The Song That Crosses an Ocean
In 1998, marine biologist Michael Noad and his colleagues at the University of Queensland documented something that had no clean explanation at the time. Two humpback whales off the east coast of Australia were singing a song-type that belonged to the west coast population, a dialect from the other side of the continent. Within two years, the entire east coast population had abandoned its own song and adopted the new one. All 82 males monitored had switched. The old dialect was gone.
