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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:17]
D
The New Books Network welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host Gregory McNeff, and I'm excited to be joined by Eduardo Mercado III, the author of why Whales Sing. The book was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in the United States in November of 2025. Edward is a professor of psychology at the University of Buffalo SUNY and a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow. He is the author of Principles of Cognition, Finding Minds and co author of Learning and Memory From Brain to Behavior. I selected why Whale Sing because it challenges one of the most widely accepted assumptions in animal behavior that humpback songs are purely displays, and instead proposes a bold alternative grounded in experiment and logic. Yet beyond the science, the book captures the wonder of trying to inhabit another species world. It shows how the physics of sound, the complexity of whale minds, and the biases of human observers all intertwine, reminding us that humility and curiosity are the twin engines of the scientific method. Hello Eduardo, thank you for joining me today to discuss your book.
- [02:21]
E
Oh, thanks for having me.
- [02:22]
D
Eduardo, why did you write why Whale Singh and who is the target reader?
- [02:26]
E
There's multiple motivations that I had for writing this book. One of. One of them was just this kind of look what I found impulse that you have. You see kids when they find something interesting, when I share to their parents, kind of like that, but in the scientific domain. And another part of it was just the desire to increase public awareness about what we know about what Wells lives are like and how our actions can affect their lives and how their lives can affect ours. And the people that I was targeting are basically anybody who's curious about animals and about scientific discoveries.
- [02:58]
D
Absolutely. Before we actually get into the book, I found your tone of style refreshing. I mean, the book itself feels more direct than an academic paper or exercise at one point. I'll just read from page 26 here. This book is part persuasive essay, part scientific tutorial, and part party pooping polemic. Is that fair? You think that the poem sort of reflects your personality or style?
- [03:29]
E
I hope so. I was trying to make it as accessible as possible. I wanted to be something that even though there is some tricky science in there that requires a little bit of a deep thinking, that still you can kind of follow along even if you didn't get too involved in the scientific part. And we're just interested in the ideas that it would still be understandable.
- [03:49]
D
Nice. And obviously the main thrust of the book is this thesis regarding why whales sing, or I should say the. I guess the acoustic approach or the display approach to singing versus sonar thesis. But it seems like there's two other underlying themes to your book, namely how the human and whale brains work or how they differ as well as the supposed objectivity of the scientific method. Do you? Yeah, that's.
- [04:19]
E
That's true. I would say that. I mean, the theme, the general theme is trying to focus on this one scientific question of why we'll sing. But the broader perspective is on how do you understand what's happening in another animal's organism's head in general, scientifically. And then what are some of the pragmatic obstacles to making progress on that? Not just about how you think about it, but what are the sort of the societal aspects of. Of getting around existing beliefs?
- [04:45]
D
Yeah, I found both of those topics interesting. I mean, pretty. The scientific method, the way you talk about your advisors and your colleagues and the researchers you work with throughout the book. I mean, we'll get into this, but I think we from the outside think of the scientific method as a process and very objective, very collaborative. And the way you describe it, sometimes it seems anything but. So it was fascinating, but also fascinating is your Background you begin the book talking about, I believe it's the pains listening to songs of whales. And one of them says, they practically had tears. And you say, yeah, that was about as far away from my introduction or feelings about whales as you could possibly imagine. Could you talk a little bit about your background? And here I'm referencing your time at IBM. And then I think you started studying dolphins and switched to whales so you could make sure you got your thesis. But could you talk a little bit about your background and how you arrived at your thesis and studying whales?
- [05:49]
E
Sure, yeah. So my undergraduate degree is in electrical engineering, and I worked at IBM in hardware design for a while. And that's kind of what I imagined my, like, life path would be. Would be essentially sitting in a lab and working on hardware, thinking about how to make it better. But at some point, I became interested in sort of the way different kinds of systems could process information, including brains, and started kind of on the side looking at neuroscience papers and books. And that's kind of how I became aware of dolphin brains as being sort of this unique kind of mammalian brain. And that's kind of went off on a rabbit hole of trying to understand, well, what do people know about non human brains in the ocean? Ultimately ended up in Hawaii in grad school, where I was planning to study dolphins. And I did study dolphins there, but kind of just randomly in the lab I was working at, they were also doing research on humpback whales, part of which was looking at humpback Wells songs. And they wanted somebody that could help them with coding, which I could code because I'd been an engineer. And so they recruited me to do that, and I was like, sure, I'll help with that. But I had no interest in it scientifically at all because I viewed the larger whales as kind of like cows, essentially, not doing anything interesting. And so when I was first hearing these songs that they were telling me about, I was like, this just sounds like a sick cow, basically. And I had no, like, intellectual investment. And I was like, just give me the sounds and I'll make the code. And then. And they were willing to pay me for it. So I was like, yeah, I'll do that.
- [07:26]
D
And I think even in more recent times, as you mentor on graduate students, or maybe it was during graduate school, some of them would come to you. Right. It seems like you kept being drawn back in. Like that line from Scarface, I've tried to get out, and I keep getting drawn back in.
- [07:43]
E
Yeah, that's a pretty close analogy. So, yeah, when I was. I basically stopped doing any, well, bioacoustic research, so. Setting their sounds. After grad school and I went into computational neuroscience. I became a professor in psychology department in neuroscience, and I was mainly focused on brain reorganization processing in rats and humans. But students kept finding me that had seen things I had done before, and they wanted to help me, to help them work on similar things, and I agreed. So I kept getting pulled back into it year after year.
- [08:19]
D
It seemed like, no, you seem like somebody maybe care more for your students than whales. But I'm glad you did and I'm glad you wrote this book. I think it's deceptively. I don't want to say simple, but it's much more thoughtful, scientific, rigorous, and backed by experience and, well, science than you would initially think. I want to jump right here. Page 32, you write. I feel I should point out here that my goal in this book is to summarize what most scientists believe about singing whales and why whales sing, while at the same time highlighting contradictory evidence. So I'm going to get to your thesis. Two clarifications. When we say whales, I don't want to say entirely, but throughout the book, you're mostly referencing humpback whales, is that correct?
- [09:08]
E
Well, yeah, that's. I think that would be an accurate description. I try to touch on all the. The sounds groups by whales, including toothed whales, that'd be like killer whales, dolphins, sperm whales, and also other large whales that are in the same group as humpback whales, like blue whales, bowhead whales. But yeah, most of the studies that have been done on singing are on humpback whales, so a lot of the focus is on them. Yeah.
