Just because they can’t sing opera or ride a bicycle doesn’t mean that animals don’t have culture. There’s no better example of this than killer whales. As one of the most (26)_____ predators (食肉动物), killer whales may not fit the (27)_____ of a cultured creature. However, these beasts of the sea do display a vast range of highly (28)_____ behaviors that appear to be driving their genetic development.
The word “culture” comes from the Latin “colere”, which (29)_____ means “to cultivate”. In other words, it refers to anything that is (30)_____ or learnt, rather than instinctive or natural. Among human populations, culture not only affects the way we live, but also writes itself into our genes, affecting who we are. For instance, having spent many generations hunting the fat marine mammals of the Arctic, the Eskimos of Greenland have developed certain genetic (31)_____ that help them digest and utilize this fat-rich diet, thereby allowing them to (32)_____ in their cold climate.
Like humans, killer whales have colonized a range of different (33)_____ across the globe, occupying every ocean basin on the planet, with an empire that (34)_____ from pole to pole. As such, different populations of killer whales have had to learn different hunting techniques in order to gain the upper hand over their local prey (猎物). This, in turn, has a major effect on their diet, leading scientists to (35)_____ that the ability to learn population-specific hunting methods could be driving the animals’ genetic development.
