Humpback Whales Remix Their Old Songs
They combine tunes at musically similar places, like the world’s biggest DJs.
by Ed Yong
Jul 24, 2017
3 minutes
They called it the black song. For the humpback whales of eastern Australia, it was irresistibly catchy.
Back in the mid-1990s, those whales were singing a completely different tune—a melody known to researchers (for arbitrary reasons) as the pink song. But in 1995, a small number of humpbacks from the west of the continent made it over to the east, bringing a foreign tune with them. That tune—the black song—was a viral hit. Within three years, it completely replaced the pink one, which has never been heard again. It then dominated the humpback
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