IMAGE: NORWEGIAN POLAR INSTITUTE, KIT KOVACS
AUDIO: UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON, KATE STAFFORD
Bowhead whales produce some of the most diverse and complex songs of any mammal, according to a study published today (April 4) in Biology Letters. From 2010 to 2014, researchers in the U.S. and in Norway identified 184 distinct songs from a population of around 300 whales—a far more varied repertoire than their more studied cousins, the humpback whales.
“If humpback whale song is like classical music, bowheads are jazz,” study coauthor Kate Stafford, an oceanographer at the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory, says in a statement. Across the study’s duration, “not only were there never any song types repeated between years, but each season had a new set of songs.”
Bowhead whales can grow to more than 18 meters in length, live up to 200 years, and are the only baleen whales that spend all year ...
