Humpback Whales

Humpback Whales are introduced through their extraordinary songs, which make them a vivid example of communication shaped by distance and by the medium through which a signal travels. Their performances also serve as a comparison for the book’s account of cultural transmission: song can be elaborate and change over time, while the physical delay in sound traveling through the ocean may make ordinary back-and-forth exchange impractical.

Song and communication

The song of Humpback Whales is described as elaborate and mysterious, with a prodigious range of frequencies spanning the whole of human hearing, from subsonic rumblings to ultrasonic squeaks. The book places it among animal signals that influence other survival machines: communication can promote genes’ welfare indirectly by changing the behavior of another animal. The song thus appears not merely as sound but as a powerful communicative performance, comparable in its complexity to other specialized signaling behaviors.

Distance and the form of a song

The sea’s acoustics may allow the exceedingly loud song of some whales to be heard around the world, provided the whales swim at a certain depth. Whether they actually communicate across such great distances is explicitly left unknown. If they do, they face a delay that makes conversation difficult: sound would take nearly two hours to cross the Atlantic Ocean and for a reply to return.

That delay offers a possible explanation for the song’s form. Some whales deliver a continuous soliloquy for a full eight minutes without repeating themselves, then return to the beginning and repeat the song many times, each complete cycle lasting about eight minutes. The long performance and its repeated cycle suit a world in which a response cannot arrive quickly enough to sustain alternating short exchanges.

Comparison with cultural transmission

The whale song is set beside a hypothetical broadcast from a civilization in Andromeda. Because a reply across that distance would be impractical, the Andromedans assemble their message into one unbroken transmission, repeating it over a cycle of several months. Their message consists of coded instructions for building and programming a giant computer. Unlike that broadcast, the whales’ song is not presented as a message whose content or actual long-distance reception is known; the comparison concerns the communication problem created by delay and the form a signal may take in response.

The book later describes a non-human example of cultural transmission in the Saddleback, whose young males imitate songs from their territorial neighbors. That account concerns learned song patterns rather than Humpback Whales, but it reinforces the broader significance of animal communication in the discussion: songs can be structured signals, and, in some species, traditions can spread through imitation rather than genetic inheritance. Humpback Whales’ song remains the striking instance of acoustic reach and extended performance, while its possible role in communication across great distances remains an open question.