Cape Cod researcher says newly found 1949 whale recording is critical discovery: "I'm getting goosebumps"
More than 76 years ago, a research team from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution was working in the Atlantic Ocean near Bermuda when they lowered a microphone into the ocean. What they recorded that day would sit quietly in storage for decades.
At the time, no one knew exactly what they were hearing. The audio was etched onto a thin plastic disk using equipment originally designed for office dictation, labeled simply "fish noises," and filed away in the archives.
Dr. Ashley Jester, who oversees these archives now, said the recordings were easy to miss. They were buried in boxes, very nondescript with their labels. Then researchers gave a modern listen to an old mystery. What Jester heard was not fish. It was a humpback whale.
"I hit play on that WAV file and it was goosebumps. The recording starts, and the voice comes on, and he says 'It's the 7th of March, 1949, a little note about the hydrophone, and then you hear the plop. And then right there is the song. I'm getting goosebumps right now thinking about it," Jester said.
Scientists now believe it could be the oldest recorded whale song ever discovered.
Whale recording from 1940s
The find is remarkable not only because of its age, but because it offers a rare snapshot of what the ocean may have sounded like in the late 1940s.
Back then, underwater recording required bulky equipment, long cables, and systems researchers often built themselves. Today, that technology can fit in the palm of your hand.
Dr. Laela Sayigh, a marine bioacoustics researcher at Woods Hole, said modern hydrophones can record for days at a time using compact digital devices.
But for scientists, this historic recording may be most valuable for what it does not contain.
"To potentially be able to look at the levels of ambient noise, which almost certainly would be much, much lower. Because now, you can hear shipping traffic, seismic exploration," Sayigh said.
Why noise pollution matters
In other words, the ocean is not as quiet as it once was. That matters because whales and other marine mammals depend on sound the way humans depend on sight.
"Considering noise as a pollutant is something that has only kind of recently gotten a lot of attention, but marine mammals as a group really rely on sound. It's their essential mode. It's as important to them as vision is to us," Sayigh said.
Sound helps whales communicate, navigate, find food, and survive. As human activity increases underwater noise, researchers say those natural behaviors may be changing.
And this discovery may be only the beginning.
"There are 212 discs in the collection. So we probably have at least 200 hours of underwater recording," Jester said.
Hundreds of hours of forgotten sound may now help scientists better understand how ocean life, and the ocean itself, has changed over time.
