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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/aug/27/how-decoding-beluga-whales-chitchat-may-save-them-and-teach-us-more-about-ourselves>
"In 2015, the whale researcher Valeria Vergara pitched a small tent at the icy
water’s edge on Somerset Island in the remote Canadian high Arctic, shrouded in
a freezing fog so thick she struggled to see her own hands. She trailed a cord
out to the coast and plopped a hydrophone into the water to record the calls of
belugas.
As many as 1,000 of the whales, accompanied by their newborn calves, frequented
the surrounding bay. Belugas’ ceaseless chatter, made up of dozens of unique
sounds, is crucial to keeping these creatures connected in the dim, turbid
waters of the Arctic.
Sheltering back in her tent, Vergara pulled on her headphones at the other end
of the hydrophone line and was suddenly immersed in a boisterous chorus of
clicks and squeals, whistles, mews and trills. “There I was in my tent, blind,
surrounded by fog, with a cacophony of beluga sounds coming to me. And I
realised in that moment: they live in a similar kind of visual fog, and yet
they are profoundly aware of each other’s presence,” she says.
“It was such an instinctive moment of empathy and understanding: oh my God,
this is really what it means to live in a world of sound.”
Ever since the earliest known recording of whale song was made in 1949,
researchers have been captivated by the wails, rumbles, clicks, grunts and
squeals of their communication.
Sound is the fabric of these creatures’ highly sociable lives: they sing in
breeding grounds, chatter in groups during birth, and echo-locate to help each
other find food. Individual species have dozens of distinctive dialects, and
the structural makeup of their communication shows parallels with human speech.
Whales also produce the loudest sounds of any animal, the same that once
resonated through the wooden hulls of whaling ships, unsettling hunters of old.
With the emergence of new analytical technologies, insights into whale
communication are amassing swiftly. In an era when most whales are protected
from hunting but face myriad other threats, researchers are asking: what clues
do their sounds contain to better protect whales from a noisier, warmer and
more unpredictable ocean?"
Via Susan ****
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*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
