- (PA News) -- The male humpback whale is believed to sing
its mysterious songs for the same reason generations of teenage boys have
started bad garage bands ñ to get the girls.
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- Researchers had thought the ocean crooners serenaded
their women only during their winter mating season in the tropics.
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- Now, scientists know the humpbacks also break out in
song during springtime in the northeastern New England region, the time
and place they are supposed to be focused on eating.
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- The findings, gathered by observing humpbacks roaming
feeding grounds off Cape Cod, undermine long-held assumptions about humpback
behaviour, said whale biologist Phillip Clapham of the Northeast Fishery
Sciences Centre, co-author of a paper on the singing in the current issue
of Proceedings Royal Society, Biology.
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- "It tells us whales don't read the text books,"
he said.
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- Clapham and Cornell University professor Christopher
Clark, a bioacoustics expert and the paper's co-author, had hoped to hear
the chatty, rare and hard-to-track North Atlantic right whale when they
began recording in an area of Georges Bank, about 80 miles east of the
Cape.
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- Instead, they heard almost nothing but humpbacks singing.
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- "They're supposed to be singing down in the Caribbean,
where guys are on the corner and the girls are out in short skirts,"
he said. "They're not supposed to be singing at suppertime."
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- The singing Clark heard and the sporadic humpback sounds
he expected to hear are as different as a grunt at the dinner table and
a grand opera.
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- Humpbacks have a range that covers eight octaves, from
a bass so low that humans cannot hear it to a magnificent soprano, Clark
said. Their highly structured songs include multiple themes that are constantly
repeated and even rhyme.
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- The songs last up to 30 minutes, and the whales embellish
like jazz musicians, seeing "who can improvise in some attractive
way better than the other (whale)," Clark said.
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- Aside from attracting mates, singing is also believed
to establish a hierarchy among male humpbacks. Some theorise the singing
breaks out among migrating whales as they start to mix.
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- Clapham said the whales could be singing because their
hormone levels are still high from winter. Or they could be establishing
bonds with females in hopes of hooking up during the next mating season,
he said.
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- They also might be trying to immediately mate with females
who did not conceive the previous winter, he said. Whaling catch data indicates
humpbacks have been conceived outside of the winter mating season, even
though it is rare for females to ovulate then.
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- More study is needed on the humpbacks, which are an endangered
but recovering species, with an estimated 11,500 in the North Atlantic.
Clapham said in the end the spring singing may just be a chance for "low
cost advertising" ñ the male humpback is eating and there are
females around, so he might as well give it a shot, mating season or not.
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- "Males take any opportunity they can to attract
the females, across the animal kingdom," he said.
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- ©2004 Scotsman.com http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=2887605
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