- [09:33]
D
And then second clarification, there is no disagreement about whether the whales are singing. The issue is more why. Right. And their vocalizations are songs, you know, I guess around humpback whales, you actually referenced tuked whales. It seems like the community feels more like they're not singing, but actually maybe using clicks for their own form of echolocation. But there's no disagreement that the humpback whales are singing. It's. Why is that fair?
- [10:03]
E
It's fair. There is not disagreement, but I think there probably should be. So I think there's. And the discriminant, I would say, is that people have initially chosen to call something song and other things not song when they have similar characteristics. And so everybody would say that humpback whales sing, except for maybe me, but even I say it because that's what everybody says. So if I don't say it. They won't know what I'm talking about. So, yeah, I would say in terms of the literature, when you see any discussion of humpback wells, everybody would say they're the. They're a singer for sure.
- [10:36]
D
Perfect. Okay, let's get into it. How do whales sing? In your definition, and here I'll reference you also talk about singers. Here you're referencing humpback whales shift units along one or more acoustic dimensions across repetitions, a phenomenon called morph, a phenomenon called morphing. You also later talk about how they changed the properties of their songs, both units and phrases, throughout adulthoods. And you compare their singing sometimes to DJs. So as that set up, how do you think whales sing?
- [11:11]
E
Right, so if we're focusing on humpback whales, which is probably the simplest for.
- [11:14]
D
This.
- [11:16]
E
When they're singing, they're producing sounds at a relatively fixed rate, very rhythmically, but at a rhythm that's much slower than what humans would use. So it's not always obvious unless you play it at a sped up rate what the rhythm is. And then within that sort of like constant rhythm, they're going through a variety of patterns of sounds which are referred to as units, and they repeat these patterns in a relatively fixed order. And so when whales are singing, what's called a song is basically this repetitive order of repeated patterns which can last anywhere from like 5 to 35 minutes long. We. And they sing in sessions, so the song itself doesn't have a clear beginning or end. The pattern just recurs over the time they sing, which could last many hours. And so it's. If you're hearing a whale sing, it's very difficult to know when a song is started or stopped because they're just keep going like, it's almost like a merry go round. They keep going to the same cycle over again. There's no first horse in the merry go round. There's not really a first part of the song either.
- [12:23]
D
Okay, Paul, would you say whale songs are complex? And again, here I'll quote from your book, you write, beneath these seemingly simple processes of inhalation, exhalation and surfacing lies a world of complexity.
- [12:39]
E
Right? I would say they're complex. I think the complexity that I see in songs is not quite the same as what most researchers would call the complex features, because a lot of researchers that study a whalesong are focusing on these patterns that I just mentioned and sort of how variable they are over time. So it's all structural features and not the sounds themselves. I'm more interested. The part that I see as being complex is the actual acoustics of what they're doing, which is essentially how they're forming individual sounds and what's happening in the ocean as the sounds spread out around them.
- [13:13]
D
I want to get into that machinery of their acoustic system and their brain. You tie that. I think you present an interesting thesis later in the book, or at least make some interesting points there. Before I do that, though, let's talk about this. I should say, actually, why don't you tell us what the scientific community consensus is regarding whale songs and why.
- [13:37]
E
Right. So if you ask anybody in the field, other than me, probably, what it is or why it is that whales are singing, I think they would universally say that they're singing as a sexual display and specifically that it's males sexually displaying to other animals. The only part that's not a consensus belief is exactly what the point of this is. So you would get differing opinions about who is the intended recipient of these songs, what the goal is of the singer in producing the songs. But they all would agree that it's the males singing to display something that would allow them to mate later on.
- [14:15]
D
Got it. And it seems, again, the conventional wisdom is these whales, A, the singing is primarily male. I don't think we found an example of a female singer, but I want to get your thoughts on that. And B, occasionally they may sing in choruses. Seems like the jury's still out on that as well. But when we talk about humbug whale singing, we primarily mean male, solitary whales. Is that accurate?
- [14:40]
E
I think it's accurate in the sense of. Is that what people are talking about? I'm not sure if it's accurate in the sense of what they're actually doing or what's actually happening. So I'll say in terms of chorusing, humpback whales are described as singing in choruses. But what that means in the scientific literature is that you can hear more than one whale singing at the same time. And since whales can travel like 10 miles, you know, you could have five wells spread out over an area of 100 square miles, and those would be a chorus. So it's not like a human chorus where they're, like, close to each other singing the same thing. It's just that they're all audible.
- [15:17]
D
Absolutely.
- [15:19]
E
And in terms of the female versus male, it is the case that pretty much all the singers that have been sexed are male. There are a few exceptions to that, but people kind of discount them. And I would say that a lot of the cases where people believe it's a male singing, they actually didn't verify acoustically that the sounds were coming from the well they sexed. So there's sort of potential ambiguity in terms of how 100% all these. So if they, if they sexed a male with a female and they heard singing, they would just assume it's the male singing? Without, without any way to verify that.
- [15:56]
D
And just to give the audience sense of sample size, I think we've seen, we've only studied, is it maybe 200 examples of humpback whales? How large is our data set here?
- [16:08]
E
I mean, in terms of the sex of the singers.
- [16:11]
D
Yeah, exactly how many examples we have of a male humpback whale singing.
- [16:16]
E
Right. I would say in cases where they've genetically identified or used some kind of visual observation of genitals, which are not that easy to see in the context where they're singing, probably it's about 200 that I would say are solid sex IDs of singers that are by themselves.
- [16:33]
D
Got it. And I want to get to your thesis, but quickly. I should have asked you this. Could you briefly talk about the discipline of bioacoustics, what it is? Because that's really, that's really what we're talking about here.
- [16:47]
E
Right. So bioacoustics refers to studies of sound production and perception and use by any animals. So it includes insects, fish, birds, humans. And typically the goal is to understand sort of the functional aspects of it, but also the physiological mechanisms that allow it to occur. So a lot of the studies in bioacoustics involve recording animals and then maybe conducting experiments to see if you can figure out what's happening when they make certain kinds of sounds.
