52 Hertz: The Loneliest Whale in the World

http://blogs.discovery.com/animal_news/2012/05/52-hertz-the-loneliest-whale-in-the-world.html

by antimora • 14 years ago

237 57 14 years ago

blogs.discovery.com

brazzy2• 14 years ago

This has given me a sad.

Strange though that there aren't any attempts mentioned to actually get close and have a look at such an unusual specimen.

gnarbarian• 14 years ago

Maybe someone should build him a translator.

oceanic• 14 years ago

Someone give this whale a Babelfish!

mpdehaan2• 14 years ago

I speeeeeeeaaaak whaaaaaaaaaaaleeeee

brudgers• 14 years ago

Practically speaking, even large whales are small and even patches of ocean are vast. USN tasks its submarines with somewhat orthogonal missions and does not equip them with windows.

From the technical side, pin pointing a moving low frequency sound source underwater using passive sonar is a non-trivial exercise. Hence torpedoes contain their own active system.

TobbenTM• 14 years ago

Gosh, what a hipster.

aarghh• 14 years ago

Brought Ray Bradbury's "The Foghorn" to mind - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fog_Horn

wtrk• 14 years ago

Indeed. AFAICT from the linked post, there's no proof (e.g. visual sighting of a whale at any of the locations from which the sounds have emanated) that the source of the sounds is even a whale at all.

eck• 14 years ago

Let's be clear. This guy operates at 52Hz, but he probably has more spatial resolution than cobra dane.

Zenst2• 14 years ago

The link to a normal Whale sound is the same link as this chap at 52 Hertz.

I do find his path tracks interesting and they do seem to have a central point and do wonder what is of note there, food!

Supprised no DNA samples have been taken, though I suspect we can't eliminate some form of polution inducing a genetic mutation. We have humans with high-pitched voices so anything is possible.

But fair play to the chap in carrying on trying to find a mate in over 20 years, now that is tenacity.

tathagata• 14 years ago

Yes, the tracks are interesting. Note how the whale often tracks back and then takes a different route as if he/she was unsure about the route (something we often do on new/unexplored forest trails so that we don't get lost). The sharp turns might therefore be some sort of a landmark for the whale.

Evbn• 14 years ago

The sharp turns are poorly interpolated data points from a small data set.

phreeza• 14 years ago

Here are the other whale sounds: http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/vents/acoustics/sounds_whales.html

brazzy2• 14 years ago

Near the arctic is where the food is, all baleen whales migrate there for that reason. The other end of the migration is tropical waters where they mate and give birth.

But these migration patterns are probably instinctual, so no surprise this guy is following them - and if he didn't migrate north, he'd probably starve.

DanielRibeiro• 14 years ago

The Whale's sound: http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/vents/acoustics/whales/sounds/whale...

cduser• 14 years ago

That doesn't sound like a very good song

peterwwillis• 14 years ago

It's just one sample. Mix it with others and you have a new Aphex Twin album.

lifeisstillgood• 14 years ago

That's it - for me the sound of one hand clapping now will always be heard at 52 Hz.

That's made my day. :-)

Hope Mr 52 Hertz Finds Mrs 52 Hertz soon. Cheers

kahawe• 14 years ago

I can understand that his migration routes are away from most other whales but one thing that keeps coming up, especially in the linked articles:

> And here's the cry of the lonely 52-Hertz whale, which no other whale can return -- as if whale songs weren't mournful enough.

Does anyone know whether this is true? Other whales could not hear/understand him even IF they were close-by because of the higher frequency? And he could not hear other whales either?? Both of these seem very unlikely to me, especially the second one, but I am no expert. I am just assuming if his signature is that of a baleen whale just at a higher frequency, wouldn't others still recognize that IF they were close?

