The Spitsbergen bowhead whales (Balaena mysticetus) are the jazz musicians of the whales; much like jazz music, the complexity of their singing is extraordinary.
A team of scientists has now published the world’s largest library of songs made by the Spitsbergen bowhead whale in Svalbard, Norway.
Only a few species of whale sing as complicated songs as the bowhead whale; these include the humpback whale and the rorqual whale. However, only the humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) has received much research attention.
The U.S. and Norwegian researchers have examined the bowhead whales that live around the Norwegian islands of Svalbard. They have found that the whales’ songs are more varied than previously thought.
“If humpback whale song is like classical music, bowheads are jazz,””
“The sound is more freeform. And when we looked through four winters of acoustic data, not only were there never any song types repeated between years, but each season had a new set of songs.”
– Lead author Kate Stafford, an oceanographer at the UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory
According to Kate Stafford, the humpback whales’ songs are freer in structure with faster pitch variations than classical music. In total, the researchers recorded 184 different songs between 2010 and 2014 using underwater microphones.
In addition, they found that the songs are most creative between November and April during mating season. And during each new winter season, they sing new songs.
“The sound is more freeform. And when we looked through four winters of acoustic data, not only were there never any song types repeated between years, but each season had a new set of songs.”
But what the songs actually mean and what they are used for is hard to determine. Kate Stafford explains that there is much left to study in the future. The reserachers would like to know if only males are singing and whether can individuals can create songs together?
Audio available at: http://www.washington.edu/news/2018/04/03/bowhead-whales-the-jazz-musicians-of-the-arctic-sing-many-different-songs/
Reference:
K. M. Stafford, C. Lydersen, Ø. Wiig, K. M. Kovacs et al Extreme diversity in the songs of Spitsbergen’s bowhead whales