Do Whales Have Pop Songs?

Whale songs are eerie, beautiful, and -- as it turns out -- completely on-trend. Learn how humpback whales share tunes among herds in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff,
I'm Lauren vogel Bomb. And as it turns out, humans
aren't the only creatures that create and riff on catchy tunes.
Whales have pop music too. During breeding season, as male
humpback whales swim along, they sing the same song. Females
never sing, only males do to find a mate or

(00:24):
to posture for other males. The song is passed back
and forth between the members of a pod, each whale
adding his own little flourishes, and as that pod meets
other pods, they pass the tunes along until whole oceans
ring with the song of the moment. In the world
of human pop music, what was the hot song of
the summer will be dropped by every radio staged in

(00:44):
the fault to make room for the new hot thing.
Research published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B
suggests that the same is true for whale songs. The
popular tune becomes gradually more and more complex as it's
altered by different populations of humpbacks. But after a few years,
the whales were tired of their complicated ditty and start
from scratch again. The research team based out of the

(01:05):
University of Queensland, rated the complexity of song recordings of
back whales from different populations in the Indian Ocean of
the course of thirteen consecutive years. They found that over
the course of a couple of years, the same songs
spread all the way across the South Pacific, from East
Australia to French Polynesia. Lead author Jenny Allen, a marine
biologist in the Cetacean Ecology and Acoustics Laboratory at the

(01:28):
University of Queensland, said in a press release. Typically these
songs changed gradually, possibly through embellishments by individual singers. We
suspect the embellishments allowables to stand out from their peers,
much like teenage boys trying to stand out from the crowd.
But every few years the songs are replaced, always by
something simpler, suggesting there's a limit to the whales' capacity

(01:49):
to learn new material. Although there is evidently a limit
to how much whales can learn, the build up and
abandonment of particular songs signifies a rapid cultural change over
thousands of miles of ocean in Alan said that's basically
unparalleled in non human culture. Dolphins do have fads too,
though they have only been observed on a smaller scale.

(02:09):
An individual named Billy, who learned to walk backwards on
her tail and captivity, later taught the trick to some
wild dolphins. After she was released, the dolphin moonwalk really
took off for a while. Today's episode was written by
Justlin Shields and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on
this and lots of other catchy science topics, visit our

(02:30):
home planet, how Stuff Works dot com.