The Loneliest Whale The Search For 52 [HOT] Download
Marac Redregez
The core of the documentary is a seven-day search in 2015 for the 52 Hz whale. The hunt is engaging and dramatic. There is also footage provided for context of industrial whaling of the past as well as the problem of ship noise pollution and ship strikes in the present.
Unfortunately, the documentary also includes commentary on loneliness and whether whales can feel loneliness. A short song about a lonely whale without friends composed and sung by Kate Micucci is fine by feels completely out of place. The fact that the scientists hunt for 52 among other whales in the area makes it clear that the assumption of an isolated animal is misplaced. While 52 may or may not be unique, there is not necessarily evidence that it is lonely.
What type of whale is 54? No one really knows, but the best guess is that it is a blue-fin whale hybrid. The first hybrid blue-fin whale was sighted in 1984 off the coast of Spain. DNA analysis revealed that the mother of the hybrid was a blue whale and the father a fin whale. 54 might just be the first hybrid whale to be captured on audio.
At the end of the documentary, scientists from Scripps reveal that based on their earlier recordings they captured two 52 Hz whale songs at almost exactly the same time from widely separated sensors, suggesting that there may be at least two 54 Mz whales in that part of the Pacific.
There are those who suggest the 52 Hertz whale is deaf. Mostly deaf people have suggested this. (Dear Cetologists: have you considered the possibility the whale is singing into silence, into a trembling in his own bones?)
The U.S. Navy first detected the 52Hz call in 1989, just as the Cold War was winding down. The military was using hydrophones to monitor enemy submarines. On a routine mission, they picked up what sounded like a loud, sad moan. It was definitely of non-human origin, and they later determined that it was a whale. Whale calls are common. The big cetaceans use them to communicate with each other, to navigate, and to find food. However, this one was quite unusual.
Every species has a specific vocalization pattern that acts as a fingerprint when researchers are identifying species. For example, your average blue whale vocalizes at frequencies between 10 and 40Hz. A fin whale does so at 20Hz. Humpback whale songs are likewise easily identifiable, and the distinct sperm whale clicks are a whopping 10,000Hz.
52 does not venture out of the Pacific Ocean and calls from August to December before going silent. It has been doing this almost yearly, with some variations. Despite its now-familiar call, the 52Hz whale continues to evade scientists.
Most likely, our elusive 52 is a rare hybrid: a blue-fin whale, to be exact. According to Whales Online, blue and fin whale hybrids were first discovered in the 1990s. This could be due to the relatively low numbers of blue whales compared to fins. In the past, whalers focused on blue whales, and these rare whales may have trouble finding mates.
In The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52, US film-maker Joshua Zeman picks up the search where Watkins left off, and sets out to find a whale that has since taken on almost mythical proportions.
This, combined with a growing awareness of the harm that human activity has caused whales, has made 52 something of a focal point for whale conservation, with articles, poems and even a song by the K-pop band BTS about his plight.
The documentary takes the audience on a captivating journey to uncover the mystery surrounding the 52 Hertz Whale. This enigmatic creature emits calls at a unique frequency of 52 Hz, which other whales are unable to recognise, leading many to believe it has spent its entire life in solitude.
For those uninitiated in the tale of the 52 hertz whale, in 1989 a team from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution heard a particularly unusual whale call, unlike anything that had been heard before or since. Picked up on sensors across the Pacific Ocean, the whale call came in at 52 hertz, far higher than any whale species known to follow its migration pattern. Its movement has similarities to that of blue whales, but blue whales have a frequency range of 10 to 39 Hz, with dominant frequencies of 16 to 28 Hz, according to the bioacoustics research program at Cornell University.
The whale has been heard consistently over the years, suggesting that its unusual call (and perhaps, lonely life) has not had a detrimental impact on its survival despite its years of calling with no reply.
As nice as that sounds, there is no new evidence. It's likely referencing back in 2010, when widely separated sensors off the coast of California picked up whale song with a similar pattern to the 52 hertz whale, meaning potentially more than one animal was singing. Pretty inconclusive, though, even without further evidence of a whale friend showing up in the subsequent 12 years it's been documented.
