Monday, December 24, 2018

emerging whale songs

Open Archive Day

My features in Current Biology emerge from behind the pay wall one year after publication, which means that all those published in 2017 are now in the Open Archive.

On the Mondays between the publication dates of new features, I tend to highlight one feature from the open archives. The last one in the series this year is about how whales learn new tunes, which happens to be quite similar to the way folk musicians learn new tunes, so it enabled me to make an unexpected connection between the behaviours of whales and humans:

Cultured cetaceans


New discoveries on the musicality of marine mammals come out fairly regularly, and one paper quite close to the subject of the feature came out just last month, see the press release here.


I used a picture of a humpback whale when the feature came out, so for balance, here's one of humans sharing their tunes:



(French/Breton session Oxford, Dec. 2018, own photo)



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