What if you could write a love song for a whale, and an orchestra went out into the ocean to play it?
As you listen, you can see the spectrogram of a beautiful humpback whale song from deep in the Monterey Bay. These sounds were recorded on an underwater microphone (hydrophone) located about 30 kilometers (18 miles) from shore, 900 meters (3,000 feet) below the surface of Monterey Bay. It is attached to the MARS undersea cabled observatory, which carries data from the hydrophone back to shore.
Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI)
The humpback whale song is one of the most complex, non-human, acoustic displays in the animal kingdom.
But why males sing is still a mystery.
Hunting whales is irrelevant to feeding Japan’s population, draws global condemnation and is certainly not economic. So why does Japan still do it?