Fun with Science Club®


			Whales can karaoke too. Carrie Straight 05.18.01 Humpback whales, Megaptera novaeangliae sing songs while they migrate and also while they are on the breeding grounds. Some humpback whales travel 4000 miles during migration. The songs they sing are usually different depending on where in the world they are from. For example, all of the whales in the Pacific Ocean sing basically the same song. In the past the humpback whales off of the eastern coast of Australia (in the Pacific Ocean) sang a song that was different than the one sung by its close neighbors on the western coast of Australia (in the Indian Ocean). Scientists decided to record the songs of the whales off the east coast of Australia in the waters of the Great Barrier Reef. They recorded these songs by hanging a special microphone off a buoy (a large object that floats on the surface of the water). These microphones recorded whale songs for short sections of time over 4 years. They recorded 1057 hours of whale songs. They then took these tapes into a laboratory and looked at the sonograms (pattern of the notes, lengths of notes, pauses). In 1996, they heard two new whales that must have come over from the western side of Australia, singing their new song to the easterners. By 1997, more whales were singing the song of the new whales and by 1998 all of the whales in the group sang the new song. This change in whale song is cultural, because the song was learned from another group and changed to become more like the new song.


			Noad, Michael J., Douglas H. Cato, M. M. Bryden, Michelene-N. Jenner, and K. Curt S. Jenner. 2000. Cultural revolution in whale songs. Nature 408: 537.