On March 7, 1949, researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) were stationed on a boat called the R/V Atlantis that was sailing off the coast of Bermuda.
They lowered a primitive underwater recording setup into the ocean, and a boxy machine more regularly found in offices began etching the sounds of the sea—a chorus of eerie howls and rustling waves—into a thin plastic disk. That disk made its way to WHOI’s archives in Massachusetts, where it sat, an overlooked relic of the earliest days of underwater acoustic recording.
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Fast-forward nearly eight decades, and experts at WHOI have rediscovered the recording and determined it’s probably the oldest whale recording still in existence. The likely vocalist? A humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae).
The scientists who stumbled on the rare recording are eager to use it for science.
“Data from this time period simply don’t exist in most cases,” said Laela Sayigh, a marine bioacoustician at WHOI, in a statement. “This recording can provide insight into how humpback whale sounds have changed over time, as well as serving as a baseline for measuring how human activity shapes the ocean soundscape.”
The recording dates to a time when the North Atlantic Ocean’s humpback whales were struggling because of decades of commercial whaling. By 1955, the population had likely fallen below 1,000 animals, experts have since estimated. And although humpback whales are due for a thorough census, even outdated estimates suggest there are at least 20 to 25 times the number of these animals in the region today.
But there are still concerns about the whales and other marine species because of shipping and water pollution, as well as noise pollution, which is thought to interfere with the whales’ ability to “talk” to one another through their songs.
Humpback whales are found in every ocean and take one of the longest migrations of any mammal, swimming 5,000 miles from the tropical waters where they breed to colder waters where they feast on krill and small fish that they filter through the sievelike baleen plates in their mouth.