Richard Collins: Animal culture and the tragic tale of Free Willy star Keiko the orca

Orcas ‘talk’ to each other constantly but after being set free, poor Keiko never mastered the local dialect

Keiko, the famous killer whale. Picture: AP Photo/Don Ryan

In her influential book The Animal Mind, Kristin Andrews devotes a chapter to ‘culture’. Animals don’t read Shakespeare or listen to Beethoven. ‘Culture’, in this context, denotes "long-lasting group behavioural patterns or informational resources that are transmitted via social learning". She cites a famous example; the sad tale of Keiko, the orca.

In 1979 three-year-old Keiko was taken from the sea off Iceland. ‘Groomed’ in a dolphinarium, he ‘acted’ in the film Free Willy, becoming a Hollywood celebrity. When his movie career ended, pressure from adoring fans led to a $20 million attempt to return him to the ocean.

Derek Mooney and I made Keiko’s acquaintance off Iceland’s Westland Islands. Extraordinarily trusting, he swam up to our boat, looking forlornly at us, but we were advised to avoid direct eye contact with him.

His was a clear case of ‘cultural assimilation’ in a wild creature, but it would lead to tragedy. Keiko approached wild orca pods following his release but was rejected by them. Lacking the education he would have received had he grown to maturity in the wild, he couldn’t even hunt successfully. Orcas ‘talk’ to each other constantly but poor Keiko hadn’t mastered the local dialect. Unable to survive on his own, he died of pneumonia in Skalvicfjord, Norway, in 2003.

The sad tale of Keiko the orca is a clear case of ‘cultural assimilation’ in a wild creature. Picture: AP Photo/Jack Smith

The animal species with the highest pretensions to ‘culture’ is the chimpanzee, our closest primate relative. Chimp ‘culture’ became a hot topic in 1999, when an article on it appeared in the journal Nature. Researchers in Africa had noticed that chimp communities develop different ways of solving similar problems. Neither the animals’ genes, nor natural selection, could account for these differences. They seemed to be down to local ‘cultures’, learned in their social groups, just as lifestyles and customs develop in human populations.

Some zoologists, however, think that bestowing the label ‘culture’ on animal behaviour is ‘a bridge too far’, but there has been a recent development. Researchers, led by anthropologist Kathelijne Koops of Zurich University, have conducted experiments in Guinea in an attempt to address the ‘culture’ issue.

If you start where Adam started, you’ll get as far as Adam got. Instead, we are born into a highly organised society, the workings of which we learn from parents teachers and peers. We ride on the shoulders of giants. Some chimps, likewise, belong to populations where tools are used to crack open the hard protective shells of nuts. 

Could an individual chimp invent such techniques from scratch or would it, like us, have to be shown how to do so by other members of the community?

The researchers placed palm oil nuts and stones where chimps would encounter them. Would the animals know instinctively how to use the stones to open the nuts? Next, the juicy contents of a nut were offered as an incentive. Finally, a broad hint was offered; nuts, already cracked open, were placed on top of stones.

The chimps, despite 35 visits, failed the tests on all counts. The researchers conclude that these "results are consistent with the hypothesis that chimpanzee nut cracking is a product of social learning".

• Kathelijne Koops et al. Field experiments find no evidence that chimpanzee nut cracking can be independently innovated. Nature Human Behaviour. 2022.