As with humans, a whale can be recognized by its voice , as a team of biologists who have just presented their findings at the Acoustical Society of America spring conference has discovered.
Experts placed acoustic sensors on the back of 13 right whales (so named because they are supposedly easy for whalers to hunt) to record their emissions for more than ten years.
The scientists focused on one of the most characteristic sound manifestations of large cetaceans, consisting of vocalizations that last for one or two seconds.
They first analyzed the formants or intensity peaks of sounds, which, for example, characterize the different vowels of human speech. Although they found that these acoustic "signatures" do not vary too much, if they added the small differences to the duration of the cetacean calls , they were able to identify individual whale specimens by individual.
The researchers intend this finding to be used to remotely detect the right whales that ply the North Atlantic, where it is estimated that only 450 specimens remain.
