Fathoms: The World in the Whale

by Rebecca Giggs

When whalers harvested the largest, mature whales, Payne says, they altered population demographics so that the young never got to learn the music of the old, impoverishing their musical lineage.

The voices of some whales have deepened and quietened; others, perhaps, bear the acoustic legacy of whaling and conservation.

An infant humpback does not arrive in the world charged up with a self-same song, the way a froglet comes equipped with the croak of its species. A humpback is brought into a historically distinct linguistic community—the conventions of its song must be learned. Which is another reason why, perhaps, some noises made by whales are deemed, by us, to be songs. The songs of whales emerge from a mammalian collective, shaped in an ever-evolving shared score. Whale song is social, as much as it is natural.