Blue Whales Sing All Day When They Migrate and All Night When They Don't
Their mysterious songs could be an ‘acoustic signature of migration’
Blue whales are the world’s largest animals, and they can grow to the length of three school buses in a row. (Christopher Michel via Flickr under CC BY 2.0)
By Rasha Aridi
SMITHSONIANMAG.COM
OCTOBER 8, 2020
Blue whales are the world’s largest animals, and their vocalizations are just as mighty. Their deep, low-frequency trills are strung together to compose songs loud enough to travel for hundreds of miles underwater. Scientists have spent decades trying to decipher their songs and figure out why blue whales sing — and a new study may provide more clues.
In a study published last week in Current Biology, a team of researchers discovered that during the warmer summer months, male blue whales sing at night. But when it’s time to migrate to warmer waters, they shift their timing and belt their songs during the day. This is the first instance that scientists have recorded how singing patterns vary with the whales’ feeding and mating cycles, reports Jake Buehler for Science News.
Each year, blue whales embark on 4,000-mile migrations. They spend the warm summer months feasting on krill in cooler, northern waters before traveling southward to their winter mating grounds in the tropics. An underwater microphone dropped 3,000 feet deep in Monterey Bay recorded the bay’s underwater soundscape continuously for five years, providing William Oestreich, a biological oceanographer at Stanford University and lead author on the paper, with a profound, musical dataset.
Oestreich and his team separated the daytime songs from the nighttime songs and observed a “very striking” pattern, Oestreich tells Science News.
More:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/when-its-time-migrate-blue-whales-shift-timing-their-songs-new-study-reveals-180976021/
= new reply since forum marked as read
And that is my hope too.
