whales sing

In case you don’t know, let me be the first to tell you.

Whales sing. 

I learned this from the life and work of a scientist named Katy Payne. 

She’s one of my heroes.

She lived and worked on the coast of Argentina. 

She loved the whales that migrated along that coast. 

In 1964, she took a trip to Bermuda to meet with a Navy engineer named Frank Watlington.

He also loved whales. 

He was recording the deep sea with underwater microphones called hydrophones, which were used by the U.S. Navy to listen for Soviet submarines during the Cold War. 

During these recordings, he picked up the sound of a humpback whale.

When Payne boarded Watlington’s ship, she didn’t know they’d be listening to anything. 

“I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard the sound whales make, have you?” asked Watlington. 

He played the sound of the humpback whale back for her.

Payne would later say, “I had never heard anything like it. 

Oh, my God, tears flowed down my cheeks. 

I was just completely transfixed and amazed because the sounds are so beautiful, so powerful - so variable. 

They were, as I learned later, the sounds of just one animal. 

Just one animal.”

Up until that moment, Watlington had kept the recordings secret. 

He feared whalers would use his discovery to help them hunt and kill whales. 

He gave the recording to Payne. 

“Go, my friend, and save the whales,” he said.

There was something peculiar about the sounds that Payne didn’t recognize at first. 

It took special ears and knowledge to find it. 

She had both. 

She grew up on a farm and went to college to study music AND biology. 

She became an acoustic biologist.

She would spend her life watching and listening to elephants and whales. 

What an amazing thing for a human being to do.

As she listened to the humpback whale, she wanted to see the sounds. 

She used a spectrogram to see pictures of the sounds peaks, valleys and gaps. 

She traced them with a pencil on paper.

She saw a structure, a structure that looked like melodies and rhythms.

“The whale is singing a song,” she whispered.

“Whales sing.”

Wow.