- [17:17]
D
Got it. And we're aided by hydrophones, which are underwater microphones. That's a big part of the tools for this. Right. Are our equivalent of microscopes for biologists.
- [17:26]
E
Yeah, certainly in the ocean, hydrophones are critical, are the main recording device used, although there's some new techniques that use like fiber optics and things like that which are a little bit fancier.
- [17:37]
D
Okay, now I want to get to your thesis and you, I think you articulated beautifully in the latter part of the book. And you write, quote, either one accepts that humpback whales evolved a horrifically screwed up late long range communication system and made their mating system dependent on it. And you're referencing the conventional thesis for why whales sing or. And this is yours, one entertains the possibility that they, these humpback whales evolved a highly refined sonar capacity that they use to monitor the Distant actions of others. Could you expand on that and tell us what your thesis is and why you're challenging the consensus?
- [18:17]
E
Sure. So, yeah, the second one you mentioned is basically my hypothesis about what's happening. And the idea there is that when you see a humpback whale producing sounds in these rhythmic patterns, what they're doing is putting out the sounds to essentially cause sound fields to spread out from around them for many miles, and then see how those sound fields will interact with anything in the ocean within a certain range, which is about 5 km, according to my estimates. And any large objects, like the size of another well, would return echoes. And by monitoring those echoes, they could potentially track other wells that are not going to be visible. I mean, they're not visible even from, like, 200 meters away, much less 2,000. And so the only way they can really know where the wells are at and where they're going is by hearing them. And so my belief is they're essentially kind of like a raptor scanning a wide area, looking for these very tiny echoes so that they can track potential other whales they can interact with. Now, the reason why I think that that is. I mean, in the first part of that quote, you mentioned how I said that if it's not that, then it's a very poorly designed communication system. The reason why I believe that is because this is actually how I got into this whole study in the first place. Because when I was doing these analyses of songs, I was seeing all this variation. The singers are producing with what you referred to as morphing before. So they're just constantly modifying the sounds. And it didn't make any sense to me because the sounds go two or more miles and any of those modifications will become distorted because of the way sound propagates in the ocean. So if they're varying the sounds all the time, whatever another whale hears is going to be a distorted version of a constantly varying signal. And then they also vary their sounds throughout their lives. So they're not even. They don't have a set, a group of sounds they make. So they've. They're basically varying the sounds almost as much as any animal can in a context where they should not be varying them at all. Because the only way to make sure that a whale gets the right message is if you are consistent in producing it. If you're changing the message every time you send it out, they're going to get a different message every time they hear. And even if. Even if they had sent out a fixed signal, it would be kind of like listening to garbled speech on the phone that's cutting in and out, where you have to kind of like pick out the message from amongst the little pieces you're getting. So that's sort of the contrast is like, what. I mean, the main sort of question for me is, like, why would a whale that's trying to communicate with other whales at long distances produce signals that are this variable? It didn't make any sense to me.
- [20:52]
D
Yeah. It's funny, I know in the book you say originally you thought, you know, this was an idea not worth pursuing. Somebody must have already challenged it. So it's almost as if, you know, again, until it was the lack of evidence that made you start thinking, maybe there's something else going on here. And I want to. I want to hit on the sonar idea. Okay. First, let's consider the evolutionary context. Cetaceans gradually returned to their watery origins, where vision proved less useful, as has occurred in multiple species. Forced to make their way in the dark, sound became increasingly important as a source of information. And you talk about baleen whales clearly evolved in environmental conditions where the ability to use echoes would have been advantageous. And these abilities are known to evolve in close relatives. So you almost seem you've got the evolutionary support on your side. Is that fair?
- [21:49]
E
I mean, to me, it would seem odd if bathing whales didn't take advantage of that information, given that all the toothed whales seem to have evolved in that direction and also other animals that lived in darkness.
- [22:01]
D
Yeah. You note, evolutionary theory cannot provide evidence that any behavior serves a specific function, but it can provide guidance on which capacities are likely to be favored in specific ecosystems. Other cetaceans clearly evolve sonar. So the onus is on scientists who think baleen whales missed the boat in this regard to explain why they failed to adapt. And I think the. Some of the pushback in your thesis has been the fact that baleen whales don't use this method of songs to, you know, to, I guess, see or use it as sonar. I want to. Could you briefly define echolocation? And I should have asked you that because that's a key word throughout the book.
- [22:41]
E
Right. So echolocation is an interesting term in that it's kind of evolved in its meaning as people have discovered more and more about how different animals use sound. So when it was first introduced by Donald Griffin, he was thinking of it in the context of bats using sounds to navigate. That was in his earliest studies, and he didn't realize that they could do things like discriminate shapes and things like that with the sounds. And so he coined the term echolocation. But now it's come to mean basically any sensory system that an animal uses to gain information from echoes, which could be distance or, or navigation, but could also be like the shape of things or the materials of things. So it's a much broader concept. So for me, echolocation would be. You've produced sounds often voluntarily, but it doesn't really matter. The sounds have gone out, they've hit things in the environment. Your brain is actively processing the sounds that come back to it and using those to gain information about the world that you wouldn't have had otherwise. Like, I'm talking right now and I'm making echoes in this room that I'm in, but my brain's filtering them all out because it's not getting anything relevant from them versus, say, if a bat were echoing in this room, it'll be deciding where to fly based on what he got. Bat.
- [23:54]
D
Yeah, you obviously use bats and I think dolphins and even chickpeas as examples of animals that may have these echolocation properties of bats and dolphins clearly do. Okay, I do want to ask you to find two more terms, and then I want to move to some of the pushback or challenges you get to your thesis. First, could you briefly describe how sonar works?
- [24:16]
E
No, not briefly, but let me say.
- [24:21]
D
Is that different than echolocation?
- [24:23]
E
It's not. Well, in some ways it is, but the term sonar was introduced by the US Navy as an acronym to refer to the techniques they were using with technology to generate echoes and process them. So there's no hearing component involved, but it's physically the same process. You make sounds, they bounce back, you do something with them. So sonar is. And so bio sonar might be like the. It's all jargon, but it's basically the same idea as what the Navy does with their sounds underwater when they're tracking different devices. So, yeah, echolocation and sonar, you could view them as synonyms.
