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Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Humpback whales can give birth while migrating thousands of miles
Humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) are master migrators. Some populations of this baleen whale species travel upwards of 5,000 miles per year from colder waters to feed, towards warmer tropical waters where they give birth and care for their calves. However, new research on a population off Australia's eastern coast indicates that their trips to more balmy waters are not as essential to calving as biologists thought. Calves in this population can actually be born in colder waters near New Zealand or Tasmania–about 932 miles further south (1,500 kilometers) than previously known. Understanding this pattern could challenge some long-held beliefs about humpback migration and improve protection areas to help these baby whales. The findings are detailed in a study published May 20 in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science. 'Hundreds of humpback calves were born well outside the established breeding grounds,' said Tracey Rogers, a study co-author and marine ecologist at the University of New South Wales in Australia. 'Giving birth along the 'humpback highway' means these vulnerable calves, who are not yet strong swimmers, are required to swim long distances much earlier in life than if they were born in the breeding grounds.' In the Northern Hemisphere, humpback whales like those found on the east coast of the United States and Canada, typically migrate from colder feeding in the Northern Atlantic Ocean in the summer and south to the Caribbean for the winter to breed and calf. For Southern Hemisphere humpbacks like those off the coast of Eastern Australia, the directions are flipped because of the equator. They travel from their frigid feeding grounds in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica, north towards the Pacific Ocean in Australia to breed, calve, and care for their young. Finding this new baby whale hotspot arose due to study co-author and University of New South Wales Ph.D candidate Jane McPhee-Frew's extracurricular work as a marine guide. 'In July 2023, during a whale-watching tour, I encountered a mum and calf at the mouth of Newcastle Harbor—the busiest shipping port in Eastern Australia,' said McPhee-Frew. 'The calf was tiny, obviously brand new. What were they doing there? But none of my tourism colleagues seemed surprised.' This new sighting piqued researchers' interest and they began investigating the calving range for humpback whales located around Australia and New Zealand. They used data from citizen science observations, government surveys, and reported strandings. New Zealand's Department of Conservation Cook Strait Whale Project supplied data from migration surveys, and Australian state wildlife departments supplied information on strandings dating all the way back to 1991. The team found 209 records of newborn calves (including 11 births), 41 strandings, and 168 observations of live calves, representing at least 169 individual whales. They also had data on the direction of travel for 118 whales, which showed the whales were continuing to migrate north after delivery. 'Humpback whale populations undertake extensive long-distance migrations from the Southern Ocean to breeding grounds in the tropics,' said study co-author Adelaide Dedden of the National Parks and Wildlife Service, Australia. 'They rely heavily on body reserves from an enormous amount of Antarctic krill to support the physiological costs of the journey and reproduction.' The highest-latitude calf was found at Port Arthur, Tasmania–about 932 miles further south than it was believed that humpbacks could calf. When they compared these observations taken over the last decade with historical texts and whaling logbooks, they say that calves born during migration were observed more often before the population crashed due to hunting. Humpback whale numbers in Australia crashed during the peak of the whaling industry, particularly during the 1960s and 1970s. 'I think it's very likely that this pattern has always existed, but the low number of whales obscured it from view,' said McPhee-Frew. 'The Eastern Australia humpback population narrowly escaped extinction, but now there are 30, 40, or 50,000 in this population alone. It doesn't happen overnight, but the recovery of humpback whales, and the return of their full range of behaviors and distribution, just goes to show that with good policies built on good science we can have excellent outcomes.' For all migratory species, these epic journeys cost a great deal of time and energy. The energy expenditures can leave their young vulnerable to predators. While this particular study can't answer why humpback whales risk migrating if they can give birth further south, it's possible that other factors are driving migration. The benefits of delivering in tropical waters might outweigh the risks of having a potential calf born along the way. While the data provided by Western Australia's Department of Biodiversity, Conservation, and Attractions pinpointed a possible nursery area in Flinders Bay, it's likely that most calves are born much further north in the tropics. [ Related: Humpback whales use bubble-nets as 'tools.' ] According to the team, there are several conservation implications in these findings. Some of the observed calves were injured, so expanded protected areas, awareness campaigns about protective measures boaters and the general public can take, and more research into the habitats that humpbacks use while migrating are critical to safeguarding the calves. 'This study was based on opportunistic observations,' cautioned McPhee-Frew. 'This data is excellent for answering questions like, 'are there newborn whales here?' But we can't stretch the interpretations too far. It might appear that we see more calves the further north we go, or that we have seen more over time. But it could be that there are more people whale-watching in the north, or more cameras and social media sharing in recent years.' 'We can only document what we see,' added study co-author Vanessa Pirotta of Macquarie University in Australia. 'Perhaps there are things happening in our ocean that we are yet to find out.'
