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gaur

> They speculate that it could be malformed, or a hybrid of a blue whale and another species.

Are there whale species that have calls significantly higher than 50 Hz? Any ungulate experts here who can comment?

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When you cross breed whales of two different frequencies, do you get a "beat" interference pattern in the offspring? :)

Sadly not.

Which is a shame. Because if you did, you could engineer Dubstep Whale[tm] after a suitably sophisticated breeding program of additive genetic synthesis.

I think you meant cetacean expert. Which I'm not, but I know a whale's not an ungulate :)

I meant what I said.

http://www.ultimateungulate.com/cetartiodactyla.html

This is why I enjoy the HN comments. Although, I should probably be upset that you sent me down a Wikipedia rabbit hole (the theory is interesting!): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ungulate#Cetacean_evolution

This is a real TIL moment right there. Good job, HN. :)

What the what?! I stand corrected, though how I'm standing with my mind splattered across the ceiling, I'm not sure...

Are you proposing that this creature might be a hippo, or were you showing off your knowledge of recent re-orderization? Do non-cetacean ungulates call like cetaceans?

I don't think whales are considered ungulates, it is just that ungulate is no longer considered a monophyletic category (but cetartiodactyla is).

Although, from Wikipedia:

> As a descriptive term, "ungulate" normally excludes cetaceans (whales, dolphins, porpoises), as they do not possess most of the typical morphological characteristics of ungulates, but recent discoveries indicate that they are descended from early artiodactyls.

Orcas in the form of clicking sounds and humpback whales, who can sing in ranges as high as 8000Hz.

However, these calls are produced via an entirely different vocalization method.

Yeah, certainly orcas can make some pretty high-pitched squeaks. But I'm guessing they can't interbreed with blue whales.

I guess I find the blue whale + fin whale hypothesis a little odd (why would the hybrid have a call that's higher in frequency than either of the original species'?), but I don't have the expertise to comment on it.

Hybrids don't always get averaged traits. Take my dog, a mutt. She is bigger than both her pure-bred parents, taller by more than an inch. In big cats a tigon, a lion-tiger cross, is bigger than either. The principal even holds true for humans. Obama, of mixed race, is unsurprisingly taller than both parents. This is sometimes called hybrid vigour. My point is that a cross between two different animals doesn't always result in something in the middle. This crossed whale may be very different than either parent.

> In big cats a tigon, a lion-tiger cross, is bigger than either

I don't think this is right. The hybrid with a lion father and tiger mother is the huge one, but the father comes first in the name of the hybrid; tigons (male tiger / female lion) aren't so large.

The reason for the difference is that male lions brand their offspring's DNA with the urge to grow large, while female lions counter with the opposite urge. For a lion/lion pairing, this balances out, but tigers don't have the same war between the sexes going on, and the maternal tiger genetic contribution is defenseless against the paternal lion one.

Humans, by the way, do something similar: the same genetic defect causes "Prader-Willi syndrome" if it came from the father, and "Angelman syndrome" if it came from the mother.

Orca are not whales. Technically, they are really big dolphins. They are in the delphinidae family (dolphins) which explains why they look/act/sound/move so differently than other "whales".

They're still order cetacea though, which is then split into baleen whales and toothed whales, which is where dolphins and orcas are found.

But not all cetaceans are whales. If orca are whales, then so too are the other dolphins. "Whale" is really a lay term covering the really big aquatic mammals. A whale shark certainly isn't a whale, but the term is still used there in the common name because of the association with size. Flipper wasn't a whale.

That makes sense, thinking of the whale sharks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale

See, specifically, the sub-heading on Odontocetes — literally, "toothed whale".

You appear to be operating with the category that "whale" is wholly and exhaustively synonymous with "baleen whale". You're wrong.

From the same wikipedia article...

"They [whales] are an informal grouping within the infraorder Cetacea, usually excluding dolphins and porpoises. "

And yet it survived, or at least the sound reoccurs every year for how long? I would think a malformation would doom its ability to communicate and feed correctly, no?

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