- [25:01]
D
Perfect. Okay. Yeah. I'm interviewing you from midtown Manhattan, so got to ask. To understand how songs travel in the worlds of Wales, it's best to think of a pizza, not a pan pizza or Chicago style deep dish. Call out to Chicago style deep dish, but a Manhattanite thin crust pie. Why is that the best analogy for how songs travel in the world?
- [25:23]
E
Right. I don't know if I'd say it's the best analogy, but it's one that gets closer to what's happening, I think. So my impression when I first started studying Humpback whale songs is they're out in the ocean and the ocean's like got a lot of water in it. And so the sounds were just going out in the water, kind of like in all directions. But I, I wasn't really thinking about sort of depth of water they were in compared to how far these sounds were going. And so when the whales are singing along the coasts, which is where they're most often studied, the water depth between like is usually 200 meters or less and the sounds are going like you know, a thousand times that. And so in that context, what we think of as being a big vast bowl of water is actually like a very thin disc of water in terms of the sound. It's so, it's almost like a sheet of paper at a certain point. And I think that the pizza is more similar because it's got this very thin structure that's not homogeneous. It varies on the surface and the bottom and within it as you go out from it. So it's not, you can predict necessarily what's going to be like any given point. And that's kind of what the whales are facing. They're in this disc of water where they're putting sound out into it and it's essentially like a two dimensional plane. And from that they've got to get information back and try to figure out what's happening.
- [26:41]
D
Good analogy. I want to get to the pushback now. We actually touched on the first one, but the primary challenge you get to your thesis is if it's really used for sonar like capabilities. Whales singing why do only mostly whale, male whales sing?
- [26:58]
E
Yeah, so this is one of the first lines of attack I would say in any discussion I have with the other people in the field. And first of all, I don't grant them the only male sing because I think that they've only been sexed in a very specific environment. And I think that there are females singing in other environments where they haven't looked yet. So that's a prediction I have, but it hasn't been tested yet. But I would say that in the context where they are mostly male singing, which I agree that's the case, like around the tropical islands, it's because the, the social context is very specific to those locations and that that social contact is that context is that the, there are females there and males there, but only a very small number of females are sexually receptive. They have to be not having a calf usually and they have to be an estrus so that they have the right hormonal. And that's only happening every once in, you know, a few days every month or something like that. So for all the males that are there wanting to mate with a female, there's a very small number of females who would actually be able to mate, be willing to mate with, with an email. And so I think that the. The males, they don't. They're not in predictable places and neither are the females. And so. And the ocean's big, so for the males, actually be with the female at the right time requires them to be actively seeking out the females. And I believe that's what they're doing. That's why you see them singing, is because they're trying to find females.
- [28:26]
D
Edward, I want to do a follow up quickly there on the conventional thesis, which I call songs as display. How do the female whales behave? I mean, do we see them being attracted to these male songs and consistently coming over? I mean, do we see this, you know, peacock dance taking place?
- [28:45]
E
The answer is the female. So there's two kinds of situations have been looked at with females in song. One is just the natural observations of what's happening, and the other is playing back songs to see what females do. When you broadcast a song in the context of naturalistic observations, there are basically no observations of females approaching a singing male. As a matter of fact, other males are the ones that mainly approach singing males, which is not what you would predict. And in the context of playbacks, they either ignore them or avoid them, which is also not what you would predict. So the females seem to be kind of like steering clear of singers much more often than they are approaching them, at least, I mean, they could still be approaching them and we haven't seen it, like at night or something, but it just hasn't really been seen. And they've been looking for a long time, like 50 years now.
- [29:36]
D
So that's interesting. Yeah, you would think that would be almost a given, given the support for the.
- [29:43]
E
Oh, and I also should mention that over 80% of singers that have been studied were alone. So, I mean, you would think that if you just sat on a singer all day, eventually a female would come and then that would say, oh, yeah, it finally paid off. Singing for eight hours straight was by yourself. Finally got you. The females, like, no, you got some.
- [30:03]
D
Males, maybe, like you said, I think males occasionally stop by for a few minutes like two fishermen exchanging reports of their how the day is going. Move on.
- [30:15]
E
Yeah, right. You seen any females? No.
- [30:17]
D
Yeah, yeah, like, so that was. That was funny and fascinating, I guess. Struggles with the mating dance are universal regardless of the.
- [30:27]
E
Oh, and I should also mention that when, when males do find a female, they tend to surround, chase them in these groups and they physically compete. I mean, and there's like blood involved, so it's not like subtle. So they're, they're definitely competing to be with females, but it seems to be more of like in this, in this. When they're close to them and they're not singing, then.
- [30:46]
D
Yeah, I think you mentioned in these sort of competitions it got so violent one way there's, I guess, record of one whale actually being killed in the process. You know. Wow, that's, that's pretty intense. Thankfully, online dating, as I think helped us out there, second pushback, or I shouldn't say second, but another one, and I thought was interesting. And most researchers don't think songs could be used as sonar because songs seem too complex and because singers behave in ways that differ from echolocating toothed whales. How do you respond to that?
- [31:22]
E
All right, so there's kind of. I'll start with the second one first because that's, I think, the simpler one. So when teeth wells applicate, they're often foraging and they'll. And they kind of like bats, they'll, they'll make clicks and then as they get closer to the target, before they catch it in their mouth, they'll adjust the timing of the clicks to be quicker and quicker to give them more and more information about the details of it. And so people have been looking for things like that in humpback wells and they're like, oh, but they're just doing the same rhythm over and over again. They're never getting faster and faster as they approach another well. So that's not what eccliation would look like. But I think the issue there is that they're not trying to catch other well in their mouth, number one. And also the other wells like 10 miles away, or maybe not 10, maybe like three miles away. So it's not like it's a very rapid process to get to them. And if you look at bats when they're searching long distances, they actually do the same thing that humpback whales do. They produce very rhythmic search signals. So my view is like, if you're searching from really far away, you're not going to change your rate of production. So they shouldn't look like toothed wells when they echolocate. And then this issue of complexity, most of the time when that's brought up, it's brought up in the context of this idea of structural complexity, these patterns, like, why all these complex patterns? And I'm like, that's a good question. But what's more relevant is the sounds themselves, because, I mean, bats also produce patterns, but what enables them to detect the echoes is what the individual sounds are. Like, are the individual sounds ones that will bounce off of things? Will they go really far? That's what's more. That's the complexity that's relevant. So I feel like they focused on the structural complexity, which is interesting, for sure, but they've ignored the acoustic complexity, which is, I think, what is more functionally relevant.
