Spring is the time of year when birds are singing throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Far to the north, beneath the ice, another lesser-known concert season in the natural world is just coming to an end.
A University of Washington study has published the largest set of recordings for bowhead whales, to discover that these marine mammals have a surprisingly diverse, constantly shifting vocal repertoire. The study published April 4 in Biology Letters, a journal of the United Kingdom's Royal Society, analyzed audio recordings gathered year-round east of Greenland. This population of bowhead whales was hunted almost to extinction in the 1600s and was recently estimated at about 200 animals. Audio recordings gathered from 2010 to 2014 indicate a healthy population, and include 184 different songs.
"If humpback whale song is like classical music, bowheads are jazz," said lead author Kate Stafford, an oceanographer at the UW's Applied Physics Laboratory. "The sound is more freeform. And when we looked through four winters of acoustic data, not only were there never any song types repeated between years, but each season had a new set of songs."
Stafford has recorded whales' sounds throughout the world's oceans as a way to track and study marine mammals. She first detected bowhead whales singing off the other side of Greenland in 2007. A previous study by Stafford of the Spitsbergen whales off west Greenland reported in 2012 that the whales were singing continuously during the winter breeding season, the first hint that there may be a healthy population in that area.
"We were hoping when we put the hydrophone out that we might hear a few sounds," Stafford said of the earlier study. "When we heard, it was astonishing: Bowhead whales were singing loudly, 24 hours a day, from November until April. And they were singing many, many different songs."
The new paper extends that initial five-month dataset, and confirms that bowhead whales sing in this region regularly from late fall to early spring. In fact the hydrophones, which are underwater microphones, picked up slightly more singing in the later years of the study. But what was most remarkable was the relentless variety in the animals' songs, or distinct musical phrases.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Wednesday April 11 2018, @07:43AM
I feel the need for a FatPhil sig here. He is not, so far as I know, a Bowhead Whale, and the Bowheads are not as endangered as the Right Whales, but still, a FatPhil sig would fit in right here so well. Improv, and scat. Music.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday April 11 2018, @10:48AM (3 children)
It's language as well as echolocation. The more concepts a whale species finds the need to communicate, the more varied its songs are going to be. Were there more distinct groups of them you'd probably even find different dialects like you do in different orca pods.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 11 2018, @11:09AM
/agrees with you fully.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday April 11 2018, @02:17PM (1 child)
I was wondering why the presumption that it's all singing. They aren't fricking songbirds, after all. It's debatable which is more intelligent - hominids or our distant aquatic cousins. Obviously, they aren't ALL equally intelligent, but some of them are definitely smarter than your average politico. Wait - have I been politically incorrect, again? I should presume that all sea mammals are equally intelligent, shouldn't I? Sorry - don't want any triggered mystical balaena sounding off in here!
(Score: 3, Funny) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday April 11 2018, @10:08PM
The problem here is that these Bowhead Whales are jazz musicians, so they're calling each other "cats" which is cultural appropriation.
(Score: 2) by Snospar on Wednesday April 11 2018, @03:13PM
Sounds like the Windows 95 Start-Up sound from the other day, you know the one that was slowed down 4000x (or something).
Is this just the noise of a whale rebooting?
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 11 2018, @04:21PM
If they take requests I'd like to hear their take on this classic [youtube.com].