whales

Whales

The sea is murky. Sight and smell, which work well for mammals on the land, are not of much use in the depths of the ocean. Those ancestors of the whales who relied on these senses to locate a mate or a baby or a predator did not leave many offspring. So another method was perfected by evolution; it works superbly well and is central to any understanding of the whales: the sensc of sound. Some whale sounds are called songs, but we are stll ignorant of their true nature and meaning. They range over a broad band of frequencies, down to well below the lowest sound the human ear can detect. A typical whale song lasts for perhaps fifteen minutes; the longest, about an hor.  Often it is repcated, identically, bcat for beat, measure for measure, note for note. Occasionally a group of whales will leave their winter waters in the midst ol a song and six months later return to continue at precisely the right note, as if there had been no interruption. Whales are very good at remembering- More often, on their return, the vocalizations have changed. New songs appcar on the cetacean hit parade.

The primary danger to the whales is a newcomer, an upstart animal, only recently, through technology, become competent in the oceans, a creature that calls itself human. For 99.99 percent of history of the whales there were no humans in or on the deep ocaeans .