- [33:04]
D
Okay, you raised two great points. I'm going to hit you with a follow up on the temporal steadiness. And, and I'm going to ask you to repeat that quote, because later on the book, and I think it's one of the most fascinating sentences in the book, you also talk about how it's almost the silences or the gaps between the sounds, and I'll give that passage, but you effectively say these silences, while they mean nothing to us, mean everything. THE SINGING WAILS so I want to get there, but first of all, another pushback, another challenge you get is, quote, the temporal steadiness of song production is one reason why scientists are skeptical that singers are echolocating. By temporal steadiness, I think you mean these 13 beats per minute, which is the tempo or the cadence of the song that humpback whales do for hours on end. How do you respond to that challenge?
- [33:52]
E
Right, so that's what I was saying before. So my belief about the pacing of the sound production is that they're producing a sound, they're listening for a certain amount of time, which corresponds to the range of what they're listening for. And then once that, once it's gone beyond that, when the echoes will be too quiet for them to hear them, they make another sound. So they're basically maxing out their range by spacing out the sounds. You can think of it as like searching along the borders of a, of an area where if you wait, like, how long do you look in one spot before you switch and look in another spot? And so I think the timing part, it's partly the way they produce the sounds, which is interesting in of itself. They have this internal production that kind of involves air moving back and forth in their body. So that's kind of one issue with why the rhythm is so regular. But it's also, I believe, because of the physics of the situation and how far away can they actually detect targets and they're basically searching as far as they can. And I think if you see that there was a shorter range they were focusing on, you would see they used a shorter or a quicker rate than what they typically default to. So I think they are definitely controlling the timing in a way that's related to the function and that people have kind of just assumed this is. They just make this that. Because that's what females like, I guess something like that.
- [35:08]
D
Got it. And in the actual process of singing, whales can vary the acoustic characteristics of the sound within songs. Is that accurate?
- [35:17]
E
Yeah, that's actually mind boggling how well they can do that, because they can make pitches extremely loudly that are lower than the lowest that he can make, which is not that surprising as well. But they can also do it for pitches that are higher than the highest he can make. So professional sopranos can't go as high as a humpback whale, who's way bigger than they are. And humpback whale can do it for like 20 hours without taking a break, which if a human did that, their vocal organs would implode, probably.
- [35:46]
D
Yeah. Okay, let's go to this, what I think is the most fascinating sentence or one of your book is full of them. But I love this one. I'm good. It's a few sentences. I've concluded that listening to humpback whale songs is the wrong way to go. Because what humans experience when hearing these songs is not what the whales themselves hear. According to the sonar hypothesis, what singing whales perceive differs so radically from our perceptions that we might as well be sensing totally different events. That's because what's important to a whale using songs as sonar are the silent intervals following the sounds within songs. Humans perceive these gaps as silence. Any differences between consecutive silences are thus imperceptible to listening humans. But from the perspective of the sonar hypotheses, what humans perceives as being nothing means everything to singing whales. Talk to me about these silences and how significant they are for the whales.
- [36:42]
E
Right. So according to the sonar hypothesis, when the whale goes silent, that's when their brain kicks in full gear attentionally because they're trying to pick out, you know, the sounds. Unlike with a bat or a dolphin, the sounds could be coming back from any direction, from miles away, and they've got to basically use a very. What's the equivalent of like a gnat? Acoustically, they get one shot at detecting that thing within all the other sounds that are happening in the ocean, and then they're repeating sounds over and over. Again, so if they want to track, you know, like with a bat, they're doing sounds very rapidly, so they can track things that are very close to them. But in this case, the objects are very far away. So the next time they make a sound, there's going to be very little motion. Kind of like you're watching like, a somebody walk from, like, two miles away. You're not going to notice much of a difference within, like, five or six seconds. So you got to keep on tracking that thing to be able to pick up. What direction is this little dot moving? Is it coming towards me, away from me? Is it moving fast or slow? And so all of the information would have to be gained while the whales are listening? Probably not. I mean, basically not making sounds. So it's like intense concentration followed by, like, putting out another signal. Intense concentration. So within this, what to us is just a bunch of, like, you know, static, essentially, they've got to pull out all this information and then from that information, infer what's happening in a huge range around them.
- [38:01]
D
Perfect. Can you talk to me briefly about reverberation and how whale brains deal with that?
- [38:07]
E
Yeah. So reverberation is basically echoes produced by sound, but it's a lot of echoes produced from lots of places. Like, if you're in a gym or something, you'd hear the sounds of squeaks and balls bouncing coming from all the different walls. And it makes this very kind of unique quality to the sound. The same thing that happens in the ocean, but even more so because the sounds are trapped inside there. And sound moves a lot faster in water than in air, so you get a lot more echoes. Traditionally, the way this has been viewed is that this is kind of background noise, like it would be in a gymnasium, that kind of makes everything kind of more fuzzy when you hear it. And from that perspective, reverberation is just a pro. Is like noise pollution or something for animals that are trying to listen. But there are some animals, bats again, that use this reverberation as a way to detect changes over time in the signal. And in principle, the whales could do the same thing. So one of the proposals of the sonar hypothesis is that when they're listening to these gaps between the sounds, one of the things they're listening for are sort of subtle modulations of reverberation that they're themselves creating. And part of the evidence for that is that the sounds they produce are some of the most reverberant sounds in the ocean. So if they're trying to avoid reverberation they've chosen the worst, again the worst possible sound to do that, they're generating massive amounts of reverberation with their own sounds, which should make it harder for them to hear each other. But from the perspective of the sonar hypothesis, this gives them more information because they've got this background sort of like to compare against, to listen for changes and things and echoes beyond just the ones they just made.
- [39:42]
D
Okay, this is a almost three part question. You write. Male whales may have adapted their abilities in ways different from bats and dolphins, which may require thinking about their underwater lives from a new perspective. First question, how does whale echolocation differ from bats and dolphins? Second question, do dolphins actually sing? And then third, how do we think differently about a whale relative to how we've been thinking about it in the bioacoustics discipline?
