Bowheads serenade each other off Greenland
with a vast repertoire of improvised jazz-like song, study says
Agence France-Presse
Wed 4 Apr 2018 07.38 BSTFirst
published on Wed 4 Apr 2018 02.50 BST
How do bowhead whales in the unbroken
darkness of the Arctic’s polar winter keep busy during breeding season?
They sing, of course.
From late autumn to early spring, off the
east coast of Greenland, some 200 bowheads, hunted to the edge of extinction,
serenade each other with compositions from a vast repertoire of song, according
to a study published on Wednesday.
“It was astonishing,” said the lead author,
Kate Stafford, an oceanographer at the University of Washington’s Applied
Physics Laboratory in Seattle, who eavesdropped on these subaquatic concerts.
“Bowhead whales were singing loudly, from
November until April” – non-stop, 24/7 – “and they were singing many, many
different songs.”
Stafford and three colleagues counted 184
distinct melodies over a three-year period, which may make bowheads one of the
most prolific composers in the animal kingdom.
“The diversity and inter-annual variability
in songs of bowhead whales in this study are rivalled only by a few species of
songbirds,” the study found.
Unlike mating calls, songs are complex
musical phrases that are not genetically hard-wired but must be learned.
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