There is a detail in Roger Payne’s original 1971 paper in Science that stopped me cold the first time I read it. Payne, the biologist who first recorded and analyzed humpback whale songs with Scott McVay, noted that every male humpback in a given ocean basin sings the same song. Not a similar song. The same song, with the same phrases, in the same order. And then, over the course of months, the song changes. Slowly, collectively, as if the entire population is updating a shared file.
Nobody fully understands how this happens. Or why.
Megaptera novaeangliae is one of the most studied large animals on Earth, and yet the function of its song remains genuinely contested among researchers. That tension, between how much we know and how much we don’t, is what makes the humpback one of the most intellectually interesting animals in the ocean.
What the Song Actually Is
A humpback whale song is not a simple vocalization. It is a hierarchically structured acoustic sequence that can last anywhere from six minutes to over thirty, repeated continuously for hours. Payne and McVay identified the structure in their landmark analysis: individual sounds combine into subphrases, subphrases into phrases, phrases into themes, and themes into the complete song. It is organized with a complexity that, at the time of its discovery, was unprecedented in any non-human animal.
Only males sing, and they sing almost exclusively on the winter breeding grounds. This has led to the dominant hypothesis that song functions in sexual selection, either attracting females or establishing dominance among competing males. But the evidence for this is surprisingly thin. Direct observations of females approaching singing males are rare. Males frequently stop singing when another whale approaches, regardless of sex. And some of the most elaborate singing occurs in areas with no females present at all.
Michael Noad at the University of Queensland has spent years studying humpback song dynamics in the Southern Hemisphere, and his work has produced some of the most striking findings in the field. In 1996, two male humpbacks from the Indian Ocean population appeared in the Pacific. Within two years, their song, which was entirely different from the existing Pacific song, had spread to the entire eastern Australian population. Eleven whales were singing the new song by the end of the first year. By the second year, it had completely replaced the old one.
This is cultural transmission at a scale and speed that has no parallel in the animal kingdom outside of humans.
Migration. The Longest Journey of Any Mammal.
Humpbacks are extraordinary migrants. The population that feeds in Antarctic waters travels north to breeding grounds off the coasts of Colombia, Costa Rica, and the Pacific islands of Oceania, covering distances of up to 8,000 kilometers each way. This is the longest documented migration of any mammal on Earth.
What drives the navigation is still not completely understood. Humpbacks appear to use a combination of geomagnetic cues, water temperature gradients, and possibly acoustic landmarks. Research by Travis Horton and colleagues, published in Biology Letters, used satellite tagging to track individual whales across entire migration routes and found that they maintain remarkably straight-line paths across open ocean, suggesting a navigational precision that goes well beyond simple environmental following.
They do this while fasting. Humpbacks feed intensively in polar waters during summer, accumulating thick blubber reserves, then travel to tropical breeding grounds where they eat almost nothing for months. A large adult may lose a third of its body weight over the course of a breeding season.
Bubble Net Feeding. A Technique Passed Between Individuals.
On the feeding grounds, humpbacks display a behavior that continues to fascinate researchers. Bubble net feeding involves a group of whales coordinating to herd fish into a concentrated mass. One whale, typically a designated “caller,” produces a specific vocalization that drives fish upward. Others swim in tightening spirals below the school, releasing air from their blowholes to create a cylindrical curtain of bubbles that the fish will not cross. Then the group lunges upward through the center, mouths open, engulfing thousands of fish in a single pass.
The coordination required for this is remarkable. Each whale in the group has a specific role, and those roles appear to be learned and maintained across seasons. Research by Charles Jurasz, who first documented bubble net feeding in Alaska in the 1970s, and subsequent work by researchers including David Wiley at the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, has shown that specific feeding groups maintain stable membership across years, with individuals returning to the same partners season after season.
This is not instinct. It is learned cooperative behavior, transmitted socially within groups.
The Recovery and What It Tells Us
Humpback whales were hunted to near-extinction during the twentieth century. By the 1960s, some populations had been reduced to a few hundred individuals. The International Whaling Commission moratorium on commercial whaling, combined with decades of protection, has allowed most humpback populations to recover substantially. Several populations have been downlisted from Endangered to Least Concern on the IUCN Red List, representing one of the genuine success stories of marine conservation.
But the recovery is uneven. Some populations, particularly in the Arabian Sea, remain critically small. And new threats, including ship strikes, entanglement in fishing gear, and the disruption of acoustic communication by ocean noise pollution, continue to affect all populations.
The song, though. The song keeps changing. New phrases appearing, old ones dropping away, the whole population updating in real time through some mechanism of cultural transmission that we still cannot fully explain. There is something in that image, thousands of animals spread across an ocean basin, all slowly singing the same evolving song, that I find genuinely moving in a way that is hard to articulate precisely.
I have also seen recent research that indicates that a large proportion of the humpback’s acoustic communication is at very low frequencies, well below what we consider ‘sound’, and that these low-frequency signals can travel hundreds or even thousands of kilometres across the ocean.
That’s a fascinating addition, David! The infrasound aspect of humpback communication is one of those details that really puts their world into perspective. Signals traveling thousands of kilometres is almost impossible to imagine from a human scale. It makes you wonder how much of their “conversation” we’ve only just begun to understand. Thanks so much for sharing that.