Bowhead Whales Are The Jazz Musicians Of The Sea: Listen

The symphony of the sea is more complex than researchers previously believed. In the frozen waters off the coast of Greenland, a group of bowhead whales are singing the final notes as their concert season draws to an end. And like any musicians worth their salt(water), these little-studied marine mammals don’t repeat their program from one year to another, according to a study published Wednesday by the University of Washington.

Bowhead whales have a surprisingly diverse, constantly shifting repertoire, according to Kate Stafford, an oceanographer at UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory and lead author of the study published Wednesday in Biology Letters, a journal of the United Kingdom’s Royal Society.

"If humpback whale song is like classical music, bowheads are jazz," Stafford said in a statement announcing the study. "The sound is more freeform. And when we looked through four winters of acoustic data, not only were there never any song types repeated between years, but each season had a new set of songs."

The marine mammals’ songs might celebrate their survival. This particular population of bowhead whales was hunted to almost extinction in the 1600s, and was recently estimated about 200 animals — a healthy sized group. Stafford and her colleagues recorded 184 distinct songs from the Greenland population from 2010 and 2014.

Bowhead whales off the coast of Greenland regularly sing from late fall to early spring. The researchers’ hydrophones — underwater microphones — picked up slightly more singing in the later years of the study.

But what was most remarkable was the relentless variety in the whales’ songs, or distinct musical phrases, Stafford said.

Humpback whales are the only other whales to sing such elaborate songs, and each population has its own melodious song that shifts slightly during the winter breeding season. Each humpback whale population also debuts a new tune in the spring.

"It was thought that bowhead whales did the same thing, based on limited data from springtime," Stafford said. "But those 2008 recordings were the first hint, and now this data confirms that bowhead whale songs are completely different from the humpbacks'."

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Much remains to be learned about bowhead whales’ singing. Among the questions: Do only males sing? Do individuals share songs? And, most important, why are their tunes always changing?

"In terms of behavioral ecology, it's this great mystery,” Stafford said.

The new data suggest bowhead whales may be similar to cowbirds and meadowlarks, birds that learn a diverse, ever-changing repertoire of songs, maybe because novelty offers some advantage.

"Bowhead whales do this behavior in the winter, during 24-hour darkness of the polar winter, in 95 to 100 percent sea ice cover. So this is not something that's easy to figure out," Stafford said. "We would never have known about this without new acoustic monitoring technology."

Current research placing radio tags on bowhead whales may someday explain why this whale has evolved to become such a versatile virtuoso.

"Bowheads are superlative animals: they can live 200 years, they've got the thickest blubber of any whale, the longest baleen, they can break through ice," Stafford said. "And you think: They've evolved to do all these amazing things. I don't know why they do this remarkable singing, but there must be a reason."

Listen to the bowhead whales' song below:

Read more about the study.

For more bowhead whale songs, go here.

Photo courtesy of Kit Kovacs/Norwegian Polar Institute