Well-Schooled Fish and Feathered Bandits: The Wondrous Ways Animals Learn from Animals

Sandy Campbell is a reference librarian in the Science and Technology Library at the University of Alberta.

Peter Christie has documented a remarkable number of learned behaviours
in birds, fish, rodents, whales, octopuses, and non-human primates in
this small but example-packed volume about social learning in animals.
Some of the most dramatic instances are when animal learning is clearly
more than simple instinct or mimicry, such as when he observed a female
macaque monkey in Japan washing sweet potatoes before eating them—the
whole group learned this behaviour from her. In another example,
Christie describes how scientific observations of humpback whale songs
revealed that between 1996 and 1998, Pacific Ocean whales began singing
a completely new song imported from the Indian Ocean populations.

The book is attractively illustrated with lots of bright colours. The
photos, while excellent in quality, show the animal, but usually do not
illustrate the behaviours being discussed. The book’s only shortcoming
is in the flow of the text. Occasionally, a page containing a
freestanding story and photo is inserted in the middle of the text of
another story. While these stories have pastel-coloured backgrounds to
distinguish them, the coloured background is not visually strong enough
to differentiate the stories. Several times I found myself surprised to
find the continuation of a story that I thought had finished. However,
this is a small issue. Overall this is a very good book on a subject
that is not often treated in detail. Highly recommended.