Bubble-net feeding

Ah.

But I do know whales, and they tracked which whales bubble net fed, where they first acquired the behavior, and who they associated with before and after learning it, because this suddenly appeared in the Canadian population.

And they distinguished it between the cooperative bubble net feeding and solo bubble net feeding.

And the interesting thing that I found in doing this is they used this very specific technique called network-based diffusion analysis.

Because realistically, how can you tell if someone, if something you cannot communicate with learnt something from a friend or just figured it out themselves? How do you figure that out? How do you make an educated guess on that? Well, it's called a network-based diffusion analysis or an MBDA.

Yeah, there was a skill issue element to this as well, which I thought was interesting.

And then they controlled for sex, sight fidelity, observation efforts, so like how often did they see them, all these other things to make sure that they got it right.

And they found that the bubble net feeding has recently begun spreading into the Canadian Pacific population and that it definitely has been driven by immigrant whales bringing their knowledge with them from Alaska.