I wish NOAA had those recordings at real speed instead of sped up 10 times. 52Hz is well within human hearing, it's a G#, 4 frets up from the bottom of a typical bass guitar. Typically the big whales are around the C that would be past the left end of the piano and beyond human hearing.
From the paper, there is an interesting statement about the capability of the Navy hydrophone systems:
The lack of calls before and after tracking periods appeared to be because the whale was not producing calls, and not due to the lack of the ability of the monitoring equipment to detect the sounds. As the tracks demonstrated, the monitoring system was not limited geographically, and appeared to detect these calls, usually on multiple arrays, whenever calls were produced in these deep-water regions.
The sample rate is 8kHz, which means the Nyquist frequency is 4kHz. Slowing it back down won't sound good, but frequencies below 400hz will be present.
It's fascinating! Though it's interesting to debate if we should apply humanly qualities such as loneliness to whales (or even other creatures). Does this whale really feel lonely (like we do)? Or is it just doing what its genetic program tells it to do? I don't recall where exactly I read, but I had read that the contribution of language is significant as far as human consciousness and feelings are concerned. It mentioned that animals have signals as a form of communication (show a ball, and dog would come over) but humans have signs. The whole conscious world is composed of signs for us and that is what makes us unique. It had further mentioned that even in aboriginal people who don't know much about modern cosmology, they still have a theory of some sort to signify the origin of world. Animals simply lack that kind of framework and therefore behave according to their genetic program or trainings.
Yes, the field was called semiotics and I recall reading about how a wandering bee doesn't give a damn to humans dancing and celebrating nearby.
Attributing feelings to animals can be appropriate, depending on the animal and the circumstances. I find it a little worrisome that you equate individual bees (which by all measures are little more than automatons) with a complex and intelligent animal such as a whale. (Recognizable) emotions are not something humans have a monopoly on, quite the contrary.
Most whales are social animals, and they're also pretty advanced mammals, so it's not unreasonable to assume that an individual might experience feelings of loneliness and abandonment given the fact that it's apparently the only one of its kind out there.
I wonder how far whales can be from one another to still feel like they are socially interacting? Humans need fairly close environments to feel like we're being social. This probably has practical limits on the size of groups and how we live.
Whales on the other hand can communicate and sense group presence for miles and miles. And in the dark of the ocean being able to see each other with visible light probably isn't as important as being able to hear each other. I wonder what implications that has on the geographic distributed size of whale society?
My main criterion of putting bees and whales in the same category was mainly the use of signals for communication, whereas humans use signs. I'm not very well read in this area but just brought this up because it's an interesting way to look at communication.
I guess the main point was whether we can assume animals are capable of having recognizable emotions or if we're simply engaging in an act of anthropomorphization, right? The problem was not deciding whether or not the song of this specific individual is intended to communicate loneliness (because that's impossible to know), it was about whether we can assume he/she is actually feeling lonely or not independent of whatever data is transmitted. And I contend that we can.
But we can just as well talk about language itself; it's a completely different discussion to have, though. Everybody and everything uses signals, and they are in a way always symbols for something. Bacteria do this in very much the same way bees do. Whales and humans do it as well. The difference here is that animals with higher cognitive abilities tend to do more powerful things with signals. Bees and bacteria use a genetically prescribed protocol to communicate according to completely hard-coded behavior. Towards the other end of the spectrum, as animals get more powerful at cognition, both internal state and communication protocols become more dynamic with humans being the apex as the ones who are most capable of formulating abstract concepts. But it's also worth noting that humans laugh and cry, these are examples of very simple signals still emitted by very complex minds.
So is whale song more like an advanced mammalian language, or is it more like a human laughing? We don't know (yet). But we can make certain assumptions about this single individual's mental state without understanding its language. Imagine the last human on earth, wandering around. We can assume he's lonely, whether he's actually crying or not.
There are cases of feral children that have shown, rather nearly confirmed, presence of feelings and thorough bred communication between two animals of the same specie, or inter-specie as well. Fire warning, presence of tiger etc.
Remember, 90% of what we talk ain't coming out of our mouth. Similarly in case of animals, body language has a major role.
For example, a woman named Oksana Malaya was raised by a pack of dogs, so she is said to have grown up as a dog. She is said to easily communicate and behave with/like dogs and communicate in a rather native way - a phenomena they call 'Mowgli Syndrome'.
I think what the OP was saying (along the lines of the Sapir-Wharf hypothesis) that since their language is relatively (significantly? I don't know much about whale communication) limited that this limitation in the ability to express such things as lonliness in their "language" limits their ability to conceptualize abstract concepts like loneliness.
I agree that comparing bees to whales is... probably not too useful. I guess (again, if you buy Sapir-Wharf) if they have some way to verbalizing / internally verbalizing feelings like loneliness, it's quite possible that they have the cognitive / emotional bandwidth to "feel" it.
I suspect it feels a kind of loneliness similar to what we feel.
Dogs certainly experience and express a definite sense of loneliness, so I can only imagine that this giant mammal does as well.
Or could. We don't actually know if it's alone. We just know that it can communicate on a frequency that other whales can't. We don't know if it can communicate on usual whale frequencies as well. Maybe it can. We also don't know if it's traveling in a pod of other whales or not. Maybe it is.
Arguably feelings are just genetic programming in the first place. After-all, the fact that billions of men like breasts has little to do with culture.
