Photo: K Stafford
Last month, researchers from the University of Washington released a study performed over four winters which recorded 184 bowhead whales singing beneath the ice in Greenland. What they found was remarkable. Kate Stafford and other UW oceanographers discovered that the songs of the bowhead were far more complex and nuanced than perhaps any other whale, including the humpback whales, which are well known for their yearly songs. Some have called the bowheads jazz singers for the creative variations in their songs. Science Daily reports:
“If humpback whale song is like classical music, bowheads are jazz,” said lead author Kate Stafford, an oceanographer at the UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory. “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.”
Stafford has recorded whales’ sounds throughout the world’s oceans as a way to track and study marine mammals. She first detected bowhead whales singing off the other side of Greenland in 2007. A previous study by Stafford of the Spitsbergen whales off West Greenland reported in 2012 that the whales were singing continuously during the winter breeding season, the first hint that there may be a healthy population in that area.
“We were hoping when we put the hydrophone out that we might hear a few sounds,” Stafford said of the earlier study. “When we heard, it was astonishing: Bowhead whales were singing loudly, 24 hours a day, from November until April. And they were singing many, many different songs.”
Just wondering if the scientists played jazz music how the whales would respond.