Blue whales are able to synchronize the pitch of their calls with an extremely high level of accuracy, and a very slim margin of error from call to call, according to a new study of the blue whale population in the eastern North Pacific. Results were published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. The authors suggest that the uniform pitch used by blue whale populations could allow individual whales to locate potential mates by swimming toward them or away from them.
"Blue whales in a given population have been observed to align their pitch to a common value, but we have now been able to determine just how accurately they are able to do so," said Roger Bland, professor of physics at San Francisco State University.
Bland and colleagues analyzed recordings of 4,378 blue whale songs, off the California coast, and focused on the whales' B calls -- the long, sad moan that typically forms the second half of the blue whale song that is specific to the eastern North Pacific population. They found that the whales all produce the B call at the same pitch, at a frequency of 16.02 Hz, exactly four octaves below middle C.
"We found that blue whales are capable of very fine control over the pitch of their call -- both in reproducing their call at the same pitch every time and in synchronizing their pitch with others," Bland said.
The study found a remarkably small variation in pitch from call to call. In musical terms, the half-tone change of pitch between the notes C and C Sharp is a 6 percent increase in pitch, whereas the variation observed between the blue whale's B calls was a 0.5 percent change in pitch.
The authors suggest that there may be an adaptive advantage to the whales tuning into a common pitch. "If whales are so super accurate in always calling at the exact same pitch, then it's possible that they could be able to detect tiny shifts in other whales' calls caused by the Doppler shift," Bland
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| Contact: Elaine Bible ebible@sfsu.edu 415-405-3606 San Francisco State University Source:Eurekalert |
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