Scientifically, ALL mental processes are also physical events. In the same way that a single transistor in a CPU going from one state to another is a physical event. However, that transistor is only meaningful in the context of that CPU and the history of design and programming that got that event to take place. In much the same way every experience of every brain unique as the physical structure of that brain is altered over time which changes the context of that event.
Given that context, we have abstracted what actually happens subjectively into emotions like Love, Fear, Hate and what have you. Still, no two people experience Fear in the same way, and each time each person experiences fear it's also slightly different. But as the shared underlying physical process that corresponds to the term Fear is fairly universal. Adults, Children, Infants all have similar chemical cascades corresponding to structures created by specific parts of all these different DNA strands, but that same basic cascade is also shared by most Mammals.
PS: Philosophy loves to define terms, but without context or a basis in physical reality it's somewhat meaningless.
It is often said that computer programs, of the IS type, do not think, they are only simulating or modeling thought. Let's look at this as follows: We have no problems saying that birds fly. Likewise, we say that airplanes and even model airplanes fly.
Also, I think we can almost equally well judge whether a whale is lonely as we can whether a human is. With almost any emotion, we cannot do much better than "if it looks like a duck and acts like a duck"
Indeed. AFAICT from the linked post, there's no proof (e.g. visual sighting of a whale at any of the locations from which the sounds have emanated) that the source of the sounds is even a whale at all.
The link to a normal Whale sound is the same link as this chap at 52 Hertz.
I do find his path tracks interesting and they do seem to have a central point and do wonder what is of note there, food!
Supprised no DNA samples have been taken, though I suspect we can't eliminate some form of polution inducing a genetic mutation. We have humans with high-pitched voices so anything is possible.
But fair play to the chap in carrying on trying to find a mate in over 20 years, now that is tenacity.
Near the arctic is where the food is, all baleen whales migrate there for that reason. The other end of the migration is tropical waters where they mate and give birth.
But these migration patterns are probably instinctual, so no surprise this guy is following them - and if he didn't migrate north, he'd probably starve.
Yes, the tracks are interesting. Note how the whale often tracks back and then takes a different route as if he/she was unsure about the route (something we often do on new/unexplored forest trails so that we don't get lost). The sharp turns might therefore be some sort of a landmark for the whale.
Very good point. Datasets on maps realy should have the ability to see the resolution of the dataset or a zoomable timeline so people can see how the data plots on a map and its potentual variations. This would avoid seeing data from a limited viewpoint. Only good example of how having mulple viewpoints of the same data would be a picture of lighnight that appears to loop, lightnight travels in 3d and if viewed from some angles will appear from a 2d perspective to loop up and around back onto itself. It is a illution based upon a limited viewpoint of the data and in the case of the data plots without the samplerling period (which could be week or day apart) and how far a this whale can swim in that time to allow for a better perspective of the plotted data.
In short, I concur, whales don't do handbrake turns and the data is a literal plot of data points from course samplerling.
Practically speaking, even large whales are small and even patches of ocean are vast. USN tasks its submarines with somewhat orthogonal missions and does not equip them with windows.
From the technical side, pin pointing a moving low frequency sound source underwater using passive sonar is a non-trivial exercise. Hence torpedoes contain their own active system.
Loneliness probably has a new meaning! - 52hz and 2 decades on - a whale trying to communicate has been so lonely in the vastness of sea. It is truly invigorating and unimaginable .. Their 10million years of evolution far greater than the Man himself must be a remarkable insight towards our own evolution. Reading this story i kind of feel moved and touched at a much deeper psychological level than ever ...
I think we have common ancestors with whales a lot more recently than proteins. It doesn't matter: we have common ancestors with them, therefore we've been evolving the same length of time.
> btw you don't have to know me
This is the internet, where no-one knows if you're a non-DNA based lifeform -- as your first comment seemed to suggest.
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I can understand that his migration routes are away from most other whales but one thing that keeps coming up, especially in the linked articles:
> And here's the cry of the lonely 52-Hertz whale, which no other whale can return -- as if whale songs weren't mournful enough.
Does anyone know whether this is true? Other whales could not hear/understand him even IF they were close-by because of the higher frequency? And he could not hear other whales either?? Both of these seem very unlikely to me, especially the second one, but I am no expert. I am just assuming if his signature is that of a baleen whale just at a higher frequency, wouldn't others still recognize that IF they were close?
If anything, following the human interpretation of this as the "poor lonely-heart whale", he just has to get out of his comfort zone and explore the waters more... this too "could be viewed as inspiration to anyone with a lonely heart"!
I take it that no other whale can hear him, but he can hear them. He's effectively mute (to them). However, loss of one sense is often compensated for by acuteness in other senses. If he can hear them, he can find them. Might he not have other ways of communicating? Whale sign language when near, or voiceless noises when far away? I'm hopeful.
Perhaps the author meant, that they can not be returned in kind because other whales sing at different frequencies? (I.e. they can hear, but not produce that.)
Fortunately the US Defense Technology Information Center has liberated a copy: http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a429410.pdf
I wish NOAA had those recordings at real speed instead of sped up 10 times. 52Hz is well within human hearing, it's a G#, 4 frets up from the bottom of a typical bass guitar. Typically the big whales are around the C that would be past the left end of the piano and beyond human hearing.
From the paper, there is an interesting statement about the capability of the Navy hydrophone systems:
The lack of calls before and after tracking periods appeared to be because the whale was not producing calls, and not due to the lack of the ability of the monitoring equipment to detect the sounds. As the tracks demonstrated, the monitoring system was not limited geographically, and appeared to detect these calls, usually on multiple arrays, whenever calls were produced in these deep-water regions.