If anything, following the human interpretation of this as the "poor lonely-heart whale", he just has to get out of his comfort zone and explore the waters more... this too "could be viewed as inspiration to anyone with a lonely heart"!

eru• 14 years ago

Perhaps the author meant, that they can not be returned in kind because other whales sing at different frequencies? (I.e. they can hear, but not produce that.)

hcrisp• 14 years ago

I take it that no other whale can hear him, but he can hear them. He's effectively mute (to them). However, loss of one sense is often compensated for by acuteness in other senses. If he can hear them, he can find them. Might he not have other ways of communicating? Whale sign language when near, or voiceless noises when far away? I'm hopeful.

y4m43• 14 years ago

Loneliness probably has a new meaning! - 52hz and 2 decades on - a whale trying to communicate has been so lonely in the vastness of sea. It is truly invigorating and unimaginable .. Their 10million years of evolution far greater than the Man himself must be a remarkable insight towards our own evolution. Reading this story i kind of feel moved and touched at a much deeper psychological level than ever ...

jmmcd3• 14 years ago

Their 10million years of evolution far greater than the Man himself

Nah. We've all had exactly the same length of evolution.

y4m43• 14 years ago

We have had 3.5 - 4 million years. Whales evolved from mammals which went back into 'sea' .

dogan• 14 years ago

maybe he just want to be left alone

nhebb• 14 years ago

Another mystery appears. I wonder what happened in 1993-1994 to get his migration path off by 90 degrees.

http://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/viewImage.do?id=10079&aid=47...

antimora• 14 years ago

Probably due to missing data points. It may seem that the line is straight but it's possible the whale traveled circular.

beedogs• 14 years ago

the last two sentences of that story made me want to strangle the author. :|

evincarofautumn• 14 years ago

I agree he was laying it on a little thick, but at least the substance of the article was interesting.

paraschopra4• 14 years ago

It's fascinating! Though it's interesting to debate if we should apply humanly qualities such as loneliness to whales (or even other creatures). Does this whale really feel lonely (like we do)? Or is it just doing what its genetic program tells it to do? I don't recall where exactly I read, but I had read that the contribution of language is significant as far as human consciousness and feelings are concerned. It mentioned that animals have signals as a form of communication (show a ball, and dog would come over) but humans have signs. The whole conscious world is composed of signs for us and that is what makes us unique. It had further mentioned that even in aboriginal people who don't know much about modern cosmology, they still have a theory of some sort to signify the origin of world. Animals simply lack that kind of framework and therefore behave according to their genetic program or trainings.

Yes, the field was called semiotics and I recall reading about how a wandering bee doesn't give a damn to humans dancing and celebrating nearby.

waterlesscloud• 14 years ago

I suspect it feels a kind of loneliness similar to what we feel.

Dogs certainly experience and express a definite sense of loneliness, so I can only imagine that this giant mammal does as well.

Or could. We don't actually know if it's alone. We just know that it can communicate on a frequency that other whales can't. We don't know if it can communicate on usual whale frequencies as well. Maybe it can. We also don't know if it's traveling in a pod of other whales or not. Maybe it is.

paraschopra4• 14 years ago

Found one article which may be relevant. It's titled Animal Subjectivity: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

Udo2• 14 years ago

Attributing feelings to animals can be appropriate, depending on the animal and the circumstances. I find it a little worrisome that you equate individual bees (which by all measures are little more than automatons) with a complex and intelligent animal such as a whale. (Recognizable) emotions are not something humans have a monopoly on, quite the contrary.

Most whales are social animals, and they're also pretty advanced mammals, so it's not unreasonable to assume that an individual might experience feelings of loneliness and abandonment given the fact that it's apparently the only one of its kind out there.

paraschopra4• 14 years ago

My main criterion of putting bees and whales in the same category was mainly the use of signals for communication, whereas humans use signs. I'm not very well read in this area but just brought this up because it's an interesting way to look at communication.

bane• 14 years ago

I wonder how far whales can be from one another to still feel like they are socially interacting? Humans need fairly close environments to feel like we're being social. This probably has practical limits on the size of groups and how we live.

