The humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae), recording 2

The typical whale songs which are known from various popular media, are usually produced by humpback whales. The Southern Hemisphere humpback whales spend the summer in the Southern Ocean to feed as much as possible. Reproduction and breeding mainly take place in tropical waters. At PALAOA, only humpback whale social sounds such as the ones in the spectrograms have been recorded. Humpback whale song has been found present on many of our offshore recorders along the Greenwich meridian. Ongoing research is investigating to which breeding stock these singing whales can be attributed. 

Recording credit: CC-BY 4.0 Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research 2022.

Part of the Polar Sounds project, a collaboration between Cities and Memory, the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity (HIFMB) and the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI). Explore the project in full at http://citiesandmemory.com/polar-sounds.