Kind: captions
Language: en
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i think everybody is used to hearing
these beautiful melodic lovely songs
from humpback royals
but it's not always nice to listen to
when anyone asks me how pretty their
songs are i'm like
[Applause]
ellen garland is a humpback whale expert
from the university of saint andrews
i have always loved being by the sea and
on the sea apparently when i was six
years old i declared that i was going to
be working with wales
whales like bats are vocal learners
and their songs are among the most
complex forms of animal communication
a single song typically is anywhere from
five minutes to half an hour just for
one song
so these guys sing for hours and hours
on end
like human music whale songs consist of
repeated phrases and themes made up of
individual units
on average is about 34 to probably 36
different sound types that we recognize
within the humpback song repertoire
[Music]
and we name them how they sound so moans
groans grunts whoops
so we call that a trumpet
we have a lot of low frequency very
grunty sound
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and sort of ascending shrieks so yeah
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i feel like that one is definitely going
to come back to haunt me
which begs the question
why
why are wells making such complex songs
one clue might be that only the males do
the singing
humpback song is really an acoustic
peacock tale it's extremely showy and
complex
they're obviously communicating with
each other you sort of want to
understand why they're doing that what
they're trying to say
to find out marlin embarked on the
world's first mapping mission of whale
song
[Music]
i was to analyze song across the south
pacific region to try and understand
what the songs were in multiple
populations through multiple years
across the south pacific there are tens
of thousands of whales living in
separate groups
until ellen came along no one had ever
compared their songs
there were so many songs i couldn't keep
them straight in my head so i started to
draw them
and then from there i could actually lay
them down on the floor by population by
year
next she color coded the songs
you can absolutely tell the difference
between these song types because they
have lots of different sounds in them
and it's the particular arrangement of
these sounds so this is the blue song
type
now if we listen to the dark red
song
[Music]
as you can see this is completely
different
scientists thought that at any given
moment each group only sang is on tune
well we thought for a long time that all
the males in an area sing the same song
but that it's different when you go to
different areas so it's different in
whatever hawaii from tahiti
so we expected to find that all the
songs within a year would be the same so
i started analyzing and i started with
the easterly population of french
polynesia and there is some interesting
irregularities in there shall we say
there's another's like this seems
strange
strange because in french polynesia in
not all the males were singing the same
song sometimes the whales were singing
the red song
sometimes the blue
and then i went to the next population
over the cook islands and then i got to
tonga and then i got to new caledonia
and of course finally to east australia
there was sort of a disconnect
the same songs kept turning up but in
different places i talked with other
researchers and they were like wow i've
seen that song type what is it doing
over there in that year
what was going on
it wasn't until ellen mapped everything
out over time that a picture began to
emerge
consider the blue song
in 2002 it enters the charts in east
australia
in 2003 it's all the rage and tonga
2004 it's a hit in samoa
and by 2005 is number one in the cook
islands
meanwhile back in east australia those
trendsetters had picked up a brand new
tune
all of the males
threw their current blue song out the
window and started singing this dark red
song type
and then once they were singing it it
was then passed to the next population
over which is new caledonia and all
those males learnt this brand new song
type and again and again across the
south pacific so to tonga american samoa
the cook islands and finally to french
polynesia it's almost a game of
telephone across the south pacific
it was kind of like beetle mania when
the you know the british invasion came
over and transformed american music
and this didn't just happen once
as ellen dug deeper she found that this
same thing happened year after year
and that was the really big eureka
moment
the fact that we see repertoires of song
shifting from one population to another
across the pacific and humpback whales
um
shows that humpback whales have cultural
transmission
that's a big deal because culture was
once thought to be uniquely human
no one knows how these songs start but
why would male whales put so much effort
into switching them
we think that it's something to do with
novelty a novel song makes you stand out
against the background of singers around
you you want to be able to stand out to
that female and maybe you'll get more
matings
but are they just sexy tunes could there
be any lyrics