Listen to the oldest known recording of a whale
Researchers have rediscovered a 77-year-old recording of a haunting song, which has now been discovered to have come from a humpback whale.
Marnie Griffiths/Getty Images
On March 7, 1949, researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) were stationed on a boat named R/V. atlantis He was sailing off the coast of Bermuda.
They lowered a primitive underwater recording setup into the sea, and a boxy machine more regularly found in offices began to burn the sounds of the ocean – the eerie squeaks and sounds of rustling waves – onto a thin plastic disc. That disc ended up in the archives of WHOI in Massachusetts, where it was an overlooked relic of the early days of underwater acoustic recording.
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Fast forward nearly eight decades, and WHOI experts have rediscovered the recording and determined that it is possibly the oldest whale recording ever known to exist. Potential singer? A humpback whale (megaptera novaeangliae).
Scientists who came across this rare recording are eager to use it for science.
“Data from this time period simply do not exist in most cases,” said Layla Sayegh, a marine biocosmetician at WHOI. statement. “This recording can provide insight into how humpback whale sounds have changed over time, while also serving as a baseline for measuring how human activity shapes the ocean’s sound landscape.”
The recording comes at a time when humpback whales in the North Atlantic Ocean were struggling due to decades of commercial whaling. Experts estimate that by 1955, the population had probably declined to less than 1,000 animals. And although humpback whales have yet to be counted intensively, older estimates suggest there are at least 20 to 25 times the number of these animals in the region today.
But there are still concerns about whales and other marine species due to shipping and water pollution, as well as noise pollution, which is believed to interfere with the whales’ ability to “talk” to each other through their songs.
Humpback whales are found in every ocean and have one of the longest migrations of any mammal, swimming up to 5,000 miles from tropical waters where they breed to cold waters where they enjoy krill and small fish which they filter through sieve-like baleen plates in their mouths.
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