December 17, 2024
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Hear humpback whales belch and bark for food
The purrs, barks and snorts humpback whales make when begging their mother for milk are the first recorded cases of begging-like behavior by a whale.
Aerial view of a pair of humpback whales on Sainte Marie Island, also known as Nosy Boraha.
Newborn humpback whales can measure more than 15 feet from nose to tail and weigh as much as adult giraffes. But these big calves still need to put on the pounds quickly to achieve their parents’ even more impressive proportions. Every day, a humpback calf eats hundreds of liters of its mother’s milk, thick as toothpaste and full of fat.
And just as a human baby shows off its impressive lung capacity when it’s hungry, a baby humpback whale hungry for milk lets its mother listen. That’s according to a new study published Wednesday B Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological SciencesHungry humpback calves produce low-frequency vocalizations to express their nutritional needs. These noises are like burps, barks and snorts The first cases of whale begging behavior were recorded.
A newborn humpback whale resting on its mother’s back.
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Humpback whales have an impressive vocal repertoire this helps them communicate over long distances and through misty water. Grown men are composed touching songs to cut off friends And all humps produce less structured calls that they use in different social situations.
Scientists have studied these calls for decades, but relatively few studies have focused on the vocalizations between humpback calves and their mothers, says lead study author Maevatiana Ratsimbazafindranahaka, who studies bioacoustics as a doctoral student at the Paris-Saclay Institute of Neuroscience. in france This hides an important aspect of a humpback’s social training. “These early interactions likely play a significant role in shaping the social behavior of humpback whales, even beyond the west,” he says.
To hear such interactions, Ratsimbazafindranahaka teamed up with researchers in Madagascar to study humpback whales swimming near Sainte Marie Island, also known as Nosy Boraha, which lies along a whale migration route. The team equipped eight humpback calves with video cameras and hydrophones, devices that recorded their voices. Back in the lab, the scientists sifted through nearly 33 hours of recordings and isolated the calves’ voices. The calves then synchronized their calls with the different behaviors shown in the corresponding videos, including play, travel and rest.
The researchers identified more than 500 social calls between groups of whale calves and that the calves were mostly quiet when resting and became louder when traveling and playing.
Whale calves were particularly noisy before nursing. On average, breastfeeding sessions generated the most calls from the behaviors analyzed by the group. These vocalizations tended to be low-frequency burps, barks, snorts, and growls, which surprised the researchers. “We expected that the young animals would use high pitched and whining sounds to communicate their needs,” says Ratsimbazafindranahaka.
Researchers say that calves use these rumbling vocalizations begging for milk from their mother. Anyone with a pet dog is familiar with begging, but it’s a common behavior in the animal kingdom and seen in everyone. beetles and poison dart frogs to the little birds Other marine mammals, among others bottle nose and The dolphins of Araguaiathey have also shown behaviors similar to begging.
Ratsimbazafindranahaka says humpback calves are likely not the only whales crying for milk. He predicts that other whales exhibit behavior similar to begging, albeit with different vocal elements. For example, blue whale calves can signal their hunger with an even lower-frequency hum because of their enormous size: newborn blue whales weigh twice as much as humpbacks.
According to Julia Zeh, a research biologist at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who studies humpback whale acoustics, humpbacks’ broad vocal repertoire makes it difficult to associate their calls with specific behaviors. But he believes the new findings help improve our understanding of how they communicate in an important part of our lives.
Delineating the complexity of mother-calf communications also highlights how these creatures are threatened by anthropogenic disruptions such as shipping and seismic surveys. making the oceans noisier. “Whales must continue to listen to each other and communicate effectively to survive,” says Zeh.
