PHOTO BY Akulatraxas

The opening of milk bottles by birds

Tits learned to pierce the foil caps of doorstep milk bottles, and the cream-stealing behavior spread geographically through the population.

PHOTO BY Kitty Terwolbeck

Tool-using and aimed throwing in a community of free-living chimpanzees

Wild chimpanzees at Gombe modify twigs into probes and use them to fish termites from mounds.

PHOTO BY Wolfgang Wander

Culturally transmitted patterns of vocal behavior in sparrows

White-crowned sparrows learn songs from local adult tutors, producing discrete, geographically bounded dialects across neighboring populations.

PHOTO BY PMS2718

Newly-acquired pre-cultural behavior of the natural troop of Japanese monkeys on Koshima islet

On Koshima Island a juvenile macaque named Imo invented potato-washing in freshwater (and later in seawater), and the behavior spread through her troop along social lines.

PHOTO BY rjshade

Large scale changes over 19 years in songs of humpback whales in Bermuda

Male humpback whales sing the same complex song across an entire population, and the song evolves progressively year over year while remaining synchronized across singers.

PHOTO BY Yi-Kai Tea

Manufacture and use of hook-tools by New Caledonian crows

Wild New Caledonian crows manufacture standardized hook tools and stepped-cut pandanus tools, with regional design variants across populations.

PHOTO BY Kitty Terwolbeck

Cultures in chimpanzees

Across seven long-term African field sites, chimpanzee communities have 39 customary or habitual behaviors (including tool use, grooming, and courtship) that vary between groups in ways unexplained by ecology or genetics.

PHOTO BY btrentler

Cultural transmission of tool use in bottlenose dolphins

In Shark Bay, bottlenose dolphins wear marine sponges over their beaks as protective foraging tools, a behavior passed almost exclusively from mothers to daughters.

PHOTO BY Akulatraxas

Experimentally induced innovations lead to persistent culture via conformity in wild birds

Experimentally seeded foraging techniques spread through wild great tit social networks via conformity bias and persist across generations, even when alternative solutions are equally rewarding.

PHOTO BY John Freshney

Bumblebees socially learn behaviour too complex to innovate alone

Buff-tailed bumblebees learn a two-step puzzle box solution from trained demonstrators, a sequence that naive bees almost never discover on their own.