Sound is as important to whales as vision is to us. Sound travels farther in the ocean than light does — so whales and dolphins grunt, call, click or sing, or listen intently, and their lives depend on sending and receiving these acoustic cues reliably. They’re quite good at it. Whales and their prey have evolved these acoustic systems over millennia. The problem is that in the last hundred years or so, we have started competing with whales for acoustic space by using ships and conducting other activities that create a lot of underwater noise (mostly unintentionally). So a whale singing in a noisy habitat is like having a great cell phone that relies on a terrible network provider. Unfortunately for whales, fish, squid and other marine life, the consequences of a “dropped call” are more serious than they are for us. If human activities jam whale acoustic signals, the information lost is not trivial. We suspect that the acoustic information being transmitted is of the kind: “There is a predator just around the corner.” Or, “Eat this fish. It may be the last one you see for days.” Or, “Mate with me.” You don’t want to miss these calls.
FREE RINGTONE: A HUMPBACK WHALE SINGING IN DOUGLAS CHANNEL, BC
One of the things that makes humpback whales so interesting to study is their iconic song. Many of us first heard these haunting sounds when Dr Roger Payne published them in a vinyl, floppy 45rpm soundsheet in an old issue of National Geographic.
The Voyager space mission included humpback whale song with other sounds representing life on Earth
Generally, humpbacks sing on their breeding grounds (in Hawaii and Mexico), and are less vocal on their feeding grounds, although they do make grunts and other calls to coordinate feeding activities. Our Quiet Ocean Campaign involves measuring underwater noise levels to see how much of these calls could be masked by chronic noise levels from commercial shipping and other human activities. We were thrilled to hear humpbacks, well, “singing” on BC’s north coast feeding grounds in late summer.
So. Two things:
1. This is a recording of humpback whales singing in Douglas Channel. We thought you might like to hear it. We’ve saved it in M4R format for iPhones and MP3 format for most other smart phones. Right-click or control-click and “save as” to your computer or smart phone, and iTunes will let you convert it to a ringtone. Every phone is different, so apologies if it’s not straightforward to use as a ringtone on other systems, but please leave a comment if you have tips for making it accessible on other systems.
Zack Morris wishes he had a humpback whale song ringtone for that cell phone.
2. Ship noise has the potential to mask these sounds. Here is an animation (made by our colleagues at Cornell) of the acoustic footprint of one large container ship transiting Vancouver Island. In our acoustics study, we’re finding that Douglas Channel has some of the lowest levels of shipping noise in BC. But that could all change soon if industrial development applications are approved to expand shipping activity into and out of Kitimat. Our research is focused on measuring how much acoustic masking whales experience from current levels of ship traffic, how much more masking we could expect if shipping levels increased, and ideally, how we can make important habitats quieter for whales.
But we’ll save the lecture for next time. For now, let us know what you think of the humpback recording.
photo by J. Towers
