Bowhead Whales Impress Researchers With Their Song Diversity

A group of around 300 whales produced 184 distinct songs over just a few years, according to a new study.

Written byCatherine Offord

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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 ...

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Meet the Author

Catherine Offord
After undergraduate research with spiders at the University of Oxford and graduate research with ants at Princeton University, Catherine left arthropods and academia to become a science journalist. She has worked in various guises at The Scientist since 2016. As Senior Editor, she wrote articles for the online and print publications, and edited the magazine’s Notebook, Careers, and Bio Business sections. She reports on subjects ranging from cellular and molecular biology to research misconduct and science policy. Find more of her work at her website.
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