Humpback Song

     Male humpback whales are well-known for the long sweet melodies they sing during the breeding season. The soulful songs that last anywhere from ten to twenty minutes, are not random noises, but carefully orchestratedthemes that keep repeating and developing. Scientists are not sure if the mammals sing to attract partners or, to deter rivals but once they get going, they tend to repeat the same tune over and over for long periods of time.

     The whales do however appear to get tired of singing the same song and create a new one every year. Sometimes the “lyrics” are entirely new, while in other instances, they incorporate portions of the previous year’s melody. In 2011, University of Queensland Associate Professor, Michael Noad, and his then graduate student, Ellen Garland, discovered that the “song of the year” was not just sung by males from the same pod, but also by members of neighboring ones. In almost each case, the song originated from a humpback group on Australia's eastern coast, and then moved from pod to pod, all the way to the whales in French Polynesia — about 4,000 miles away. One song became such a super hit it was even being hummed by whales in the Atlantic Ocean. The discovery was hailed as groundbreaking, because it revealed that similar to humans, whales exchange their culture with each other, something that had never been observed in the animal kingdom before.