Newly digitized whalers logbooks allow researchers to analyze trends in 19th-century whaling.
The records show that whales soon learned to anticipate and evade predation from humans.
The behavioral changes suggest social learning at work since the change in their behavior occurred too quickly to be evolutionary.
Until someone works out a way to communicate with them, we can t really know how smart whales are. We do know they have the largest brains of any animals on the planet of course, big is a thing they do really well altogether and that their brains have more cortical convolutions than any other creature, including humans. There are indications that they re quite intelligent.If that s so, however, why did 19th-century whalers in the North Pacific find it so easy to drive them to the edge of extinction? Didn t they see what was happening? New research published by the Royal Society in the U.K. apparently has an answer to that question, and it is yes. A