Yahoo
14-02-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Whale Song Reveals Eerie Similarities to Human Speech, Scientists Find
Two new studies have found eerily human-like sophistication in whale songs, challenging notions about our exceptionality and potentially shedding light on the evolution of language. Some whales can match or even surpass the efficiency of our speech, one of the studies found, with humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) providing the closest competition. In the second study, researchers report that humpback songs adhere to a statistical structure considered a hallmark of human language. "These findings challenge long-held assumptions about the uniqueness of human language, uncovering deep commonalities between evolutionarily distant species," says Simon Kirby, professor of language evolution at the University of Edinburgh. Aside from impressing and humbling us, the whales' abilities could help us better understand the language of other animals and our own. A growing body of research suggests lots of species have intricate communication systems, and many exhibit qualities once deemed uniquely human. In the efficiency paper, ethologist and computational scientist Mason Youngblood from Stony Brook University used a pair of linguistic laws to examine the efficiency of 51 human languages and 65,511 whale-song sequences. Natural selection favors efficient communication, Youngblood notes, which helps individuals share vital information quickly and simply. Complex signals can convey more, he acknowledges, and redundancy helps ensure accurate transmission, but those benefits aren't free. Prattling takes valuable time and energy, and could attract predators. To quantify the efficiency of human and whale communication, Youngblood used two linguistic principles: Menzerath's law and Zipf's law of abbreviation. According to Menzerath's law, efficiency increases when longer sequences like words, sentences, or songs consist of shorter elements, like words, phonemes, or notes, Youngblood explains. Per Zipf's law of abbreviation, a communication system is more efficient if frequently used elements – like words, phonemes, and notes – are shorter. Youngblood applied both laws to vocalization sequences from 16 cetacean species, including baleen whales as well as dolphins and other toothed whales. For comparison, he also assessed 51 human languages. Calls from 11 of 16 species exhibited Menzerath's law as much or more than human speech. The exceptions were orcas (Orcinus orca), Hector's dolphins (Cephalorhynchus hectori), Commerson's dolphins (Cephalorhynchus commersonii), Heaviside's dolphins (Cephalorhynchus heavisidii), and North Pacific right whales (Eubalaena japonica). Most species didn't display Zipf's law of abbreviation, Youngblood reports. It appeared just in humpback and blue whales (Balaenoptera musculus), with only humpbacks rivaling humanity's embrace of the law. For the second study, researchers focused on humpback whale songs, applying quantitative methods traditionally used to evaluate speech in human babies. Previous research has identified a specific attribute of human language that seems to aid learning and promote language preservation. Structurally coherent units of a language display a frequency distribution governed by a power law called a Zipfian distribution. This seems to help babies learn a language more easily, the researchers on the new study note, and "likely enhances the accurate preservation of language across generations." Humpback songs are similarly complex, often arising from nested hierarchical components. For example the whales create phrases using individual sound elements, then repeat phrases to form themes, and put themes together to build songs. Humpbacks also pass on songs culturally, as we do with language. If the statistical properties of human languages evolved for smoother cultural transmission, the authors say, then similar signs should appear in whale songs. To test that idea, they analyzed eight years of humpback recordings with speech-segmentation techniques designed for use with human infants. This revealed hidden structure in the songs, including statistically coherent subsequences whose frequency followed a Zipfian distribution – traits found in all human languages. The subsequence lengths also adhere to Zipf's law of brevity, the researchers add, which states more frequently used linguistic units tend to be shorter. "Using insights and methods from how babies learn language allowed us to discover previously undetected structure in whale song," says first author Inbal Arnon, a developmental psycholinguist at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Finding this hidden, "language-like" structure was a surprise, adds behavioral ecologist Ellen Garland from the University of St. Andrews. Whale songs lack the semantic meaning of language, she explains, and may be more comparable to human music. Nonetheless, Garland says this discovery "strongly suggests this cultural behavior holds crucial insight into the evolution of complex communication across the animal kingdom." The studies were published in Science Advances and Science. Mysterious Radioactive Anomaly Discovered Deep Under The Pacific Ocean Sea Turtles Dance to Orientate With Earth's Magnetic Field, Study Reveals Yellowstone's Super-Hot Water May Hold The Secrets of Earth's First Breath
