Recent research shows that communication in the oceanic world of whales is lot more complex and nuanced than we assumed it to be. Just as tonal languages like Mandarin use Tonal languages use variations in pitch — not just consonants and vowels — to distinguish the meaning of a word, whales have their own tonal dialects.
Using new AI-ML tools, scientists at CETI have been trying to decipher the phonetic alphabets of whalese language :) - 156 distinct codas were discovered. They have now come to the conclusion that these codas are far more complex than we imagined. Within specific groups and families whales communicate with a level of nuance that is close to human languages!
Just like in Mandarin-Chinese, meaning of the word "ma" changes according to the tone to mean 'mother', 'hemp', 'horse' or a scolding, whales too can use the same sound in different tones. This new tidbit lingered in my mind, and reminded me Ed Young's wonderful book "An Immense World". In this book, Yong describes some amazing aspects of whale migration:
- Whales have some of the most insane migrations of any animal on the planet. Some of them go from the equator to the poles, and with astonishing precision, traveling to the exact same area, year after year..
- Biophysicist, Jesse Granger, collected 33 years' worth of records of healthy, uninjured gray whales inexplicably stranding themselves, and compared these incidents with data on solar activity...a striking pattern emerged: whales got stranded the most on days with the most intense solar storms
Penetrating Perception
- In Hawaii, false killer whales often pick tuna oof fishing lines because they know where the hook is inside that fish!
- 'Internal antlers' - Beaked whales are odontocetes that look dolphin-esque on the outside - but on the inside, their skulls bear a strange assortment of crests, ridges and bumps, many of which are found only in whales....these might be the equivalent of deer antlers - showy ornaments that are used to attract mates
Infrasonic Rumbles
- Whales evolved from small, hoofed, deer like animals that took to the water around 50 million years ago. As they adapted, one group of filter-feeding MYSTICETES, which includes blues, fin, and humpback - shifted their hearing to low infrasonic frequencies.
- Underwater, sound waves take just under a minute to cover 50 miles. If a whale hears the song of another whale from a distance of 1500 miles, it is really listening back in time by about half an hour, like an astronomer gazing upon the ancient light of a distant star..
- A 20Hz note has a wavelength of 75 meters, which means the distance between two peaks of pressure is two to three times as long as the longest blue or fin whale. 20Hz is an octave below the lowest key on a standard piano
- Fin whale calls (20Hz) can travel 13,000 miles - no ocean is that wide! - you could listen to whales singing in Ireland with a microphone off Bermuda!
Boom Boxes
- The sperm whale does something even stranger. Its titanic barrel of a nose can make up a third of its 52-foot body, and the phonic lips lie at the very front. When they viberate, most of their sound goes backwards through the whale's head. It passes through a fat-filled organ called the SPERMACETI (once prized by whalers), bounces off an airsac at the back of the head, and then moves forward through another fatty organ called the JUNK (deemed worthless by whalers). The sound emerges from this absurd detour is the loudest in the animal world. At 236 decibels, it's basically an explosion - it is around 44 times the loudness of a thunderclap!
- Adjusting for the difference in fluid density, a 236 dB underwater sound translates to approximately 170 dB in the air.
- For comparison, a standard rocket launch registers at about 140-160 dB, and sustained exposure to 150 dB is widely considered the threshold of ruptured eardrums and severe physical trauma for humans.
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References & Links
The discovery of the sperm whale phonetic alphabet (Anton Petrov) @whatdamath
Natural History Museum - why are sperm whales so loud ? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=hThIOKlZ_3I
