falconspace

Mystery Interlocutor's comments hung in the air like a film of gauze, filtering the light to a pool of pale yellow on my cluttered desk. For the moment, I chose to ignore them, plunging back into the server bank I've been exploring these past few days.

Whales seem to have gotten caught up in the same censorship press with falcons, but there it is, publications about whale communications and intelligence drop off as dramatically as any having to do with raptors, and it's part of a general decline of activity related to animal intelligence or consciousness. Everybody knows the significance of stopping the teaching of evolution in schools around the turn of the 20th century; the notion that humans and animals have more in common than not is just silly. Ask any Congregant. Obviously, animals are God's creatures, too, but God gave men dominion over Creation. After all, who eats whom? Does the horse ride the man?

It's difficult not to speculate what might have happened if people like those described in the two articles [71] below hadn't been "reassigned," if ChurchØne® Elders had invested less in genetic engineering and more in consciousness and communications research, if we had continued to push closer to understanding nonhumans instead of seeking to exploit them?

Unweaving the song of whales
by Molly Bentley, BBC News

For nearly a decade, Cornell University researcher Christopher Clark has been eavesdropping on the ocean, hoping to decipher the enigmatic songs of whales.

Using old US Navy hydrophones once employed to track submarines, he has collected thousands of acoustical tracks of singing blue, fin, humpback and minke whales.

His bioacoustics lab is now able to pinpoint the location of individual singers, and determine the length of their song. As a result, he's had to redraw the map of whale acoustics.

"The range is enormous," explained Dr Clark. "They have voices that span an entire ocean."

Drawing on newly declassified acoustic data from the Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS), and using new tools that can crunch high volumes of them, Dr Clark has determined that whales' songs travel over thousands of kilometres and also that increasing noise pollution in the oceans impedes the animals' ability to communicate.

Booming voices

It is not certain whether whales thousands of kilometres apart communicate directly with each other, or what their messages contain. But the results support a 30-year theory that, before the advent of modern shipping, the animals' booming voices would have resounded from one ocean basin to another.

With sound that is loud and low, in other words, "beautifully designed" for long distance travel, the singing of a whale in the waters off Puerto Rico could carry 2,600km to the shores of Newfoundland, says Dr Clark.

When scientists create a digital map of the sound as it propagates in the water, it "illuminates the entire ocean", he adds.

The pan-oceanic range is fitting for massive 30-190-tonne creatures that rely on reflected sound, rather than light, to navigate.

"You are dealing with animals that are highly acoustically oriented," said Dr Clark. "Their consciousness and sense of self is based on sound, not sight."

Dr Clark and other whale researchers spoke at the recent annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington DC about how new technologies are revealing whale secrets at the same time that human activity continues to threaten their well-being.

He is particularly concerned with noise pollution, or "acoustic smog". Noise from shipping vessels doubled every decade, said Dr Clark, which means a whale's world decreases by a factor of two.

Over 20 years, its 1,600km acoustic radius shrinks to 400 km, and, presumably, limits the range over which animals can navigate and find food or mates.

"We are slowly, inexorably, raising the tide of ambient noise so that their worlds are shrinking just to the point where they're dysfunctional," Dr Clark believes.

Military Sonar

He distinguishes between the chronic noise from ships and the acute bursts of noise from military sonar, which recent evidence suggests startles the animals and leads to decompression sickness or stranding.

Despite the ban on commercial fishing, other menaces besides noise pollution, such as commercial fishing nets and ocean contaminants also continue to threaten the health of whale populations, according to Roger Payne, president of the conservation group Ocean Alliance.

His team is in the final year of a five-year expedition designed to establish the first baseline levels of synthetic pollutants in the ocean. Long-lived industrial pesticides, such as DDT and PCBs, re-concentrate as they move up the marine food chain. Whales are at the top of that chain.

"Insect repellents and insecticides which have been spread on fields on land have now gotten out to whales in mid-ocean," said Dr Payne.

His ship, the Odyssey, and its crew have travelled across the Pacific Ocean taking tissue samples of sperm whales, whose longevity allow plenty of time for chemicals to accumulate in their fatty tissue. They have collected 1,100 tissue samples so far, and have run preliminary analysis on 30 of them.

