![]() “Well, nobody is phoning home.” These letters came from the heartbroken and the deaf, from the lovelorn and the single the once bitten, twice shy and the twice bitten, forever shy-people who identified with the whale or hurt for him, hurt for whatever set of feelings they’d projected onto him. One marine-mammal researcher quoted in the story, Kate Stafford, may have inadvertently fanned the flames: “He’s saying, ‘Hey, I’m out here,’ ” she told Revkin. They came, as New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin wrote at the time, “from whale lovers lamenting the notion of a lonely heart of the cetacean world” others were “from deaf people speculating that the whale might share their disability.”Īfter Revkin’s story ran that December, headlined “ Song of the Sea, a Cappella and Unanswered,” more letters flooded Woods Hole. They weren’t just typical pieces of professional correspondence. Soon after the report was published, the researchers started getting notes about the whale. It is perhaps difficult to accept that … there could have been only one of this kind in this large oceanic expanse. We do not know the species of this whale, whether it was a hybrid or an anomalous whale that we have been tracking. After shipping noises caused the attempt of the researchers to find the whale, the experts made a shocking discovery that one can only find out by watching Zeman’s The Loneliest Whale documentary.Much remained unknown, the report confessed, and difficult to explain: Noise pollution continues to be a significant stressor for whales while simultaneously disrupting their ability to communicate. With the whale’s location detected near the shore off the west coast of the United States, the scientists worried about the abundance of noise from commercial ships as it prevented them from smoothly detecting the 52-Hertz whale. The lack of detected activity of the whale led to most scientists presuming the 52-Hertz whale was dead.įortunately and unexpectedly, an intern found the whale while thoroughly studying their recordings. Many experts doubted the finding of the 52-Hertz whale as nobody has heard of the whale again in many years. In the documentary The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52 produced by Joshua Zeman, Zeman raised $400,000 to fund the search for the 52-Hertz whale. (Source: The Guardian) The Loneliest Whale Expedition When their paper became widespread, people from all parts of the world empathized with the whale’s loneliness. Watkins and his team of experts continued to track the 52 Hertz whale for more than ten years, publishing a study about the underwater sound systems’ potential to trace individual whales. The hydrophone network’s recording stood out to him as the whale was vocalizing at 52 Hertz while bearing the signature call of the blue and fin whales, despite the blue and fin whales having only a 15 to 30 Hertz range.ĭue to the hybrid whale’s higher frequency, people speculate that other whales may hear the 52 Hertz call but wouldn’t understand it. Watkins, including a group of other scientists, theorized that a unique whale produced the noise, a hybrid between a blue whale and a fin whale. Not long after, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution scientist William Watkins realized that the recordings contained a whale call. They thought it was a Chinese submarine for many years, and when the Berlin Wall fell, they turned the listening system over to scientists and said, “Well, you can use this. In an article tackling the story of the world’s loneliest whale, filmmaker Joshua Zeman states that the technicians, who acted as ear witnesses, assumed that the strange sound indicated the presence of the military. The two main charactersJames, an offbeat teen obsessed with whales, and Darren, a somewhat egotistical 20-something who. A clever write-up of conversational emails, swapped between different characters, constructs this work of fiction giving it a distinct style. They attributed the series of unusual, low-frequency moans to the Jezebel monster, but in reality, the noise came from a whale. A 52-Hertz Whale is the debut novel of authors Natalie Tilghman and Bill Sommer. Navy heard an unfamiliar sound coming from the network of hydrophones they deployed in numerous parts of the ocean floor to detect Soviet submarines. The Jezebel Monster or the Hybrid Whale?ĭuring the Cold War in 1989, the U.S. Known as the world’s loneliest whale, the 52-Hertz whale vocalized in a 50-52 Hertz range while bearing the signature calling of a blue and fin whale, making scientists theorize that the 52-Hertz whale was a hybrid of the two. When scientists got hold of the sound recordings, they determined that the sound came from a unique whale as the majestic creature vocalized much more than the normal range of blue or fin whales. ![]() ![]() Navy as they thought the noise came from the Jezebel monster. First detected in 1989, the whale calls of the 52-Hertz whale confused the U.S.
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