Do sea otters and dolphins pass tool-use habits from parents to offspring?

Details

This paper reviews aquatic animal tool use rather than reporting a new experiment. It considers how environmental conditions, animals’ bodies, thinking and social lives contribute to the behavior. Sea otters and dolphins are the aquatic tool users studied in greatest detail. The review describes some individuals as tool-use specialists and reports that tool use passes from parents to offspring through learning from others.

The authors suggest that long periods of dependence on parents may help explain this transmission. The abstract does not establish whether offspring learn specifically by watching a parent.

More broadly, the review describes tool use as rare but spread across diverse aquatic animal groups. The authors suggest that aquatic habitats generally offer conditions unfavorable to tool use, which likely helps explain its rarity, but further research is needed. Like land-based tool users, aquatic animals tend to obtain tools from the bottom and use them to find or obtain food. A contrast with land-based tool use is that aquatic animals often use other animals, materials those animals produce, or water itself as tools.