
To hear what they sound like, click the play button on the audio samples below.
Image & audio: Kate Stafford
Stafford’s team hoped merely to catch a few sounds, a stray grunt or moan. Instead, as described in a study published July 31 inEndangered Species Research, they heard a veritable choral symphony.
Between November and late April, hardly an hour passed without the microphones picking up a song. The whales sang for five months straight, and their songs proved unexpectedly rich: No fewer than 60 distinctive types were identified, surpassing in sheer diversity the range of any other baleen whale species.
Unlike extensively studied sperm and humpback whale vocalizations, which can be analyzed in some detail — researchers have described sounds that appear to signify names and clan affiliation,between-whale conversations and cultural patterns of learning — bowhead interpretation is in its infancy.
Individual whales might sing a few songs, or a great many. Juveniles and adults could have different repertoires. So might males and females. Songs could pass between generations or across groups. They could convey the same types of information heard in other whales, or mean something else altogether.
“We just don’t have enough data,” said Stafford, who explained that recorders hardy enough to survive months of Arctic immersion have only existed for a few years. “For humpbacks and sperm whales, that work goes back decades. For bowheads, we’re talking a couple years. But there’s similarly neat stuff going on.”
Stafford suspects some songs involve navigation, helping bowheads coordinate over long distances, and some almost certainly involve mating. The sheer volume of songs also seems linked to the nature of polar winters, which plunge Arctic oceans into icebound, near-total darkness for almost five straight months.
That’s precisely when the bowheads sang so richly. Stafford’s recordings might represent a bowhead bacchanal. “I don’t want to be anthropomorphic, but they’re spectacular,” she said. “They are loud, and they go on and on.”
Download the summary of the paper here.
Hi there, I have had occasion to hear the sounds of the bowhead whales in the Arctic. They are one of the most amazing animals I have had the opportunity to observe, and photograph. For anyone interested, I have posted some of my pictures, and stories, from my three week trip off Baffin Island, filming bowhead whales at: http://frametoframe.ca/destinations/arctic-expedition/photo-essay-search-arctic-bowhead-whales