Chasing Doctor Dolittle by Slobodchikoff PhD Con

Author:Slobodchikoff PhD, Con [Slobodchikoff PhD, Con]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Published: 2012-11-26T16:00:00+00:00

SINGING WHALES

Like us, male humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae ) sing, too. I vividly remember the day that I picked up a copy of the January 1979 issue of National Geographic . There, in a story called, “Humpbacks: Their Mysterious Songs,” was a page with a plastic record that had the songs of the whales. I played the record right away, and was dazzled by the low-frequency rumbles, gurgles, and clicks that I was hearing. But I was even more fascinated with something else on the record. One track had the whale song speeded up some sixteen times, so that the time intervals were compressed and the song was much shorter than the multiple minutes of normal humpback whale song. And what amazed me was that the speeded-up song sounded just like bird song!

When I started analyzing prairie dog sounds, I found that I could speed up and slow down any sound that was in my computer. I sped up whale song, and found that it indeed sounded like a bird singing. But I also slowed down human speech, and found that it sounded like whale song. At sixteen times slower than normal speed, human speech has low-frequency rumbles, gurgles, and clicks, very similar to the song of a humpback whale. Speed up human speech some eight to ten times, and now it starts sounding more like the birds that you hear singing in the park in spring.

This led me to wonder how animals perceive time. Maybe whales perceive time slower than we do, and birds perceive time faster. So what sounds like a slow rumble of grunts and groans to us might be perceived by a whale the same way that we would perceive a sentence. And what sounds to us like the delightful chirping of a singing bird might be perceived by the birds the same way that we would hear a phrase or a sentence in our language. When I first started unraveling the language of prairie dogs, everyone knew that they made alarm chirps. But because the sounds were 0.1 seconds long, they sounded to us like simple chirps, with no information contained in them. People who worked with prairie dogs prior to the advent of sophisticated recording equipment assumed that all chirps were the same, with an alarm chirp for a coyote being the same as an alarm chirp for a human. Once I started stretching out the time dimension, I found that there were different chirps for different predators. This implies that prairie dogs process information faster than we can, and it also implies that other animals might process acoustic information either slower or faster than we do.

Let’s take a look at humpback whale songs. I have to admit up front that no one knows what the sounds mean. All we can access are the patterns of the sound, which seem to us like songs, with a structure that is very much like language. Males are the only ones who sing, and they sing on

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