A whale of a song
Why do male humpback whales sing? What are they singing about? And can the study of their complex, structured songs teach us anything about the origins of language?
The answers to these mysteries and more are being sought by University of Queensland (UQ) scientists as part of the biggest and most comprehensive research project ever into whale song.
Dr Michael Noad (below right), a lecturer in veterinary science at UQ and leader of field research for the project, says there’s much to be learned about whale song. Some facts have been established - for instance it’s only the male humpbacks that sing, and they sing only during the breeding season.
Scientists don’t know the age at which they begin to sing, but Dr Noad says young males could begin to learn at adolescence.
Some evidence of this comes from whales that have been recorded singing only one of the six or seven themes into which the song is divided.
“They could be juveniles just beginning to sing,” he said. The songs are patterned and divided into themes like the stanzas of a poem. All the males sing the same song, in the same order, and break their songs to breathe at the surface in the same places.
“The pattern changes with time, and all the whales then follow the new pattern. We think that some whales are the leaders and initiate the changes. The others are followers.
“The changes in pattern are too fast to be genetic – they are passed from whale to whale by learning.”
Dr Noad said there have been two schools of thought about why the males sing. One is that the song is intended to warn other males to stay away; the other is that the song is intended to attract females.
“The song is so complex that I think it’s the latter,” he said. “You don’t have to be complex to warn off a rival – a snarl will do that.”
“The whales’ song is one of the most complex acoustic structures of any animal. I think we will learn a lot about communication from the whales, perhaps even with application to ourselves – about how language began to evolve.”
The Humpback Acoustic Research Collaboration (HARC) project is a partnership between UQ, the Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO) catalyst and, from the United States, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The project also involves researchers from the Universities of Sydney and Newcastle. The study is funded by the US Of. ce of Naval Research and DSTO.
UQ has a vital role to play because the project is based upon the migratory path of the east Australian humpbacks, one of the best studied whale populations in the world. Fieldwork is based off the Sunshine Coast’s Peregian Beach and an array of techniques is used – visual surveys from the shore, hydrophones anchored offshore and tracking from a boat.
Although this is the last of three years of data collection, analysis is expected to take another two to three years.