Whales show brains, social interaction go together: study
The rich social interaction and highly evolved brains of some whales are linked in a kind of evolutionary feedback loop, a newly published paper suggests.
The research, largely done at the University of British Columbia, sheds new light on similarities between whale and human evolution.
“Similar pressures and possibilities in the environment can select for a similar outcome,” said Kieran Fox, now a postdoctoral student at California’s Stanford University and co-author of the new paper in Nature Ecology and Evolution.
Fox and his colleagues studied brain sizes and social behaviours of a wide variety of whale species.