Humpback whales match song production to dive patterns. Zeh et al.

Description

Understanding the function and origin of a complex animal display requires a holistic study of its performance. Among animal displays, humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) song is remarkable for its hierarchical structure, syntax, and cultural transmission – but it has been challenging to study the performance as a whole, leaving the role of movement in humpback whale song overlooked. Using temporarily attached sound and movement recording tags, we discovered a tight correspondence between dives and songs of humpback whales, which were repeated without stopping for up to 16 hours. Repeating song elements, known as themes, were linked to specific parts of a dive. The themes produced during ascent and descent were consistent across individuals and years, while a greater number of theme types occurred at depth. Different levels of song component variability across dive phases suggests that features of themes produced during the bottom portion of a dive, where the depth is stable, are more likely to be driven by song sharing under sexual selection. Movement during song performance illustrates important connections between physiology, environment, and behavior for learned, rhythmic acoustic displays. This dataset (.zip file) consists of continuous spectrogram images of song examples corresponding to each of the specific themes discussed in the corresponding manuscript. The images consist of an example full song from one dive from March 4, 2020, Jan 14, 2022, and January 13, 2024. The timestamps on the spectrogram images correspond with timestamps of individual units (along with labels of the theme and dive phase that unit corresponds to) in the CSV file in the supplemental materials of the manuscript. Further details can be found in the manuscript.

Steps to reproduce

Spectrogram images were generated using the R packages "tuneR" and "seewave" with a Hanning window and 90% overlap. FFT was 4096 for a 64kHz sample rate, 8192 or a 120kHz sample rate, and 1024 for a 12 kHz sample rate.

Institutions

• Syracuse University

  New York, Syracuse
• University of Hawaii at Hilo

  Hawaii, Hilo

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