HUMPBACKS TRADE THEIR SONGS
A study led by University of Queensland scientists has found that New Caledonian humpback whales can learn songs from their counterparts on Australia’s east coast with remarkable accuracy.
In collaboration with Opération Cétacés from New Caledonia, scientists from the University of Queensland have found that humpback whales can learn remarkably complex songs from whales from other regions.
Dr Jenny Allen, whose doctoral work at UQ’s School of Veterinary Science led to the study, says that researchers found New Caledonian humpbacks could learn songs from their counterparts along Australia’s east coast with remarkable accuracy.
“By listening to the Australian humpback population, we were able to see if the songs changed in any way when sung by the New Caledonian whales,” explains Dr Allen. “We found they actually learned the exact sounds, without simplifying or leaving anything out.”
The study looked closely at the song patterns of male humpback whales from each region between 2009 and 2015. It found that while new songs were able to be learned accurately each year, those songs did not remain the same year to year.
“They sang a different song each year we observed them,” says Dr Allen. “So it seems that humpback whales can learn an entire song pattern from another population very quickly, even if it’s complex or difficult. This really indicates a level of cultural transmission beyond any observed non-human species.”
The songs were collected using autonomous loggers in Australia, and boat-based hydrophones in New Caledonia, with the recordings translated into spectragrams and transcribed at an individual sound unit level using an acoustic dictionary developed from Allen’s previous work.
As well as song sharing, there were rare instances of themes sung only by a single population. These occurred more often in progressively changing ‘evolutionary’ songs rather than new ‘revolutionary’ songs.
Maintaining song patterns with such accuracy suggests significant acoustic contact between the groups, supporting a hypothesis that song learning may occur on shared feeding grounds or migration routes.