52 Hertz: The Loneliest Whale in the World
blogs.discovery.com
blogs.discovery.com
Fortunately the US Defense Technology Information Center has liberated a copy: http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a429410.pdf
I wish NOAA had those recordings at real speed instead of sped up 10 times. 52Hz is well within human hearing, it's a G#, 4 frets up from the bottom of a typical bass guitar. Typically the big whales are around the C that would be past the left end of the piano and beyond human hearing.
From the paper, there is an interesting statement about the capability of the Navy hydrophone systems:
The lack of calls before and after tracking periods appeared to be because the whale was not producing calls, and not due to the lack of the ability of the monitoring equipment to detect the sounds. As the tracks demonstrated, the monitoring system was not limited geographically, and appeared to detect these calls, usually on multiple arrays, whenever calls were produced in these deep-water regions.
Well, how high is the bitrate? If it's high enough, I suppose you can slow it back down 10x without significant loss of quality...
Looks like they give a 128kbps wav file. Not exactly audiophile quality unfortunately.
Here's a 8kHz .wav slowed down to 1/10: http://dump.elektronaut.no/post/ak52_1x.wav
edit: You probably need a subwoofer or a decent pair of headphones to appreciate the rumble.
Yes, the field was called semiotics and I recall reading about how a wandering bee doesn't give a damn to humans dancing and celebrating nearby.
Most whales are social animals, and they're also pretty advanced mammals, so it's not unreasonable to assume that an individual might experience feelings of loneliness and abandonment given the fact that it's apparently the only one of its kind out there.
Whales on the other hand can communicate and sense group presence for miles and miles. And in the dark of the ocean being able to see each other with visible light probably isn't as important as being able to hear each other. I wonder what implications that has on the geographic distributed size of whale society?
But we can just as well talk about language itself; it's a completely different discussion to have, though. Everybody and everything uses signals, and they are in a way always symbols for something. Bacteria do this in very much the same way bees do. Whales and humans do it as well. The difference here is that animals with higher cognitive abilities tend to do more powerful things with signals. Bees and bacteria use a genetically prescribed protocol to communicate according to completely hard-coded behavior. Towards the other end of the spectrum, as animals get more powerful at cognition, both internal state and communication protocols become more dynamic with humans being the apex as the ones who are most capable of formulating abstract concepts. But it's also worth noting that humans laugh and cry, these are examples of very simple signals still emitted by very complex minds.
So is whale song more like an advanced mammalian language, or is it more like a human laughing? We don't know (yet). But we can make certain assumptions about this single individual's mental state without understanding its language. Imagine the last human on earth, wandering around. We can assume he's lonely, whether he's actually crying or not.
Remember, 90% of what we talk ain't coming out of our mouth. Similarly in case of animals, body language has a major role.
For example, a woman named Oksana Malaya was raised by a pack of dogs, so she is said to have grown up as a dog. She is said to easily communicate and behave with/like dogs and communicate in a rather native way - a phenomena they call 'Mowgli Syndrome'.
Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxana_Malaya and a couple of other cases too. Very fascinating subject, indeed.
I agree that comparing bees to whales is... probably not too useful. I guess (again, if you buy Sapir-Wharf) if they have some way to verbalizing / internally verbalizing feelings like loneliness, it's quite possible that they have the cognitive / emotional bandwidth to "feel" it.
Dogs certainly experience and express a definite sense of loneliness, so I can only imagine that this giant mammal does as well.
Or could. We don't actually know if it's alone. We just know that it can communicate on a frequency that other whales can't. We don't know if it can communicate on usual whale frequencies as well. Maybe it can. We also don't know if it's traveling in a pod of other whales or not. Maybe it is.
Given that context, we have abstracted what actually happens subjectively into emotions like Love, Fear, Hate and what have you. Still, no two people experience Fear in the same way, and each time each person experiences fear it's also slightly different. But as the shared underlying physical process that corresponds to the term Fear is fairly universal. Adults, Children, Infants all have similar chemical cascades corresponding to structures created by specific parts of all these different DNA strands, but that same basic cascade is also shared by most Mammals.
PS: Philosophy loves to define terms, but without context or a basis in physical reality it's somewhat meaningless.
You cannot judge them by that. Humans didn't give a damn about bees dancing for centuries, either (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_von_Frisch)
Also, I think we can almost equally well judge whether a whale is lonely as we can whether a human is. With almost any emotion, we cannot do much better than "if it looks like a duck and acts like a duck"
I do find his path tracks interesting and they do seem to have a central point and do wonder what is of note there, food!
Supprised no DNA samples have been taken, though I suspect we can't eliminate some form of polution inducing a genetic mutation. We have humans with high-pitched voices so anything is possible.
But fair play to the chap in carrying on trying to find a mate in over 20 years, now that is tenacity.
But these migration patterns are probably instinctual, so no surprise this guy is following them - and if he didn't migrate north, he'd probably starve.
In short, I concur, whales don't do handbrake turns and the data is a literal plot of data points from course samplerling.
Strange though that there aren't any attempts mentioned to actually get close and have a look at such an unusual specimen.
From the technical side, pin pointing a moving low frequency sound source underwater using passive sonar is a non-trivial exercise. Hence torpedoes contain their own active system.
That's made my day. :-)
Hope Mr 52 Hertz Finds Mrs 52 Hertz soon. Cheers
Nah. We've all had exactly the same length of evolution.
> btw you don't have to know me
This is the internet, where no-one knows if you're a non-DNA based lifeform -- as your first comment seemed to suggest.
> And here's the cry of the lonely 52-Hertz whale, which no other whale can return -- as if whale songs weren't mournful enough.
Does anyone know whether this is true? Other whales could not hear/understand him even IF they were close-by because of the higher frequency? And he could not hear other whales either?? Both of these seem very unlikely to me, especially the second one, but I am no expert. I am just assuming if his signature is that of a baleen whale just at a higher frequency, wouldn't others still recognize that IF they were close?
If anything, following the human interpretation of this as the "poor lonely-heart whale", he just has to get out of his comfort zone and explore the waters more... this too "could be viewed as inspiration to anyone with a lonely heart"!