That allowed them to triangulate the position of the whale making the song. Whalers nearly wiped out the slow-moving whales, which remain buoyant after they are killed. That is one of our biggest challenges—our population has fewer than 30 whales.”, Crance speculates that these songs are a reproductive display. From previous surveys and genetic studies, they identified it as a male right whale. The eastern North Pacific population of right whales is the most endangered large whale population in the world. Seven years of frustration followed, Crance said, as they could never positively confirm that the sounds were coming from the scarce right whales. Cousins to the Bowhead whales, many of their calls are in the range of human hearing. Right whales forage and reside at the surface in shallow waters near the coasts. So we started going back through our long-term data from moored acoustic recorders and saw these repeating patterns of gunshot calls. North Pacific Right Whale Song Recordings, Gunshot call production by the North Pacific right whale, in the North Pacific Ocean and the Okhotsk Sea, Acoustic detection of the critically endangered North Pacific right whale in the northern Bering Sea, Acoustic detection of North Pacific right whales in a high-traffic Aleutian Pass, 2009-2015. Right whales are surface feeders that inhabit shallow areas close to shore, easily subjecting them to ship collisions, or “ship strikes.” Their niche also made them easy prey for commercial whalers, so currently there are exceedingly few right whales. Zooplankton, crustaceans, krill, pteropods. The extremely endangered right whale population is the first ever found to sing. While Crance’s team suspected that the songs were produced by a right whale, they had only the acoustic recordings, with no visual confirmation—until two summers ago. Researchers detected four distinct songs over eight years at five locations in the southeast Bering Sea. Do the other populations also sing, and it just hasn’t been documented yet, or is this unique to our population?” asks Crance. It’s the first time right whale songs in any population have been documented, said NOAA Fisheries marine biologist Jessica Crance on Wednesday from Seattle. FILE - In this Aug. 6, 2017, file photo, provided by NOAA Fisheries a North Pacific right whale swims in the Bering Sea west of Bristol Bay. Researchers detected four distinct songs over eight years at five locations in the Bering Sea off Alaska’s southwest coast, Crance said. She spoke to southern right whale and North Atlantic right whale experts to confirm that singing had not previously been documented. Cousins to the Bowhead whales, many of their calls are in the range of human hearing. “Working in the very remote, harsh, and large Bering Sea, getting the answers will be very difficult. “We thought it might be a right whale, but we didn’t get visual confirmation. “Is it the only population to sing or does it occur in other species and populations?” she asked. The discovery almost raises more questions than answers, Crance said. (NOAA Fisheries via AP, File), Connect with the definitive source for global and local news. “With only 30 animals, finding a mate must be difficult,” Crance said. “We have direct evidence of male right whales singing, and we think this may be exclusive to males, but we have very limited data on vocalizing female right whales.”. “It was great to finally get the confirmation when we were out at sea that yes, it is a right whale, and it’s a male that’s singing,” Crance said. “We can now definitively say these are right whales, which is so exciting because this hasn’t been heard yet in any other right whale population.”, Song Recording 1 GS2-TP A singing male may be trying to attract a female, she said. Arrows delineate preliminary (PP), main (MP) and terminal (TP) phrases of a song, “Why is this population of right whales singing? Federal marine biologists for the first time have recorded singing by one of the rarest whales on the planet, the North Pacific right whale. So rare, that when when scientists recently heard some singing, they were astounded. They spotted what they believe was a juvenile in 2017 but the last Bering Sea mother-calf pairing was seen in 2004, Crance said. After all, these whales aren’t supposed to sing. This has been well documented for Southern and North Atlantic right whales. To be a song, the sounds have to contain rhythmically patterned series of units produced in a consistent manner to form clearly recognizable patterns, Crance wrote in a paper for the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. That these animals are rare and threatened has brought a lot of focus to their preservation. Unknown, but there is evidence that their Bowhead cousins may live 200+ years. Researchers can receive sound from up to four buoys at once and point them toward the source.
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