This story initially appeared in Undark and is a part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

When Roswell Schaeffer Sr. was 8 years previous, his father determined it was about time he began studying to hunt beluga whales. Schaeffer was an Iñupiaq child rising up in Kotzebue, a small metropolis in northwest Alaska, the place a wholesome retailer of beluga meat was a part of making it by means of the winter. Each summer time, 1000’s of those small white whales migrated to Kotzebue Sound, and hunts had been an annual custom. Whale pores and skin and blubber, or muktuk, was prized, not solely as a type of sustenance and a buying and selling commodity, but in addition due to the non secular worth of sharing the catch with the group.

Now, practically seven many years later, Schaeffer is one among only some hunters who nonetheless spend the late weeks of spring, simply after the ice has melted, on Kotzebue Sound, ready for belugas to reach. Many folks have switched to searching bearded seals, partly out of necessity: There merely aren’t sufficient belugas to maintain the group anymore.

In the Eighties, Kotzebue Sound’s beluga inhabitants began to dwindle, from 1000’s to a whole lot, after which to the handfuls or fewer that go to the area now. Kotzebue just isn’t alone. Although some shares are wholesome, beluga numbers have fallen off in round a half-dozen areas during the last 50 years. Decades in the past, searching, business whaling, and different influences pushed the whales towards the brink. Now, even after searching has ceased in some locations, stresses equivalent to local weather change, elevated ship visitors, and chemical pollution are a gathering storm that threatens to complete the job.

But some scientists assume that understanding how the whales reply to those stresses may find yourself being as necessary as understanding the stresses themselves. Belugas, like chimpanzees, birds, people, and lots of different animals, create cultures by passing information and customs from one era to the subsequent. With local weather change and different human actions reshaping the world at an alarming charge, belugas will doubtless need to depend on progressive cultural practices to adapt—genetic adaptation is just too sluggish to maintain up.

Cultural practices can grow to be rote, nevertheless, and similar to people, different animals can maintain onto traditions lengthy after they’ve stopped making sense. One key query, in accordance with Greg O’Corry-Crowe, a behavioral ecologist at Florida Atlantic University, is: Will tradition carry the whales by means of?

“When the change is so seismic, maybe, and so rapid, you’re trying to look for the innovators and the pioneers among the social conservatives,” O’Corry-Crowe mentioned. At the identical time, Indigenous folks like Schaeffer are going through their very own quandary. Continuing to hunt belugas might harm the whales’ likelihood of rebounding, but when Indigenous teams hand over the observe, they might lose information that’s helped maintain them within the Arctic for 1000’s of years.

Philosophers and scientists have lengthy urged that animals can be taught. But even within the early 2000s, scientists debated the concept animals accumulate information over generations. One animal that helped popularize that notion is the killer whale.