Humpback whales, it turns out, are creating individual songs and then sharing them with other whales. A new study says the songs can pass from one whale population to another, and even from the Pacific to the Atlantic.
“Half the globe is now vocally connected for whales,” said Ellen Garland, a marine biologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and the author of the study, “and that’s insane.” Her study was just published in the Royal Society Open Science journal.
Her eight-year study found that whales off Australia pass songs to whales in French Polynesia who pass them to whales off Ecuador. Other studies have found that whale songs originating in the Pacific have been recorded in the Atlantic.
Only male humpback whales sing, and their underwater songs can last as long as half an hour. Dr. Garland says the whales’ songs have a complex structure. They combine short sounds into phrases, and then expand the phrases into themes. Each song can have several themes.
In her study, scientists recorded whales using underwater microphones deployed from boats. She recorded whales in breeding grounds near Australia. Others recorded them in breeding grounds near Ecuador. The songs likely spread when whales migrate to foraging grounds near Antarctica, and whales from one population may end up swimming next to whales from another.
But the whales are fast learners. “Thousands of males can rapidly replace their song by learning a new song in as little as two minutes, a feat unparalleled in the animal kingdom,” she said.
Dr. Garland says there’s still little understanding about why whales sing in the first place. In her study named Sexy Singing Project, she asks, “Are some songs attractive because of who sings them, or do they have inherent qualities that make them attractive when sung by anyone?”
The worldwide population of humpback whales is about 135,000. Males can live more than 50 years, weigh 66,000 pounds, and grow to be more than 50 feet long. Read more:
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