- [40:12]
E
Right. So I mentioned a couple of ways that are different in terms of like the bats and dolphins are usually using echolocation to catch things. In the case of bats it would often be insects and in dolphins would be fish. So it's more of a, like a intersect rapid interception of an evasive maneuvering prey. You know, that's the dolphin in bat context. Bats can echo like 5 meters maximum. A dolphin can do much more, I mean up to like 200 meters. But the thing about, and they both use ultrasonic sounds to do that, so sounds that are above our hearing. And the thing about ultrasonic sounds is they're very directional. So when a bat or a dolphin is ech, locating it's kind of like a little beam in front of it. And if the things behind them, they're not going to be able to perceive it from the echoes. Usually for the case of the humpback whale, their sounds are all audible. They're not ultrasonic, they're not trying to catch anything in real time. As a matter of fact, what usually happens is when a whale starts swimming away rapidly, they stop singing, which some people have viewed as evidence against the center hypothesis. But I think it makes some sense. But so the whale's putting out sounds, they're, they're sonic, they're going a lot farther, like I said 5,000 meters instead of 5 meters. They're going in all directions. And what, what, what's going to happen if, if the whale detects other wells like 2 or 3 km away, even swimming to join that? Well, they got to figure out what's the trajectory, how can I intercept it? I've got to swim for at least 10 minutes before I even get close to it. And so at that point it's more about getting there than it is about trying to find the target. And maybe if they get there and their well's not there, then they start singing again to kind of get an another, you know, beat on where they should be at. So it's a very different situation of like planning ahead versus planning in real time and dealing with all directions simultaneously versus dealing with one direction right in front of your face. Um, I think those are, those are the key factors that are different. Um, this is like a memory test now for me. The other, other two.
- [42:12]
D
Do dolphins sing or do we have a definitive answer to that?
- [42:16]
E
Um, so like I think I mentioned before that most people would only describe whales as singing. Or most experts, I think they should be describing some toothed whales as singing. And one of those in particular is the killer whale who does produce pattern sequences of calls that have a lot of things in common with what many baleen whales are doing. But they don't call them singing because they don't believe it's a mating display. So it's kind of circular, it's got all the acoustic features of a song, but not, they don't, they don't believe it. It's for something that I don't believe it's for either. But so it's kind of a weird. So I would say dolphins do single, but people don't want to call it singing because they think singing means mating.
- [42:51]
C
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- [43:22]
D
Yeah, and then third question again, I'll read you the quote. Male whales have adapted their abilities in different ways from bats and dolphins. You've answered how and what those ways are. Understanding this may require us having a new perspective on the underwater lives of whales. What would that entail? That new perspective, it would essentially be adopting your thesis, I think.
- [43:41]
E
Well if it is the case that they're using application of the way that I've proposed, then most of like. So another thing that's different between bats and Dolphins and humpback whale is that they live in social groups that are pretty large, most of them. So they're kind of like dealing socially every day with, like, individuals they know really well. Whereas humpback whales are pretty solitary. They don't have, like, friends that they hang out with. And so a lot of their social life, if you want to call it that, is going to be at a distance, like they're not with the other animal that they're interacting with. And so it's almost like imagining a virtual social circle, almost like the Internet, where they're, they're sort of perceiving things that are out there, but beyond their physical, you know, contact. They're imagining what's happening essentially by recreating in their heads, like, all these events that are occurring way far away from them. And they're basically deciding what to do based on their simulated world of like, okay, I perceive that there's a whale over here and one over here, and these are moving this way. So I think based on that, I should just stay here until one of them gets closer or I should start swimming, otherwise I'm going to be gone. So it ends up being much more of like a in your head scenario than you would imagine for a whale, I think, and very different from what a dolphin or a bat would have to deal with.
- [44:56]
D
I absolutely want to move to that because your commentary, your insights into the hump brain are fascinating. Quick detour, though. Is there any particular locations, like the Arctic, where humpback whales would give in to sing more frequently?
- [45:10]
E
They definitely are more likely to sing in the tropical regions, especially when you're talking about humpback whales. Again, they've been recorded most often near coastlines. They do sing in deep water as well, and they sing when they're migrating back and forth between the poles and in the equator. So there are places that, that humpback whales are more likely to be found at, for sure. And if they're found there, they're likely to be heard singing there at some point. So it's pretty, pretty closely matches with their habitat.
- [45:39]
D
Nice. Let's talk about the humpback brain. You write, to understand why they sing, we need to understand what their brains are like. What are their brains like relative to humans?
- [45:49]
E
Yeah, this is a really interesting sort of, I would say, unsolved mystery in many respects. So the things we do know is that their brain has all the same main components that are seen in a human brain in terms of the gross anatomy. But when you look at the details, you see A lot of things that aren't the same. So like in particular, cerebral cortex, which is the main thing people focus on in human brains, has a structure that's not quite the same and they have a lot more of it than we do, which is kind of a little bit surprising, I think, for many people. And there's debates about why that is. So they have a lot, they have a larger brain than humans, they have a more cerebral cortex than humans. Their cerebral cortex seems simpler in some ways than humans in terms of what the structure is like. But people don't really know what those differences actually functionally achieve. They just know it's different. So almost all the studies are neuroanatomical and there's no terrestrial brain that's equivalent really. So it's more of trying to understand from what they're doing. And if you see more neurons with stronger connections, you can pretty much predict that they're doing something intense with that part of the brain. But you can't always tell what that intense thing is.
- [47:03]
D
I'm going to give you a follow up here. The capacity of brains to show long lasting changes in neural network activity over time is referred to as brain plasticity. When these changes occur in circuits that react to cochlear inputs, it is called auditory plasticity. And when the changing circuits are in the cerebral cortex, it's called auditory cortical plasticity. Talk to me about the humpback whale's auditory cortical plasticity.
