to evade the hunters by swimming upwind, among other methods, and passed on this knowledge to their underwater pals.

Nineteenth century whalers apparently suffered quite a few setbacks as the sperm whales they hunted taught one another how to outfox their human pursuers, Live Science reports.

According to the media outlet, researchers who analysed logbooks that were kept by whalers during hunting forays in the North Pacific have established that “the strike rates of the hunters upon their targets declined by 58 percent in just a few years.”

The research team reportedly managed to establish that not only did sperm whales learned to escape from wind-powered hunting vessels by swimming upwind, whales which hadn’t previously encountered human hunters learned to copy the behaviour of the whales which did.

Sourse: sputniknews.com