Researchers have rediscovered a 77-year-old recording of a haunting song that was determined to have come from a humpback whale.
By Meghan Bartels edited by Andrea Thompson
Marnie Griffiths/Getty Images
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On March 7, 1949, researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) were stationed on a boat called the R/V Atlantis which was sailing off the coast of Bermuda.
They lowered a primitive underwater recording rig into the ocean, and a square machine more regularly found in offices began recording the sounds of the sea – a chorus of strange howls and rustling waves – in a thin plastic disk. This record was found in the WHOI archives in Massachusetts, where it was located, a neglected relic of the early days of underwater acoustic recording.
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Nearly eight decades later, WHOI experts rediscovered the recording and determined that it was likely the oldest whale recording still in existence. The likely singer? A humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae).
Scientists who came across this rare recording are eager to use it for scientific purposes.
“Data from this period simply does not exist in most cases,” Laela Sayigh, a marine bioacoustician at WHOI, said in a study. statement. “This recording can provide insight into how humpback whale sounds have changed over time, while serving as a benchmark for measuring how human activity shapes the ocean soundscape.”
The recording dates from a time when humpback whales in the North Atlantic Ocean were in trouble due to decades of commercial whaling. By 1955, the population had probably fallen below 1,000 animals, experts have since estimated. And while humpback whales need to be thoroughly surveyed, even outdated estimates suggest there are at least 20 to 25 times more of them in the region today.
But concerns remain about whales and other marine life due to water and shipping pollution, as well as noise pollution, which would interfere with the whales’ ability to move. “talk to each other” through their songs.
Humpback whales are found in all oceans and make one of the longest migrations of any mammal, swimming 5,000 miles from tropical waters where they breed to colder waters where they feast on krill and small fish that they filter through the sieve-shaped baleen in the mouth.
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