- [47:30]
E
Yeah, this is actually. So my laboratory at the University of Buffalo, which is the name of it, is the Neural and Cognitive Plasticity Laboratory, is specifically focused on the ways that adult and younger brains change as a function of learning experiences. Specifically cortical cerebral cortex changes. And the reason why humpback whales, actually, humpback whales are what got me interested in this field because they, as I mentioned, I think earlier, they modify their sounds continuously when they're singing. And they also modify them across years throughout their entire lifespan, which is extremely rare for mammals. Matter of fact, the only mammals that are known to do that are humans and humpback whales. And that was also, I mean, that was part of what got me interested in like, why would you do that? But I also interested in, like, how do you do it? Like, how does a brain deal with having new sounds each year? Or like, you know, if you go to another country, if you were moved to another country, they spoke a language you didn't speak initially, you would, it would sound like gibberish. But if you live there long enough, it would become all owed. They're talking, and this is what they're saying. And your brain somehow taking in these things that before or nothing, and turn them into something. And so in the case of humpback whales, the behaviors, the way they're using the sounds, implies that their brain must be changing in terms of how they're processing the sounds, because otherwise, how could they use them? And it was interesting. I was curious about, like, what is it that determines. Why would it only be humans and humpback whales? Why aren't all animals doing this? Or what's hard about it? Or is there something special about a human brain and a humpback's brain that would allow them to change more rapidly or more flexibly than, say, a dog or a cat?
- [49:09]
D
Are whales smarter than man or dolphins? And I'll quote, humans can't match the acoustic webs of whales. You talk about that. You also note humpback whales have gargantuan auditory circuits in their brains for a reason.
- [49:23]
E
Right. So if we're talking about sound processing, I would be surprised if cetaceans aren't more advanced than humans are in terms of the way they process sounds. They just had way longer to evolve, and they've had to deal with. They need the sounds much more than humans do. So it would be different functions, but it probably is things that we can't even imagine that are possible to do with sound. If I had to guess in terms of the question of if they're smarter than people because of their really large brains, I mean, that was a big theme starting in the 70s, I would say this realization that they have a lot of cortical tissue and what are they doing with it? I mean, I guess it's sort of like saying, is a sculptor smarter than a mathematician? It's like, well, what do you want them to do? And so I think in some domains, probably there are things they can do that would be beyond what we can do in terms of, like, especially if it's, like, spatial processing over miles. Maybe they could do stuff that we wouldn't be able to do without. I mean, we can't do. That's why the Navy has all this technology to enable them to do things underwater that we can't do naturally. So maybe if you take. If you add the artificial part, maybe we can do the same things they can. But if you take it away, then there's probably definitely things they can do that we can't.
- [50:37]
D
When we began this interview, I talked about the three themes. The first is obviously why Whales sing. The second is the relationship between human brains and whale brains, and we've just covered that. The third is the scientific method, which, again, I think we think of as objective and methodical. Reading your book, it comes across as anything but. And I sort of want to move into that third theme now. And by that I mean the human element. And I'm going to start with this notion of hierarchical structure to whale songs you write. The fact that researchers can describe whale songs using hierarchical terminology, however, provides no evidence that whale songs are themselves hierarchically structured. If that's the case, why are we using hierarchical terminology?
- [51:19]
E
Yeah, so this is another, I guess, sticking point between the way I approach song analysis and other people in the field. That system for analyzing whale songs as being hierarchically organized was in the first paper ever written on humpback whale song in the 1970s. And the reason why they. I mean, I don't haven't talked to the people that developed that technique, but my belief about what probably happened was that needed some way to talk about the different features of song that could be objectively applied to any recording of song by any scientist who's interested. And that's what they came up with. So it's basically like a system of measurement that was familiar and easy to apply. So pragmatic reasons, I would say, is why they chose that. But then what happened was that because people were like, yeah, this is really a good way of organizing our discussions of this topic, they came to view it as being intrinsic to the structure of the thing they were studying. And so they were treating the fact that they could describe something like a tree as having, like, a foundation and a trunk and branches, and the branches is having chaotic structure. It's like, okay, yeah, that's true. But the tree's not using chaos theory to generate its branches. The fact you can describe them using the mathematics doesn't mean that's actually what the reason why they're that way. And so it's kind of the same thing, is that you can definitely characterize or describe the properties of the sounds when this sort of like terminology that's got nesting to it. You could do that for your table as well. But whether that means your table's more complex because you applied that terminology to it is questionable. I would say it's just a framework for thinking about it.
- [52:58]
D
Yeah, it almost from the cheap seat feels like the drunk looking for his keys where the light is. Okay, now I want to move a little more into the human. You refer to your thesis as the Manowar Hypothesis. At one point it was referred to, quote, as pseudoscientific garbage. And I think even in the epilogue, you say, a week ago, you were receiving pretty harsh feedback. And throughout the book, you talk about the battle with editors going back and forth. I think at one point you wrote a rejection to your rejection letter. Why don't you put this thing down and move on? You clearly there's not an emotional attachment here. It's a rational debate where you think you have the evidence, but the community just will not accept it. I want to get into their reason why. But first, why. Why are you fighting this at this point?
- [53:43]
E
Right. So there's. I guess there's a. There's the psychology explanation and then there's sort of like the historical explanation. So I already mentioned that I tried to get out of it. I tried to put it down, and students kept putting it back in my hand of, like, no, you're going to keep on doing stuff like this. And so part of it was just momentum and people essentially drawing me back in, which was I wouldn't consider necessarily voluntary, but maybe felt compelled as a mentor or scientist to help people who are interested in it. But part of it also is just every time I get drawn back in, I see something I'd never seen before and did not expect to see. Even though I've studied song for over 20 years, I've seen things, even last year, that I was like, what is that? Well, doing. So I think part of it is, like, there's a reinforcing part of just seeing things that no one's ever seen before or have never realized were there before. That kind of keeps me motivated to, like, suffer through all the, like, negative parts that you're talking about. So, yeah, it's a combination of other people kind of drawing me back in, plus the whales themselves, I guess, doing things that are unique enough to make me stay interested in.
- [54:55]
D
You're right. I've noticed over the last decade that some scientists are resistant to the sonar hypotheses, not because of any specific counter evidence, but because they feel that this alternative is in some way a killjoy explanation that attempts to knock humpbacks off a privileged pedestal. How big a deal do you think that is? And that seems very counterintuitive for someone who thinks the scientific method is a logical, thoughtful, deliberate process.