Whales on the other hand can communicate and sense group presence for miles and miles. And in the dark of the ocean being able to see each other with visible light probably isn't as important as being able to hear each other. I wonder what implications that has on the geographic distributed size of whale society?

BMarkmann• 14 years ago

I think what the OP was saying (along the lines of the Sapir-Wharf hypothesis) that since their language is relatively (significantly? I don't know much about whale communication) limited that this limitation in the ability to express such things as lonliness in their "language" limits their ability to conceptualize abstract concepts like loneliness.

I agree that comparing bees to whales is... probably not too useful. I guess (again, if you buy Sapir-Wharf) if they have some way to verbalizing / internally verbalizing feelings like loneliness, it's quite possible that they have the cognitive / emotional bandwidth to "feel" it.

dimitar• 14 years ago

It is often said that computer programs, of the IS type, do not think, they are only simulating or modeling thought. Let's look at this as follows: We have no problems saying that birds fly. Likewise, we say that airplanes and even model airplanes fly.

Retric2• 14 years ago

Arguably feelings are just genetic programming in the first place. After-all, the fact that billions of men like breasts has little to do with culture.

paraschopra4• 14 years ago

Yes, but what we are debating here is the experience of those feelings (which may or may not get influenced by language).

Someone• 14 years ago

"a wandering bee doesn't give a damn to humans dancing"

You cannot judge them by that. Humans didn't give a damn about bees dancing for centuries, either (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_von_Frisch)

Also, I think we can almost equally well judge whether a whale is lonely as we can whether a human is. With almost any emotion, we cannot do much better than "if it looks like a duck and acts like a duck"

yogrish• 14 years ago

Other mysterious sounds: http://weburbanist.com/2010/06/07/signal-or-noise-8-mysterio...

sageikosa• 14 years ago

Evolution in action? For natural selection to work some critters have to end up on the losing team.

jws• 14 years ago

There is a paper on 52 Hertz from 2004 which is locked securely in Elsevier's fortress, safe from inquisitive minds.

Fortunately the US Defense Technology Information Center has liberated a copy: http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a429410.pdf

I wish NOAA had those recordings at real speed instead of sped up 10 times. 52Hz is well within human hearing, it's a G#, 4 frets up from the bottom of a typical bass guitar. Typically the big whales are around the C that would be past the left end of the piano and beyond human hearing.

From the paper, there is an interesting statement about the capability of the Navy hydrophone systems:

The lack of calls before and after tracking periods appeared to be because the whale was not producing calls, and not due to the lack of the ability of the monitoring equipment to detect the sounds. As the tracks demonstrated, the monitoring system was not limited geographically, and appeared to detect these calls, usually on multiple arrays, whenever calls were produced in these deep-water regions.

ComputerGuru• 14 years ago

I wish NOAA had those recordings at real speed instead of sped up 10 times.

Well, how high is the bitrate? If it's high enough, I suppose you can slow it back down 10x without significant loss of quality...

prawks• 14 years ago

http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/vents/acoustics/whales/sounds/sound...

Looks like they give a 128kbps wav file. Not exactly audiophile quality unfortunately.

pohl• 14 years ago

It would be interesting to fit her with a prosthesis that dynamically adjusts the frequencey and rebroadcasts the song in the normal range.

INTPenis• 14 years ago

Wow that's sad, aside from casual flings I've been living alone 7 years longer than this whale has been known to.

LonelyWhale• 14 years ago

Hey guys! We've been reading all your comments on this board about the 52 Hertz Whale and have been loving them! I too connected to this very special story, which is why I am currently working on a documentary that will physically search for 52, while exploring people's reactions. We are in production of this major documentary about the 52 Hertz Whale and would love for you to visit our Facebook page to sign up for our mailing list and learn more. Not only is the documentary about the whale, but it's about you folks who relate to this amazing story, and why we all do. Please 'like' us at: www.facebook.com/finding.52

52 Hertz: The Loneliest Whale in the World

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