Adult Blue Whale

It has been discovered that Blue whales are actually able to effectively tune the pitch of their calls with an astounding amount of accuracy, and are able to repeat this process call after call. This discovery was made during a recent study of the Blue whale population in the North Pacific. The results of this study were recently published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

The authors of the article have hinted that this control in the pitch of their calls could allow them to find a potential mate by simply swimming toward or away from the call.

“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,” explained professor of Physics at San Francisco State University, Roger Bland.

Professor Bland along with colleagues have analyzed the recordings of over 4,000 Blue whale calls, their focus being the B calls – Those long sad sounding moans that manifest themselves in the second half of the Blue whale song that is distinct in the North Pacific population of Blue whales.

“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 went on to explain.

This just goes to show you that humans aren’t the only creatures on the face of the planet that are capable of amazing things… We should pay more attention to nature, we might actually learn something.

Now some happy news from the ocean: blue whales have been spotted in migratory routes and feeding grounds in the Pacific that has been void of blue-whales for over half a century. Sightings are also increasing in the Atlantic, and recent research suggests that the Antarctic blue whale population is growing at a heartening 6% a year. About 440 blue whales have been spotted in the western Atlantic and about 200 in the eastern, including large numbers off Iceland. These are likely to be just a fraction of the total amount of blue whales present in these waters.

“The overall numbers are still tiny compared with the original populations before whaling started, but the trend is at last in the right direction,” said John Calambokidis, a marine scientist whose research on whale movements and populations has just been published in the journal Marine Mammal Science. “This may represent a return to a migration pattern that existed in earlier periods for the eastern north Pacific blue whale population,” he said.

Richard Sears, founder of the Mingan Island Cetacean Study in Canada, has noticed a similar trend with blue whale sightings increasing in the north Atlantic during the past few years. Sears is cautiously optimistic, but warns that the increase in sightings may be partly due to more people looking for whales. “There is still no room for complacency,” he said.

Until the 20^th century, blue whales were normally avoided by whalers since these oceanic giants were too large and too fast for traditional ships to handle. With a maximal reported length of over 30 meters and the capacity of exceeding 170 metric tons in weight, the blue whale is the largest animal even known to have existed on our planet and capturing it using an old fashioned sailing vessel is certainly no picnic.

Before the invention of the steam-powered whaling ship and the exploding harpoon, the estimated global population of the blue whale was somewhere between 350,000 and 400,000. By the 1960s, no more than 5,000 blue whales were left.

Unlike whales such as the humpback which has undergone a remarkable recovery since the international ban on whaling was imposed, the blue whale populations have not shown any clear signs of recovery during the last few decades and scientists have worried about them being too shattered and fragmented to be viable populations in the long run. Illicit harvesting has also been a problem – files handed to the International Whaling Commission by Alexey Yablokov, environmental adviser to Boris Yeltsin, showed that the Soviet Union killed over 9,000 blue whales from the time of the ban until 1972.

“These revelations go some way towards explaining why blue whale populations stayed low for so long,” says Dan Bortolotti, author of the book Wild Blue. “It also suggests that they may now have a chance to recover — but only if the ban on hunting all large whales stays in place.”

The United Nations Environment Program has now released the first study of the impact of marine debris throughout the world’s oceans. The report found that plastic, especially bags and polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles, makes up more than 80 per cent of all rubbish found in the oceans. The UN report, titled “Marine Litter: a Global Challenge”, also found that plastic bags alone constitute almost 10 percent of the rubbish.

“Some of the litter, like thin-film, single-use plastic bags, which choke marine life, should be banned or phased out rapidly everywhere because there is simply zero justification for manufacturing them any more, anywhere,” says UN environment program executive director Achim Steiner.

The United Nations are not the only ones worried about the enormous amounts of plastic entering our marine ecosystems each year. In Australia, plastic bags and other marine debris are a direct threat to 20 marine species according to the Federal Government’s Threatened Species Scientific Committee who has listed plastic bags as a “key threatening process” under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999. Marine animals threatened by our reckless use of plastics include iconic creatures like the Blue whale, Loggerhead turtle, and Tristan albatross.

U.S. and Canadian scientists have documented the first known migration of blue whales from the coast of California to areas off British Columbia and the Gulf of Alaska since the 1965 ban of commercial whaling.

Researchers identified 15 separate cases where Blue Whales were spotted in the waters off British Columbia and the Gulf of Alaska. Four of the observed animals were identified as Blue Whales previously seen swimming in Californian waters, which suggests that Blue Whales are re-establishing their old migration pattern.

The identifications were made by comparing pictures of Blue Whales photographed in the northern parts of the Pacific Ocean since 1997 with photographs of Blue Whales taken off the southern U.S. West Coast. The identity of individual Blue Whales was determined based on dorsal fin shape and pigmentation patterns in skin colour.

The Blue Whale was almost hunted to extinction during the 20^th century and even though commercial whaling has been prohibited (albeit not strictly enforced) since 1965 the populations are having a hard time recovering. Blue Whales are still listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species and no more than roughly 5,000 to 12,000 Blue Whales are believed to remain in our oceans, with 2,000 of them living of the U.S. West Coast.

The migration research was conducted by scientists from Cascadia Research Collective in Washington State, NOAA’s* Southwest Fisheries Science Center in California, and Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans. You can read the full article in the most recent issue of the journal Marine Mammal Science.

* The United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)