CetaMada celebrates the Music Day, 20th of June:

Scientist find new « notes » to decode the enchanting humback whales songs.

Songs of humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) have been enchanting many people and even more to scientist who have studied this amazing compositions for several years.

The importance of interpreting such songs is that will allow specialists to get an insight on the intraspecific social interactions. The complex acoustic display is composed by phrases which all together create a rhythmical melody very specific for each action or behavior that whales want to express among them. For example this melodies play an important role in both the mating ritual and male to male interaction. Often the sequences are quite long and complex, so the methods used to analyzed such data should be more friendly to scientist and also they should allow to work in a faster way.

Hence, the need and the importance of a group of scientist to record as many songs as possible of humpback whales. In their attempts to acquire a better method to analyze such so many songs finally scientist found a subunit, which will help now all specialists to obtain more accurate classifications of the different calls. Among the institutes involved in this research for over the last 2 years we shall mention the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research (University of Southampton), University of Sud Toulon, University of Paris, and the only Malagasy NGO working on Marine Mammals: CetaMada. For further references please read the article

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