Whales have the Ultimate Long-Distance Connection

They are the largest animals ever to have evolved on Earth. At 150 tons and over 100 feet long, an adult blue whale could behave like the bully on the block, but it doesn't. Most whales are placid browsers, straining through vast volumes of ocean for the small animals on which they graze.

They are an enigma. Some seventy million years ago, their ancestors decided to return to the ocean, although they had already established themselves as viable mammals on dry land. Whales are loving (as witness the long motherhood period), they are playful, they are curious, they are intelligent. With that intelligence, it makes one wonder why they so often beach themselves.

But the most intriguing part of their behavior is that apparently they have a kind of language of their own. In the murky depths of the ocean, sight is not a very reliable sense on which to rely. So it appears that they use sound. The communication could be, for instance, between a mother and her baby or between a couple of adults wishing to establish a more meaningful relationship.

Scientists have called whale talk "songs," for lack of a better description. It is not yet known exactly what information these songs contain. They range over a broad acoustic spectrum which, to us would spread from soprano to bass, but some frequencies are so low as to be inaudible to human ears. A typical whale song lasts about fifteen minutes, although they can go on for an hour or more. Often they are repeated, note for note, measure for measure.

On occasion, a group of whales will join in for a singalong. And the songs may gradually change, by some mutual consensus, from month to month. In the process of their yearly migration, a group of whales may leave their winter waters in the middle of a song and return six months later to resume the "tune" at precisely the right note and just where they left off. Whales are very good at remembering, and seem to have a great deal to talk about. It's aggravating that we haven't been able to understand them--or their cousins, the dolphins.

Unfortunately, during the past century, we've been interfering with their communications. One of their principal "hums" is about 20 cycles per second--way down at the end of the keyboard. This is about the frequency at which many of our maritime engines operate.

Biologist Roger Payne has calculated that, with a sound wave trapped in a deep water "channel," two whales once probably could have communicated with each other even if they were as far apart as Antarctica and the Aleutian Islands. But with all the noise that we generate in the oceans these days, they're lucky to hear each other even a couple of hundred miles apart. That's still not bad.