Whale Song

Whale Song

The sea is murky. Sight and smell which work very well for mammals on the land, are not of much use in the depths of the ocean. Those ancestors of the whales who relied on these senses to locate a mate or a baby or a predator did not leave many offspring. So another method was perfected by evolution; it works superbly well and is central to any understanding of the whales: the sense of sound.

Some whale sounds are called songs, but we are still ignorant of their true nature and meaning. They range over a broad band of frequencies, down to well below the lowest sound the human ear can detect.

A typical whale song lasts for perhaps fifteen minutes; the longest, about an hour. Often it is repeated, identically, beat for beat, measure for measure, note for note.

Pusha, the cat. Let’s pretend this is a whale. It’s a social creature who hunts, fishes, browses, frolics, plays, mates, runs from predators. Size doesn’t matter, does it? Image: © M. Jorgensen (Elena)

The Whales

Up to 1846, the best lighting fuel was sperm whale oil. And the best lamp was a whale oil lamp, then kerosene lamps became the last word in lighting and were widely used, particularly in Canada. In 1854, Gesner patented his process and formed the North American kerosene gas light Co. and the whole world moved into a kerosene age.

The primary danger to the whales is a newcomer, an upstart animal, only recently, through technology, become competent in the oceans, a creature that calls itself human. For 99,99 percent of the history of the whales, there were no humans in or on the deep oceans. During this period the whales evolved their extraordinary audio communication system. The finbacks, for example, emit extremely loud sounds at a frequency of twenty Hertz, down near the lowest octave on the piano keyboard (a Hertz is a unit of sound frequency that represents one sound wave, one crest and one trough, entering your ear every second).

Such low-frequency sounds are scarcely absorbed in the ocean. The American biologist Roger Payne has calculated that using the deep ocean sound channel, two whales could communicate with each other at twenty Hertz essentially anywhere in the world. One may be off the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica and communicate with another in the Aleutians. For most of their history, the whales may have established a global communications network. Perhaps, when separated by 15,000 kilometers, their vocalisations are love songs, cast hopefully into the vastness of the deep.

For tens of millions of years these enormous, intelligent, communicative creatures evolved with essentially no natural enemies. Then the development of the steamship in the nineteenth century introduced an ominous source of noise pollution. As commercial and military vessels became more abundant, the noise background in the oceans, especially at a frequency of twenty Hertz, became noticeable. Whales communicating across the oceans must have experienced increasingly greater difficulties. The distance over which they could communicate must have decreased steadily. Two hundred years ago, a typical distance across which finbacks could communicate was perhaps 10,000 kilometers. Do whales know each other’s name? Can they recognize each other as individuals by sound alone? We have cut the whales off from themselves. Creatures that communicated for tens of millions of years have now effectively been silenced.

A dolphin, illustration by Elena

And we have done worse than that, because there persists to this day a traffic in the dead bodies of whales. There are humans who hunt and slaughter whales and market the products for lipstick or industrial lubricant. Many nations understand that the systematic murder of such intelligent creatures is monstrous, but the traffic continues, promoted in the 20th century chiefly by Japan, Norway and the Soviet Union. We humans, as a species, are interested in communication with extraterrestrial intelligence. Would not a good beginning be improved communication with terrestrial intelligence, with other human beings of different cultures and languages, with the great apes, with the dolphins, but particularly with those intelligent masters of the deep, the great whales?

For a whale to live there are many things it must know how to do. This knowledge is stored in its genes and in its brains. The genetic information includes how to convert plankton into blubber; or how to hold your breath on a dive one kilometer below the surface. The information in the brains, the learned information, includes such things as who your mother is’ or the meaning of the son you are hearing just now. The whale, like all the other animals on the Earth, has a gene library and a brain library.

There is a curious counterpoint in this story. The preferred radio channel for interstellar communication with other technical civilisations in near a frequency of 1.42 billion Hertz, marked by a radio spectral line of hydrogen, the most abundant atom in the Universe. We are just beginning to listen here for signals of intelligent origin. But the frequency band is being increasingly encroached upon by civilian and military communications traffic on Earth, and not only by the manor powers. We are jamming the interstellar channel. Uncontrolled growth of terrestrial radio technology may prevent us from ready communication with intelligent beings on distant worlds. Their songs may go unanswered because we have not the will to control our radio-frequency pollution and listen.

A whale that was big news: When a whale was towed alive into Vancouver harbor in 1964, she captured the hearts of all Vancouverites. They named her Moby Doll, and donated $100,000 for her care, but for some reason she died. Her fame had spread far. The staid Times of London, England, gave her obituary a 2-column heading – the same size it had given to the outbreak of World War II.

(Courtesy of Carl Sagan)

Occasionally a group of whales will leave their winter waters in the midst of a song and six months later return to continue at precisely the right note, as if there had been no interruption. Whales are very good at remembering. More often, on their return, the vocalisations have changed. New songs appear on the cetacean hit parade.

Very often the members of the group will sing the same song together. By some mutual consensus, some collaborative song-writing, the piece changes month by month, slowly and predictably. These vocalizations are complex. If the songs of the humpback whale are enunciated as a tonal language, the total information content, the number of bits of information in such songs, is some 10-6 bits, about the same as the information content of the Illiad or the Odyssey.

We do not know what whales or their cousins the dolphins have to talk or sing about. They have no manipulative organs, they make no engineering constructs, but they are social creatures. They hunt, swim, fish, browse, frolic, mate, play, run from predators. There may be a great deal to talk about.

Whales and Their Communication System

The primary danger to the whales is a newcomer, an upstart animal who only recently, through technology, has become competent in the oceans, a creature that calls himself human. For 99,99 percent of the history of the whales, there were no humans in or on the deep oceans. During this period the whales evolved their extraordinary audio communication system.

A love song is a distress call cast in the vastness of the deep (quotations from Megan Jorgensen). Image: © M. Jorgensen (Elena)

The finbacks, for example, emit extremely loud sounds at a frequency of twenty Hertz, down near the lowest octave on the piano keyboard (a Hertz is a unit of sound frequency that represents one sound wave, one crest and one trough, entering your ear every second.) Such low frequency sounds are scarcely absorbed in the ocean. The American biologist Roger Payne has calculated that using the deep ocean sound channel, two whales could communicate with each other at twenty Hertz essentially everywhere in the world.

One might be off the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica and communicate with another in the Aleutians. For most of their history, the whales may have established a global communications network. Perhaps, when separated by 15,000 kilometres, their vocalisations are love songs cast hopefully into the vastness of the deep.