"We find these substances present in every single one of those samples," explained Dr Payne, who adds he will test all the samples once the voyage is complete.

"Toxic dumps"

The study will be the first global measure of pollution in a single species at the top of aquatic food chain, although high levels of pollutants in marine animals have been detected in previous studies.

PCB toxicity is defined as 50 parts of contaminant per million parts of animal, (50 milligrams per kilo) tests have revealed up to 400 ppm in killer whales, 3,200 in beluga whales and 6,800 in bottlenose dolphins.

It makes the animals "swimming toxic dump sites," according to Dr Payne.

Contaminants such as PCBs and DDT have been shown to inhibit a mammal's immune system, its ability to function, and the development of its young.

"The young receive roughly the contaminant concentration that their mother has, add to it what they get in their food during their lifetime, and then pass that double dose to their offspring," said Dr Payne.

He is also concerned about the possibility of what he calls "double stressors," in which seemingly weak threats to an animal are combined and create a one-two punch that causes serious harm, even death.

He cited a 2003 University of Pittsburgh study in which bullfrog tadpoles had little reaction to pesticides and to the smell of predators when exposed to them in separate experiments. When the stressors were combined, mortality rose to 80-90%.

Biologists had yet to determine whether such synergistic effects apply to other vertebrates, such as whales, said Dr Payne, who suggests that a combination of acute noise, contaminants or predation, could serve as double stressors.

While some whale populations are recovering since the 1986 moratorium on commercial whaling, anthropogenic influence may play a decisive role with populations that are at critical levels and endangered, such as the Northern right whale.

Specialised ecosystems

When whales are threatened, so are the specialised ecosystems that depend on them - and on their carcasses.

New research into whale falls - the sinking of whale carcasses to the ocean bottom - is revealing a weird and diverse assortment of creatures; some not found anywhere else in the ocean.

A whale fall is such a rare find that scientists like University of Hawaii oceanographer Craig Smith have made a practice of towing dead beached whales to sea and sinking them themselves.

"It's really a community service," said Dr Smith. "A rotting beached whale is a big, stinking mess."

Then they watch to see who shows up. A whale fall provides an organic smorgasbord - up to two million grams of carbon in its blubber and oily bones - for a host of creatures, some of which may be so specialised, they rely on dead whales to complete their lifecycle.

First scavengers such as hagfish appear and eat the soft tissue. Then bacteria and invertebrates devour the skeleton. Chemoautotrophs - including bone-eating zombie worms - gather when the bones begin to emit sulphide. At this stage, whale falls provide parallels to the sulphide-loving ecosystems at hydrothermal vents.

Scientists speculate that creatures that require sulphide may use whale falls as sulphide stepping stones - to disperse to new hydrothermal vent communities - and may even have a spot in the evolutionary lineage of some of the vent species, according to Dr Smith.

"It's quite possible that the ancestors of the giant tube worms on vents were actually animals that were living on dead whales," he says.

Bone-eating zombie worms

Evidence from DNA sequencing techniques also suggests that, not only may whale falls host more species than thrive at hydrothermal vents, some have highly specialised adaptations.

The bone-eating zombie worms, for example, use internal bacteria to break down the fats in the whalebone and appear to be unique to whale falls.

"It is increasingly evident that there are major kinds of habitats, major types of organisms with extreme evolutionary novelty that remain to be discovered," said Dr Smith.

But as the whales disappear, so do these exotic ecosystems.

By some estimates, large whale populations have been reduced by 75% as a consequence of whaling. Following conservation biology theory, said Dr Smith, a 75% drop in one population meant that 30-40% of the species that depend on it would go extinct.

"We are beginning to appreciate what whaling may have done to these specialised communities," explained Dr Smith. "And it's very likely that there either have been or - may be on-going - species extinctions on the deep sea floor connected with whaling.

