whales

How whale urine benefits the ocean ecosystem

Biology, Ecology, marine animals, marine ecology, Science, whales / Kris Guyer / March 12, 2025

A “great whale conveyor belt”

illustration showing how whale urine spreads throughout the ocean ecosystem — Credit: A. Boersma

Migrating whales typically gorge in summers at higher latitudes to build up energy reserves to make the long migration to lower latitudes. It’s still unclear exactly why the whales migrate, but it’s likely that pregnant females in particular find it more beneficial to give birth and nurse their young in warm, shallow, sheltered areas—perhaps to protect their offspring from predators like killer whales. Warmer waters also keep the whale calves warm as they gradually develop their insulating layers of blubber. Some scientists think that whales might also migrate to molt their skin in those same warm, shallow waters.

Roman et al. examined publicly available spatial data for whale feeding and breeding grounds, augmented with sightings from airplane and ship surveys to fill in gaps in the data, then fed that data into their models for calculating nutrient transport. They focused on six species known to migrate seasonally over long distances from higher latitudes to lower latitudes: blue whales, fin whales, gray whales, humpback whales, and North Atlantic and southern right whales.

They found that whales can transport some 4,000 tons of nitrogen each year during their migrations, along with 45,000 tons of biomass—and those numbers could have been three times larger in earlier eras before industrial whaling depleted populations. “We call it the ‘great whale conveyor belt,’” Roman said. “It can also be thought of as a funnel, because whales feed over large areas, but they need to be in a relatively confined space to find a mate, breed, and give birth. At first, the calves don’t have the energy to travel long distances like the moms can.” The study did not include any effects from whales releasing feces or sloughing their skin, which would also contribute to the overall nutrient flux.

“Because of their size, whales are able to do things that no other animal does. They’re living life on a different scale,” said co-author Andrew Pershing, an oceanographer at the nonprofit organization Climate Central. “Nutrients are coming in from outside—and not from a river, but by these migrating animals. It’s super-cool, and changes how we think about ecosystems in the ocean. We don’t think of animals other than humans having an impact on a planetary scale, but the whales really do.”

Nature Communications, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-56123-2 (About DOIs).

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Strange “biotwang” ID’d as Bryde’s whale call

animal behavior, baleen whales, bioacoustics, Biology, Science, whale communication, whales / Paul Patrick / October 3, 2024

In 2014, researchers monitoring acoustic recordings from the Mariana Archipelago picked up an unusual whale vocalization with both low- and high-frequency components. It seemed to be a whale call, but it sounded more mechanical than biological and has since been dubbed a “biotwang.”

Now a separate team of scientists has developed a machine-learning model to scan a dataset of recordings of whale vocalizations from various species to help identify the source of such calls. Combining that analysis with visual observations allowed the team to identify the source of the biotwang: a species of baleen whales called Bryde’s (pronounced “broodus”) whales. This should help researchers track populations of these whales as they migrate to different parts of the world, according to a recent paper published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science.

Marine biologists often rely on a powerful tool called passive acoustic monitoring for long-term data collection of the ocean’s acoustic environment, including whale vocalizations. Bryde’s whale calls tend to be regionally specific, per the authors. For instance, calls in the eastern North Pacific are pretty well documented, with frequencies typically falling below 100 Hz, augmented by harmonic frequencies as high as 400 Hz. Far less is known about the sounds made by Bryde’s whales in the western and central North Pacific, since for many years there were only three known recordings of those vocalizations—including a call dubbed “Be8” (starting at 45 Hz with multiple harmonics) and mother-calf calls.

That changed with the detection of the biotwang in 2014. It’s quite a distinctive, complex call that typically lasts about 3.5 seconds, with five stages, starting at around 30 Hz and ending with a metallic sound that can reach as high as 8,000 Hz. “It’s a real weird call,” co-author Ann Allen, a scientist at NOAA Fisheries, told Ars. “Anybody who wasn’t familiar with whales would think it was some sort of artificial sound, made by a naval ship.” The 2014 team was familiar with whale vocalizations and originally attributed the strange sound to baleen whales. But that particular survey was autonomous, and without accompanying visual observations, the scientists could not definitively confirm their hypothesis.

