Filmmakers look to world's loneliest whale

Filmmakers look to world's loneliest whale | Earth | EarthSky


Andrew Revkin reported this week (February 17, 2015) on the effort by filmmakers Josh Zeman and Adrian Grenier to raise funds toward bringing a whale known as 52 – sometimes called the world’s loneliest whale – to a movie theater near you. Zeman and Grenier want to mount a small oceanographic expedition to the North Pacific to find, track, tag and follow 52, last heard in 2012 but still thought to be out there. ...


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52 attracted media attention some years ago, when the U.S. Navy noticed the whale’s unusual call. Scientists now believe it has been swimming the Earth’s seas for years, ostracized from its own kind thanks to an inability to communicate. The whale sings in a sound frequency that is so unusual, no other whales will respond. ...

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Listen to a blue whale. http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/vents/acoustics/whales/sounds/whalewav/nepblue24s10x.wav

Listen to the 52-Hertz whale. http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/vents/acoustics/whales/sounds/whalewav/ak52_10x.wav

(These recordings of whale song are sped up, by the way, so they sound much higher than the real-life sounds. For an idea of what 52 Hertz frequency really sounds like, watch this video


The whale calls at 52 Hertz: hence, its designation. Other filter feeder whales call between 15 and 25 Hertz. As you can hear at the linked recordings, the 52-Hertz whale also calls in a distinctly more rapid rhythm compared to the deeper and more languid blue whale song.

Not only is the 52-Hertz whale off frequency, it’s off track. Scientists, easily able to follow its movements for years thanks to its unique call, can’t match the whale’s migration path to that of any known filter-feeding whales.

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UPDATE: By the way, Zeman and Grenier weren’t the only artists inspired to create something about the lonely whale 52. Lilian Mehrel of the NYU Tisch School of the Arts dropped EarthSky a note yesterday with word of her mockumentary, The Loneliest. The @52_hz_whale Twitter account (403 followers, 6 tweets) thanked us when we posted this story to Twitter. Look around, and you’ll find more.

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