Whale song
Posted: Sun Feb 20, 2005 9:45 am
I'm not entirely sure that Professor Chomsky (for whom, unlike Anders, I have the greatest respect, both as a linguist and a public intellectual) would consider the vocalisations produced by these animals as «language» - if that, they are also much more - but I do hope that we can allow these magnificent creatures to live and provide us with objects of study, rather than appetisers....
Henri
Whales 'guided by their singing'
David Smith
Sunday February 20, 2005
Observer
Whales sing to each other across thousands of miles of ocean and use sound to create their own mental 'A to Z' of the sea floor, scientists revealed yesterday.
Christopher Clark, from Cornell University in New York, had been listening to whale songs for nine years when he realised he had been thinking about the giant creatures in the wrong time scale.
'There is a time delay in the water, and the response times for their communication are not the same as ours,' he said. 'Suddenly you realise that their behaviour is defined not by my scale, or any other whale researcher's scale, but by a whale's sense of scale - ocean-basin sized.'
Clark has been using a network of ex-Cold War US Navy underwater microphones to listen to whales. Whereas the Sound Surveillance System once followed Soviet Union submarines in the North Atlantic, it is now being used to track blue, fin, humpback and minke whales.
Week-long soundings at the US Navy's Joint Maritime Facility at St Mawgan in Cornwall yielded thousands of acoustical tracks of different species of singing whales. 'We now have evidence that they are communicating with each other over thousands of miles of ocean,' Clark said. 'Singing is part of their social system and community.'
Clark has tracked cohorts of humpback whales hundreds of miles apart moving together and watched the collective migration of species across expanses of ocean. His findings were presented to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington DC yesterday.
The songs showed that whales use echo-location to navigate and can recognise ocean floor features such as mountains.
'Whales will aim directly at a sea mount that is 300 miles away then, once they reach it, change course,' Clark added. 'They must have acoustic memories analogous to our visual memories.'
david.smith@observer.co.uk
Henri
Whales 'guided by their singing'
David Smith
Sunday February 20, 2005
Observer
Whales sing to each other across thousands of miles of ocean and use sound to create their own mental 'A to Z' of the sea floor, scientists revealed yesterday.
Christopher Clark, from Cornell University in New York, had been listening to whale songs for nine years when he realised he had been thinking about the giant creatures in the wrong time scale.
'There is a time delay in the water, and the response times for their communication are not the same as ours,' he said. 'Suddenly you realise that their behaviour is defined not by my scale, or any other whale researcher's scale, but by a whale's sense of scale - ocean-basin sized.'
Clark has been using a network of ex-Cold War US Navy underwater microphones to listen to whales. Whereas the Sound Surveillance System once followed Soviet Union submarines in the North Atlantic, it is now being used to track blue, fin, humpback and minke whales.
Week-long soundings at the US Navy's Joint Maritime Facility at St Mawgan in Cornwall yielded thousands of acoustical tracks of different species of singing whales. 'We now have evidence that they are communicating with each other over thousands of miles of ocean,' Clark said. 'Singing is part of their social system and community.'
Clark has tracked cohorts of humpback whales hundreds of miles apart moving together and watched the collective migration of species across expanses of ocean. His findings were presented to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington DC yesterday.
The songs showed that whales use echo-location to navigate and can recognise ocean floor features such as mountains.
'Whales will aim directly at a sea mount that is 300 miles away then, once they reach it, change course,' Clark added. 'They must have acoustic memories analogous to our visual memories.'
david.smith@observer.co.uk