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Whale songs have features of language, but whales may not be speaking

animal behavior, Biology, language, Science, whale song, whales / Rejus Almole / May 22, 2024

A group of sperm whales and remora idle near the surface of the ocean.

Whales use complex communication systems we still don’t understand, a trope exploited in sci-fi shows like Apple TV’s Extrapolations. That show featured a humpback whale (voiced by Meryl Streep) discussing Mahler’s symphonies with a human researcher via some AI-powered inter-species translation app developed in 2046.

We’re a long way from that future. But a team of MIT researchers has now analyzed a database of Caribbean sperm whales’ calls and has found there really is a contextual and combinatorial structure in there. But does it mean whales have a human-like language and we can just wait until Chat GPT 8.0 to figure out how to translate from English to Sperm-Whaleish? Not really.

One-page dictionary

“Sperm whales communicate using clicks. These clicks occur in short packets we call codas that typically last less than two seconds, containing three to 40 clicks,” said Pratyusha Sharma, a researcher at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the lead author of the study. Her team argues that codas are analogues of words in human language and are further organized in coda sequences that are analogues of sentences. “Sperm whales are not born with this communication system; it’s acquired and changes over the course of time,” Sharma said.

Seemingly, sperm whales have a lot to communicate about. Earlier observational studies revealed that they live a fairly complex social life revolving around family units forming larger structures called clans. They also have advanced hunting strategies and do group decision-making, seeking consensus on where to go and what to do.

Despite this complexity in behavior and relationships, their vocabulary seemed surprisingly sparse.

Sharma’s team sourced a record of codas from the dataset of the Dominica Sperm Whale Project, a long-term study on sperm whales that recorded and annotated 8,719 individual codas made by EC-1, a sperm whale clan living in East Caribbean waters. Those 8,719 recorded codas, according to earlier research on this database, were really just 21 coda types that the whales were using over and over.

A set of 21 words didn’t look like much of a language. “But this [number] is exactly what we found was not true,” Sharma said.

Fine-grained changes

“People doing those earlier studies were looking at the calls in isolation… They were annotating these calls, taking them out of context, shuffling them up, and then tried to figure out what kind of patterns were recurring,” Sharma explained. Her team, by contrast, analyzed the same calls in their full context, basically looking at entire exchanges rather than at separate codas. “One of the things we saw was fine-grained changes in the codas that other whales participating in the exchange were noticing and reacting to. If you looked at all these calls out of context, all these fine-grained changes would be lost; they would be considered noise,” Sharma said.

The first of those newly recognized fine-grained changes was termed “rubato,” borrowed from music, where it means introducing slight variations in the tempo of a piece. Communicating sperm whales could stretch or shrink a coda while keeping the same rhythm (where rhythm describes the spacing between the clicks in a coda).

The second feature the researchers discovered was ornamentation. “An ornament is an extra click added at the end of the coda. And when you have this extra click, it marks a critical point, and the call changes. It either happens toward the beginning or at the end of the call,” said Sharma.

The whales could individually manipulate rubato and ornamentation, as well as previously identified rhythm and tempo features. By combining this variation, they can produce a very large variety of codas. “The whales produce way more combinations of these features than 21—the information-carrying capacity of this system is a lot more capable than that,” Sharma said.

Her team identified 18 types of rhythm, three variants of rubato, five types of tempo, and an ability to add an ornament or not in the sperm whale’s communication system. That adds up to 540 possible codas, of which there are roughly 150 these whales frequently used in real life. Not only were sperm whales’ calls built with distinctive units at a coda level (meaning they were combinatorial), but they were compositional in that a call contained multiple codas.

But does that get us any closer to decoding the whale’s language?

“The combinatoriality at the word level and compositionality at the sentence level in human languages is something that looks very similar to what we found,” Sharma said. But the team didn’t determine whether meaning was being conveyed, she added. And without evidence of meaning, we might be barking up the wrong tree entirely.

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