Humpback Whales Learn New Song

Anonymous Coward writes "Here's the link to a news story (realplayer) about how a group of Australian humpback whales learned a new song from another group. I thought it was pretty interesting, since apparently it's never been seen before. It took a couple of years for all the members of the group (from Eastern Australia) to learn the new song, which they must have heard from a different group that lives quite a long distance away near Western Australia. There should be an article on http://www.abc.net.au/news about the story but the link seems to be broken at the moment."

Comments

TTTO: Campatown races.

[Chacham]

I keep hearing in my head, "Humpback whales learn a new song - Doo da doo da", to the tune of "Camptown Races".

Intriguing

[jd]

Some other cectatian trivia, which may be related (or might not):

• Cectatians seem to have a signature whistle. One animal, one whistle. It seems to be used as a recognition code, not entirely dissimilar to a MAC address, especially as it's self-assigned and not allocated.
• Each pod has its own "accent". However, there are documented cases of killer whales (which is actually a dolphin) learning the accents of other pods and duplicating them.
• Research with other animals (such as grey parrots) indicates that some animals learn better in peer-peer groups than in student-teacher groups.
• There are absolutely no tetraphonic or quadrophonic recordings of cectatians on the Internet, despite there being a lot of evidence that cectatian "language" has a significant non-vocal element. (Listening to monophonic recordings of dolphins or whales is like listening to half a phone conversation with half the words missing, blind-folded. It might be theraputic, but it won't make much sense.)

Bad news for alien space probes

[Shimbo]

If they keep changing their song, how are they going to talk to those giant alien space probes that come by every few million years?

Ah, crap!

[tesserae]

I logged on through a completely different account just to check, and it looks like that link is gonna harrass you for a subscription.

I'll make it up to you: the same other account lets me past the screening to the WAV files -- the song the humpbacks sang last year, and the one they picked up from those westcoast punks this year.

And as a bonus, here's the complete story (a short one) from ScienceNOW:

Whales' Cultural Revolution

Just as the Beatles once revolutionized American music, a small band of whales seems to have introduced a new musical style to whales living off Australia's East coast. In little more than a year, the crooning visitors managed to make their tune the major local hit, according to a study in the 20 November issue of Nature.

In humpback whales, the vocalists are always male, and they apparently sing to impress females. Each population has its own "in" song, which gradually evolves. That happens when one crooner embellishes his tune with an extra trill or groan, and others in the area pick up the riff. Females probably get bored by the same old song, says bioacoustician Michael Noad from the University of Sydney in Australia, so males keep adding new fillips to spice things up. But switching to a completely different song is unheard of, Noad says; deviating so far from the norm might label the singer as weird, rather than irresistibly trendy, he speculates.

So Noad and his colleagues, who have studied whale songs for many years, were surprised when their hydrophones picked up a novel song in 1996, one that became dominant by late 1997 and the only thing on the charts in 1998. (Click here for the old and the new song.) "The main part of the change just happened over a couple of months," he says. "It was extraordinarily rapid." Initially, the team had no idea where the song had come from--until Noad listened to a tape of western Australia humpbacks. "It was an exact match, no doubt about it."

The team figures the western Australian whales must have introduced the song when they accidentally headed to the east during their annual migration from Antarctica. But he has no idea why their song became popular so fast.

"This is very surprising," says whale researcher and bioacoustician Adam Frankel of Marine Acoustics Inc. in Arlington, Virginia. Nobody had ever reported such a cultural revolution among whales before, Frankel says. "It's huge."

--MARI N. JENSEN

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Great. Can we get them to stop?

[human bean]

It wasn't bad enough that humans produced cover bands, now we have other species doing it.

Is ASCAP going to sue if they don't have the sheet music?