Author: Leah Rosenbaum / Source: Science News for Students
Narwhals are among the most elusive of whales. But for the first time, researchers have been able to listen in on their chatter for days at a time.
A team eavesdropped on these “unicorns of the sea” as they dove, fed and socialized.Susanna Blackwell is a biologist who studies ocean mammals. One of her interests is underwater sounds and how they affect marine animals. She works at a company called Greeneridge Sciences, Inc., in Santa Barbara, Calif. She wants to know how narwhals use different sounds in their daily lives.
Blackwell and her colleagues listened in on the clicks, buzzes and calls of the East Greenland narwhal. The researchers described the sounds June 13 in the journal PLOS ONE. What they learned could help future studies of whether the whales might be disturbed by human-made noise from fishing or oil drilling, the scientists hope.
Narwhals rely on sound in the dark Arctic waters where they live. Like other species of toothed whales, narwhals use echolocation to hunt. “They’re like wet bats,” says Kate Stafford. She studies whales and their songs at the University of Washington in Seattle but was not part of the new study.
Whale sounds are often recorded using hydrophones (HIGH-druh-fohnz). These special underwater microphones dangle in the water and collect sounds. But the devices have several drawbacks. They can’t sense the depth or direction from which noise comes. And they can’t tell which animal is making what sound.
So Blackwell and her colleagues came up with a different solution. They attached acoustic recording devices to the narwhals themselves. “It is really like sitting on the back of a narwhal for a few days and…
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