Whales dive shapes its song patterns: new research

A whale’s dive shapes its song patterns, suggests new research.The study using data from suction caps attached to the aquatic mammals is the first to connect an entire humpback whale song structure to a complete dive cycle.The findings could help infer whale behavior from acoustic recordings alone, say scientists.The haunting, complex songs of male humpback whales can last for hours and travel for miles underwater, playing a central role in reproduction during the winter breeding season.But despite decades of research into what the songs sound like, scientists have had far less insight into what the whales are physically doing while they sing.Understanding that connection could reveal how singing affects a whale’s energy use, oxygen management and vulnerability to underwater noise and vessel strikes.The new study by Doctor Julia Zeh reveals a previously unknown link between the structure of a humpback whale’s song and the whale’s movement through the water.The findings, published in the journal Current Biology, show that specific song themes are tied to specific parts of a dive.De Zeh says the study offers a new window into the biology and evolution of one of the animal kingdom’s most elaborate acoustic displays.To gather the data, she and her colleagues temporarily attached sound-and-movement recording tags to singing humpback whales off the coast of Maui, part of a research project spanning six years from 2018 to 2024.The non-invasive tags are small suction-cup devices about the size of a tablet.The research team attached them from small boats using long poles and, more recently, drones.Once affixed, the tags recorded both the whale’s underwater sounds and its movement before eventually losing suction and detaching, allowing the researchers to retrieve the devices and download the data.In total, the team tagged 16 whales, a substantial sample from a tagging perspective and one selected to be broadly representative of the larger Hawaiian breeding popula...