Found: A Hub Where Humpback Whales Share Their Songs
A new study has found that whales from diverse locations gather at the Kermadec Islands, where they seem to transmit unique ditties

By Brigit Katz
smithsonian.com
September 12, 2019

Humpback whales are the great crooners of the deep. Males are known to emit a songs of complex melodies, comprised of moans, cries and chirps, and their choruses can last for hours at a time. Humpback populations also transmit their songs to one another, in a west-to-east direction, so that a ditty might spread thousands of miles across the sea. Now, as Cara Giaimo reports for the New York Times, a new study has identified one location where humpback whales seem to converge to share their songs: the Kermadec Islands, a remote spot off the coast of New Zealand.

Each year, humpback whales spend the summer in cold, northerly waters, then migrate down to tropical breeding spots in winter. And each breeding ground is associated with a unique song, which the males switch up from year to year. (Females don’t appear to sing, though they can make certain vocalizations.) But researchers studying humpback whales in the South Pacific have noticed that males at one breeding ground will sometimes incorporate elements of songs from other breeding grounds—prompting experts to wonder where they were picking up the new tunes.

“The song we hear in whales in New Caledonia this year—next year we’ll hear elements of that song in the whales in Tonga,” Rochelle Constantine, a biology professor at the University of Auckland and co-author of a paper in Royal Society Open Science, tells Giaimo.

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