But, instead, males and females frequently produced these vocalizations during dives that didn't involve foraging at all. For example, scientists had long assumed that one type of short call was used at meal time. Males are also far noisier, and make different sounds for different reasons, but scientists aren't always sure what those reasons are. What they learned challenged many assumptions about these noisy beasts.īlue whales of both sexes produce several types of single-note calls, but only males sing. The researchers then synced the recordings with the movements of 121 whales that had been tagged with suction-cup trackers. In the first effort of its kind, Ana Širović, an oceanographer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, and her team scoured a collection of more than 4,500 recordings of blue whale sounds taken from underwater microphones at over a dozen locations over 14 years, from 2002 to 2016, in southern California. And for years scientists had only the vaguest notion of when and why these giants of the sea make all those sounds.īut this week at an annual ocean sciences meeting in Portland, Oregon, one of the world's top whale-call experts revealed the surprising ways these secretive animals may signal behavior with their vocalizations. The blue whale, which can grow to 100 feet long and weigh more than a house, is a veritable chatterbox, especially males, vocalizing several different low-frequency sounds. The biggest animal to ever live is also the loudest, and it likes to sing at sunset, babble into the night, talk quietly with those nearby, and shout to colleagues 60 miles away.
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