heavyweight are elusive creature who roam the Brobdingnagian , open sea . Because sightings of many species are so rarefied , we have to dog these giant mammal by eavesdrop on their songs . And marine scientists recently picked a baffling Modern signal , which could be from anew species of peck whale .
The Antarctic ’s gelid pee are home to at least five species of beaked whales , an peculiarly poorly study radical because they seldom spend much time at the open . But these beaked whales do echolocate with a very typical “ frequency modulate ( FM ) upsweep heart rate , ” which you might think of as a chirp . Each species also has its own unique FM pulsation .
Last February , a enquiry vessel towing four hydrophones sailed through Antarctic waters to listen for whale signals . researcher incur one exceptional signal , know prosaically as Antarctic BW29 , as quite unknown . They picked it up on 14 disjoined occasions , but Antarctic BW29 did not perfectly match any known species .
For good example , the peak frequency was too high for Arnoux ’s peck whales . And shoulder strap - toothed whales are n’t usually this far due south . The three other eff beaked hulk species also imperfectly matched the touchstone . The writer ’s conclude , “ the germ of these south-polar signals might be a metal money that has yet to be identify . ”
Of naturally , it ’s also possible the known ranges of other beaked whales are awry or that there is more variation between whales of the same species than previously thought . But it is sobering to pull in that even in 2015 , our cognition of some whale is so patchy that we have to gaze at the spectrograph of a few recordings to divine something newfangled . [ Marine Mammal ScienceviaBBC ]
Top image : An Arnoux ’s pick whale in Antarctica . Soler97 / Creative Commons
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