- [55:23]
E
I think. I mean, I'm not sure about in other fields, but I do feel like in the field of animal research, some animals are given more cultural weight than others. You can see this in terms of animal rights movements and which animals are chosen to be defended first and what laws are made first. So I feel like there's. Once an animal has become sort of like a special case, you can think of, like, pets, like, what would people think was okay to do to a dog versus a rat? They're both mammals, but clearly they're not treated the same way. I feel that part of it is that. That they've. Humpback whales have kind of attained this status that puts them even maybe above a pet in some ways in terms of the way people think about them. And so if you're saying anything that says, like, no, they're doing things that other animals are doing. Although in this case, it doesn't make any sense to me because I feel like the. What I'm suggesting is actually more sophisticated than what they're suggesting. So if anything, it should put them higher on the scale of sophistication. But that's not the way they see it because they. I mean, I don't really know what their internal thought process is, but my impression is they feel like I'm saying, like, oh, just like a bat. And bats are not as impressive as a dolphin, so therefore they're like, less. Or chimpanzee or whatever. And so therefore you're trying to knock them down a peg. And it's like, actually, I think they're more sophisticated than you thought they were. So it's a weird mindset, but definitely, I think it's sort of like your preconceptions about what is simple or complex or what people are claiming about what is possible is sort of an emotional reaction to that is a barrier to a lot of progress in terms of just being rational. Like you're saying it would be ideal if people could just, like, look at all evidence and be like, well, this is obviously the best of the choices to explain the most data, but I've never seen that in any of my fields.
- [57:16]
D
Next question. Not so much emotional, but maybe myopic. And here I'll quote you. This is perhaps the main difference between investigating whale songs from a psychological versus a biological perspective. Whale biologists are fixated on figuring out how singing males get females pregnant, whereas whale psychologists. I actually didn't know there was such a thing. Are more interested in understanding what's on a singer's mind when it sings. How much do you think of those unique, specific disciplines are driving these songs as display hypotheses?
- [57:46]
E
I mean, it is the case that almost everyone that's studied Wells in the last few years has been a biologist. And I think they're definitely focused on evolution and reproductive patterns and migration patterns and things like that, whereas psychologists tend to be much more focused on individual level variations and in real time as opposed to over evolutionary time. And so it's like a different scope. And I think if you're zooming out on the universe and trying to study it versus zooming in on a single organism, those are very different perspectives that can make you have very different biases and thoughts about how to study it.
- [58:23]
D
What do you think is going to resolve this argument in your favor? Or is there anything that would convince you that you're wrong? You've got a very strong neuroscience background and you talk about the basal forebrain in your book. What's going to move this debate one way or the other?
- [58:40]
E
There are definitely experiments that can be done in the ocean to try to test some specific hypotheses, some of which I present in this book and others I presented in papers. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure they won't be done, partly for pragmatic reasons and partly because there's not people that are invested in trying to do them. And so I. I don't know if there is any way to define a definitive piece of evidence that would sway the field one way or the other, but hopefully I'm wrong about that. And then in terms of, like, the neuroscience, there are definitely lots of things we can do now that weren't possible before. But again, I don't feel like most people that are studying humpback whales want to try to understand brain function. It seems too tricky and they don't. It's not something they typically focus on because it's too individual level. So it's possible we could do it, but I don't think we're going to. So right now what I'm working on is trying to understand what whales do when they hear each other singing. In other words, if there's two singers singing and they can both hear each other, do they just sing on their own or do they actually do things based on what they hear the other whale singing? And I think that's one angle that could probably reveal a lot that hasn't been pursued very much so far.
- [59:53]
D
Yeah, that's fascinating. I actually thought it was interesting that ChatGPT was more open to your thesis and researchers. I think when you queried it, it actually suggested the Stone hypothesis was credible for an alternative thesis, as opposed to disparaging it. Before we get to the last question, what is uni hemispheric sleep and why Is it so cool?
- [60:15]
E
Right? Well, I think probably all humans would be very happy to have uni hemispheric sleep, because that means they would never actually be asleep. So they get, like, whole 20% of their life added onto them instantaneously. So unhemmopheric sleep basically refers to a phenomenon that occurs in some animals, including cetaceans, where only half of their brain goes into a sleep state at a time, so the other half can control all the normal functions as if it were. Everything's going normally. And because of this, cetaceans are voluntary breathers. So if they go unconscious, like when we do, when we sleep, they would drown. So that's why they have it. And it means that they can. They're basically awake from the time they're born in terms of conscious states. And it's even crazier than that because, like, dolphins have been tested on their ability to maintain attention on a task like detecting echoes from far away. And they can do a task like that for two weeks straight with no breaks, with no loss of performance. So it's like the unlimited attention, unlimited awareness. It's like a. It's radically different from what he's experienced. And they're mammals, so maybe, maybe it could be possible to, you know, create a situation where a human could have that for some period of time through some kind of manipulation.
- [61:33]
D
Elon Musk and email feels like there's a research opportunity.
- [61:35]
E
He probably already is working on it.
- [61:36]
D
I was about to say this feels like a Peter Thiel. Elon Musk. Another one of their speculative explorations. Eduardo, this has been great. Last question here. Is this debate songs as display versus songs as sonar? It's really just a battle between whale nerds. Right. Is there any larger implications? Why does it matter to the rest of us?
- [61:58]
E
Yeah, I kind of wish it was just a battle between whale nerds, because that would be a little less distressful. But it could be a case where human ignorance about what's happening in whales lives could lead to some serious, seriously bad outcomes, because we're introducing all kinds of noise into the ocean that could dramatically affect a whale's ability to detect other whales. And if they can't, if they're depending on this for perception, it's like throwing, like, you know, smoke into their lives. And it could lead to things as bad as the extinction of the species, because if they can't reproduce, they're done. And if the whales start collapsing, then the whole ecosystem of the ocean could start collapsing. And so, I mean, it could directly affect humans just because we were like oblivious to what we're doing, we're thinking, oh, they can deal with noise from our boats. That shouldn't be a problem for them. Maybe that'd be true if they're just like peacocks and they can just get closer and then still mate. But if they're using it to actually find each other to mate, then it could be a serious problem.
- [62:56]
D
Well, hopefully, and I'm sure your book, your thesis has definitely drawn attention to that. Thank you so much for your time. Again, the book is why Whales Sin by Eduardo Mercado iii. Eduardo, again, very fascinating book about an area I knew nothing about. And you write from a very scholarly perspective. And not only do I have a significant regard for whales, but also for the research you're doing and I would say a more nuanced view of the scientific method. Thank you.
- [63:25]
E
Oh, thank you, Sam.