The world’s oldest known recordings of whale songs tell a story about changing seas
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As It Happened5:38Researchers have unearthed the world’s oldest known recordings of whale songs
When Peter Tyack first heard a deep-grain, almost haunting recording recorded underwater in Bermuda in 1949, he knew immediately what he was listening to.
Sound – taken from the archives of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Falmouth, Mass. – believed to be the oldest known recorded record of a whale song.
“I immediately recognized the song of the humpback,” Tyack, a Woods Hole Marine bioacoustician, told me. As It Happened hosted by Nil Köksal.
“For me, it was almost too exciting to hear the sound of the ocean that the whale had. [more than] 75 years ago. “
Scientists say it paints a picture of how large mammals communicated during a time when the ocean was quieter than it is now and how changing underwater sounds affect whales today.
Researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution found a recording of a humpback whale off the coast of Bermuda in March 1949 and buried it in their archives, marking the earliest known recording of a whale song. They say it provides a unique picture of how whales communicated in a time when the sea was calmer than today. Credit: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
The sound was recorded by Woods Hole engineers on a research vessel that was testing sonar systems and conducting acoustic tests with the US Office of Naval Research.
The researchers may not have known what was on the recording, Tyack said. The sound of whale song was not widely known until bioacoustician Roger Payne released an album Whale Songs in 1970.
“They were curious, so they kept this record going,” said Ashley Jester, director of research data and library services at Woods Hole.
“They even took the time to record where they didn’t make any noise in their ships on purpose so they could hear more.”
It was Jester who discovered the whale’s song while playing old audio recordings last year. It was on a disc labeled “Fish Sounds.”
While some recordings of whale voices were collected in the ’40s and ’50s, they were mostly taken on tape and have since been scattered.
The reason this clip has lasted so long, Jester said, is because it was saved on a plastic disc made by a 1940s telegraph machine called a Gray Audograph – cutting-edge technology at the time.
The discovery of a long-lost whale song in a quiet ocean could be a jumping-off point for better understanding the sounds animals make today, said Hansen Johnson, a scientist at the Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life at the New England Aquarium, who was not involved in the research.
“And, you know, it’s good to listen,” she said. “It’s very special.”
The sea is very noisy now
The humpback’s now-iconic song, recorded 77 years ago, is believed to be the male’s mating call.
But different species of whales make all kinds of singing in the form of clicks, whistles and calls for fun and communication.
Scientists say those sounds are the key to their survival. Research shows that some whale voices contain some of the signs of human language, Some species are believed to have the same substance different “dialects”. to different people.
But these days, whales struggle to get along. That’s because the ocean is louder than ever.
Baleen whales, for example – which include humpbacks – make low tides very close to the surface. That is the right range and the place where the boats should sink.
Researchers have found that baleen whales cannot perform their songs in the deep ocean, forcing them closer to the surface – and closer to human-caused noise pollution.
Tyack says whale calls change over time. But, until now, scientists had no way of knowing what they sounded like, since the original recordings preserved were from the ’60s.
That’s why he’s grateful to the engineers who recorded the humpback off the coast of Bermuda, and hopes that Jester’s digitization work will unearth even more whale voices from earlier times.
“We have very few records of early sea sounds,” he said. “So this is very important because, as the sound of the ocean changes, the animals have to adapt to it.”
