“THAT CROONER,” THE FEMALE HUMPBACK CONFESSES, “melts my heart.”
“The complexity of humpback whale songs is suspected to attract females for mating.” Image by D. Parer and E. Parer-Cook in Science magazine.
It isn’t that whale songs share semantic meaning with human language. Rather, as described by Emily Anthes in “Humpback Whales Sing the Way Humans Speak,” The New York Times, February 6, 2025, it’s that “both communication systems are culturally transmitted, learned from others in the community and passed down over generations.”
Here are tidbits gleaned from her article as well as from “Convergent Evolution in Whale and Human Vocal Cultures,” by Andrew Whiten and Mason Youngblood, Science magazine, February 6, 2025.
An Oceantic Hit Single. Whiten and Youngblood write, “Culture pervades the lives of numerous animal species, in a great diversity of forms, but the songs of the humpback whale are among animal culture’s most extraordinary manifestations. Sung only by males, the songs penetrate the ocean for many miles and are suspected to attract females for mating through their musical complexity. Year by year, the songs may become more complex and perhaps more alluring to females. However, in the southwestern Pacific, a totally new song emerges every few years that is adopted across the ocean.”
Whiten and Youngblood continue, “The rapidity with which new songs and variations are copied demonstrates that they are culturally transmitted, but the evolutionary forces that shape the complex song structures over time have remained mysterious. On page 649 of this issue, Arnon et al. report that fundamental laws identified in quantitative linguistics and in the culturally evolved learnability of human languages apply to whale song.”
From Arnon et al.’s Abstract: “In this study, we applied methods based on infant speech segmentation to 8 years of humpback recordings, uncovering in whale song the same statistical structure that is a hallmark of human language.”
Zipf’s Law. Emily Anthes writes in The New York Times, “Zipf’s law, which was named for the linguist George Kingsley Zipf, holds that in any given language the frequency of a word is inversely proportional to its rank.” Think of “the” (English’s most common word), “of,” and “and.”
Heard in the Waters around New Caledonia. “The researchers,” Anthes says, “transformed humpback whale songs, recorded over eight years in the waters around New Caledonia, into long sequences of basic sound elements, including various types of squeaks, grunts, whistles, groans and moans. Then, they identified ‘subsequences’ of sounds that frequently occurred together—such as a short ascending whistle followed by a squeak—and might be roughly analogous to a word.”
Anthes continues, “The frequency with which these subsequences were used followed Zipf’s law, the researchers found. In 2010, for instance, groan-groan-moan was the most common subsequence, appearing about twice as often as the next most common sequence, which was a moan followed by three ascending cries. The most frequently used subsequences were also generally shorter than the rarer ones.”
And Don’t Forget Menzerath’s Law. Anthes notes, “The findings dovetail with another paper published this week, which found that the vocalizations produced by 11 species of dolphins and whales follow one of the efficiency rules observed in human language. The rule, known as Menzerath’s law, holds that the longer a sequence becomes, the shorter its individual components tend to be; long sentences, for instance, tend to have shorter words.”
Anthes recounts, “The study, which was published in Science Advances on Wednesday, documented this same pattern in a diverse array of cetaceans, including humpbacks, which produce melodic songs; sperm whales, which issue sequences of clicks; and bottlenose dolphins, which are known for their whistles.”
It ain’t wha’cha says, it’s the way you says it. Regards of your species. Talk about DEI. ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025