<i>Whales spread 'greatest hits' across the ocean</i>

Recordings of male humpback whales have shown that their songs spread through the ocean to other whales.
Researchers in Australia listened to hundreds of hours of recordings gathered over more than a decade.
These revealed how a specific song pattern, which originated in Eastern Australia, had passed "like Chinese whispers" to whale populations up to 6,000km away in French Polynesia.
The research team, led by Ellen Garland from the University of Queensland, say the findings show the animals transmit such "cultural trends" over huge distances.
"Within a population, all males sing the same song," Garland explained. "But that song is constantly changing. So we wanted to look at the dynamics of songs throughout an ocean basin."
To do this, she and her colleagues studied recordings of 775 humpback whale songs, taken by scientists from the South Pacific Whale Research Consortium.
Using sound analysis software, Garland and her colleagues discovered that four new songs that had emerged in a population in Eastern Australia gradually spread westwards.
Within two years of this new song being invented, whales in French Polynesia were singing this same "version".
Peter Tyack, a biologist from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, US, said the results showed "a new way to look at culture in these animals".
"These are very mobile animals; they can swim hundreds of km in a day... and their song carried very well underwater," he said.
"So all it takes is a few roving males acting as cultural ambassadors to spread their songs (from population to population)."