However, there is good news in that the whale might not be as lonely as it has been portrayed. According to Christopher Clark, director of the Bioacoustics Research Program at Cornell, the whale can likely be "understood" or recognized by other blue whales. With whales in different areas having different dialects, Clark says that the whale may not even be that "mind-bogglingly unique".
"The animal's singing with a lot of the same features of a typical blue whale song," Clark said in 2015. "Blue whales, fin whales and humpback whales: all these whales can hear this guy, they're not deaf. He's just odd."
We've been a proud partner of the D.C. Environmental Film Festival for the past 30 years, which is crazy, 30 years. And we'd like to thank the Environmental Film Festival for being such a great partner, not only during the festival, but throughout the rest of the year. And we're really excited to welcome everyone to this panel discussion. At the museum, we are actually the world's largest collection of whale materials. So we are no stranger to the public love of whales. And we have a beloved model of Phoenix and Atlantic right whale in our Sant Ocean Hall. Then we also have a half a million square foot whale warehouse where we house around 10,000 whale and dolphin specimens in Suitland, Maryland. So our whale collection helps answer research questions for our in-house researchers and others around the world. So we're pleased to be a part of this program, and I'm learning more about whales.
So the Loneliest Whale asks a compelling research question. And if you haven't had the chance to see the film yet, please watch after the discussion. You can watch until the festival ends on March 27, but there is a limited number of screening views available. So do get on that. Before we get started, I wanted to say a few housekeeping notes. The discussion will be offered in closed captioning. It can be turned on via the settings and gear icon, which is in your lower right hand corner in Eventive. If you have questions you'd like to ask our panelists, please use the chat box in Eventive. Folks will be watching throughout for submission. So please feel free to throw them in at any time. We'll get to as many as we can during the question and answer portion at the end. If you have questions for somebody specific on the panel, please let us know, and I will direct that accordingly. So with that out of the way, I'd like to introduce our panelists.
Emily Frost:
And next I'll introduce Dr. John Hildebrand who co-led the expedition with Josh to search for the 52 Hertz whale. John Hildebrand is a distinguished professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography of the University of California at San Diego, a member of the Marine Physical Laboratory at Scripps and an adjunct professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering. His research focuses on using sound to study marine mammals and the impact of anthropogenic sound in the ocean. Hildebrand's lab has developed a high frequency acoustic recording package called harp that is capable of long term acoustic monitoring in remote ocean locations. This technology has been a key component to reveal new information on the behaviors and seasonal migrations of whale and dolphins. Hildebrand's work has also documented that ocean noise levels from commercial shipping have increased dramatically over the past few decades, raising concerns about potential impact of ocean noise on marine mammals. Welcome.
Emily Frost:
And finally, our third panelist is senior research assistant, Sara Heimlich, one of the scientists featured in the film if you've watched it. Her work with NOAA focused on bio acoustic data processing and analysis. It includes identifying and locating seismic activity and marine mammal vocalizations to piece together some of science's mysteries to better understand marine ecosystems. Her data analysis played a critical role in answering some of the research questions highlighted in the film.
Joshua Zeman:
Yeah. And I'm the filmmaker, right, which is even worse. The film is about a cinematic quest to find what we call the 52 Hertz whale, the loneliest whale. The loneliest whale has been heard, but never seen. It's called the 52 Hertz well because it used to call out at a 52 Hertz frequency, and that's a different frequency than other low frequency whales, blue and fins. And this is a really interesting story. I first read about it through Andy Revkin in the New York Times, wrote an article about it in the Science Times. And this story, it captivated me. I was immediately struck by the story of this lonely whale, and yes, completely anthropomorphizing this whale. But then I went on the internet and just was looking around and there were all these people who seemed to have this connection as well. They just felt something.
And that was really interesting to me. And I wanted to know why, why did this story of this lonely whale seem to have this reaction to so many people? And so I started to do a little bit of research just about whales, about loneliness, and then I got into the science. And that's when it got really cool. And just if you don't know anything about sound in the ocean, it's amazing. And that led me to our wonderful scientists. And then that the crazy idea of saying how hard could it be to find one whale in an entire ocean. And so I convinced them to help us on this journey 10 years of course later.
df19127ead