
Humpback whales synchronize their songs across oceans - dang
https://medium.com/@dealville/whales-synchronize-their-songs-across-oceans-and-theres-sheet-music-to-prove-it-b1667f603844
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kragen
It looks like the sonograms are full of harmonics. The conventional musical
notation for a note with rich harmonic content, such as a single pluck of a
guitar string, is not a vertical line on the staff with notes at every
harmonic; instead, you just indicate the pitch of the fundamental. (Even if
the fundamental itself is mostly missing, like in the low notes on an upright
piano, that's where you put the note.) Then, notes with different harmonic
content (because they are played on different instruments) are plotted on
different staffs, although this might be counterproductive for visualizing
whale songs. Colors are probably better for that.

It would be interesting to see if a second-order Markov model of the whale
song unit sequence finds information that is not captured in a first-order
model. More interesting still would be if a stochastic context-free or
pushdown model were able to predict whale songs better than a similarly-
complex Markov model, as it would indicate that the whale song has a recursive
structure, like human language.

It makes some sense that you would use a long, highly-redundant transmission
of a sequence of discrete symbols, which then you would repeat after hearing,
to distribute information of general interest around the ocean, where travel
is slow and the latency-bandwidth product is high. The researchers speculate
(largely on the basis of sexual dimorphism) that the information communicated
is merely fashion — but surely there is some generally-useful, temporally-
changing information of interest to humpback whale survival and fecundity.

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Pyxl101
How can we attempt to pull patterns out of the song?

What if the songs actually contain the whale equivalent of GPS coordinates?
How would we detect it?

I'm sure a few people have spent many hours trying to do so, but I wonder if
machine learning could help. It would be a challenge: we'd need factors to
correlate to, like the whale's position or information about their environment
(location of boats, pollution, or prey).

Perhaps a start would be triangulating the whale's position during each song,
and looking for elements that somehow vary with location. I imagine someone
has looked for this. Location might not actually be a good thing to look for -
whales can presumably determine each other's location from the sound source
and distance alone, like a human could hear the direction and distance of a
shouting human. What else might they be communicating?

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SanFranManDan
It seems to me that one would not only have to record the whale but the
actions of basically all whales (if this does travel across oceans then
studying local whales might miss a lot of data). Then you could do some deep
analysis on the correlation of while recordings with actions of the whale
population. Of course you could try to just study a pod or local group of
whales to try to decipher near range communication, but depending on how often
they communicate long range, this might have too much noise.

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rch
You could look at ocean currents and surface temperature to see if there's a
relationship there. I can imagine whales would be interested in collaborating
on a regional biodensity forecast.

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jbattle
This is a good point - it seems not improbably that a whale's view of place
would have more to do with their location in an oceanic current rather than
their x, y coordinate in a plane. Sort of like if you describe your position
within a car on a highway - you most naturally would say "im in the fast lane
between shelbyville and springfield" rather than "i'm at lat/lng such-and-
such"

So to attempt to find correlations with the whale's absolute position may (who
knows!?) be looking for a signal the whale isn't sending.

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fapjacks
Ocean currents and swells are also how ancient Polynesians navigated the ocean
so precisely over such huge distances. They developed the ability to read them
like maps. Unfortunately, these skills are almost totally extinct. I believe
there's only one Hawaiian "master navigator" in the old ways left alive. That
intelligent animals could also survive by using this information is not at all
unbelievable. Very cool and interesting to think about.

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jMyles
It really is incredible. It's worth giving serious consideration to pausing
human activity in the oceans until we really understand what the whales are
doing and saying.

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thaumasiotes
> It's worth giving serious consideration to pausing human activity in the
> oceans until we really understand what the whales are doing and saying

It really isn't. We need the oceans. Your proposed course of action has
unimaginably large costs, no prospective benefit, and indefinite duration.

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lemming
It might have huge prospective benefit for the whales.

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thaumasiotes
So what? If every whale in the world died right now, that would be much better
for humanity than the insane approach of _ceasing all use of the ocean_.

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lemming
Ah, the "only humans matter" argument.

Quite a lot of people, myself included, don't agree that what is "better for
humanity" is the best option when it comes at a massive cost to other aspects
of the natural world.

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callesgg
I would have liked the article to come to some from of conclusion.

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ddingus
Well, it did.

Basically, it goes like this:

"Look, these creatures are doing beautiful things we don't understand"

"and they do it together"

"seems like birdsong"

"these vocalizations inspired people to protect whales"

"now they are under threat again"

There could have been a more clear call to action, but sometimes awareness
alone is powerful advocacy.