Sonata for Humans, Birds and Humpback Whales
by Natalie Anger, New York Times

When humanity's ancestors discovered, a million years or so ago, the exquisite pleasure of a hot meal by the fire, they might very well have set the mood with a little night music — a shimmering cadenza played on a slender bone flute, perhaps, or a hymn to the spirits belted out a cappella.

As researchers conclude in the current issue of the journal Science, the love of music, that unslakable, unshakable, indescribable desire to sing and rejoice, rattle and roll, is not only a universal feature of the human species, found in every society known to anthropology, but is also deeply embedded in multiple structures of the human brain, and is far more ancient than previously suspected.

In fact, what could be called the "music instinct" long antedates the human race, and may be as widespread in nature as is a taste for bright colors, musky perfumes and flamboyant courtship displays.

In twin articles that discuss the flourishing field of biomusicology — the study of the biological basis for the creation and appreciation of music — researchers present various strings of evidence to show that music-making is at once a primal human enterprise, and an art form with virtuoso performers throughout the animal kingdom.

The researchers discuss recent discoveries in France and Slovenia of musical instruments dating back to 53,000 years ago — more than twice the age of the famed Lascaux cave paintings or the palm-size "Venus" figurines. The instruments are flutes carved of animal bone, and are so sophisticated in their design as to suggest that humans had already been fashioning musical instruments for hundreds of thousands of years. And when Jelle Atema of the Marine Biology Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., an author on one of the new reports and an accomplished flutist who studied with the renowned Jean- Pierre Rampal, reconstructed his own versions of the archaic flutes from bits of ancient bone and gave them a blow, he and his collaborators were impressed by their sweetness and versatility.

"What you immediately hear when he plays these flutes is the beauty of their sound," said Patricia M. Gray, the lead author on the first of the two Science articles. "They make pure and rather haunting sounds in very specific scales.

"It didn't have to be this way," she added. "They could have sounded like duck calls." Dr. Gray, a professional keyboardist, is the artistic director of the National Musical Arts, the ensemble-in-residence at the National Academy of Sciences, and the head of the academy's Biomusic program, a group of scientists and musicians who, according to their mission statement, "explore the role of music in all living things."

The new reports also emphasize that humans hold no copyright on sonic brilliance, and that a number of nonhuman animals produce what can rightly be called music, rather than random drills, trills and cacophony. Recent in-depth analyses of the songs sung by birds and humpback whales show that, even when their vocal apparatus would allow them to do otherwise, the animals converge on the same acoustic and aesthetic choices and abide by the same laws of song composition as those preferred by human musicians, and human ears, everywhere.

For example, male humpback whales, who spend six months of each year doing little else but singing, use rhythms similar to those found in human music, and musical phrases of similar length — a few seconds. Whales are capable of vocalizing over a range of at least seven octaves, yet they tend to proceed through a song in stepwise lilting musical intervals, rather than careering madly from octave to octave; in other words, they sing in key. They mix percussive and pure tones in a ratio consonant with that heard in much Western symphonic music. They also follow a favorite device of human songsters, the so- called A-B-A form, in which a theme is stated, then elaborated on, and then returned to in slightly modified form.

Perhaps most impressive, humpback songs contain refrains that rhyme. "This suggests that whales use rhyme in the same way we do: as a mnemonic device to help them remember complex material," the researchers write. "It's very easy to play along with pure, unedited whale songs," said Dr. Gray, who has written movements for saxophone, piano and whale. "They're absolutely comprehensible to us."

Birds, too, compose songs with the same notes, rhythmic variations, harmonic patterns and pitch relationships as those found in human compositions. The hermit thrush, for example, considered one of the lushest of avian vocalists, sings in the so- called pentatonic scale, in which the octaves are divided into five notes. "This is a very recognizable and very pleasant scale that is found across many human cultures," Dr. Gray said. "The pentatonic scale is the scale on which the prehistoric flutes are built, and it's also the basis for a lot of rock 'n' roll music today." Birds of a feather, it seems, rock together.

The California marsh wren may sing as many as 120 themes in a given jam session, with each theme matched by its immediate neighbor in what is known among musicians as the call-response pattern. Some birds even use instruments: the palm cockatoo of Northern Australia selects a hollow log of a preferred resonance, and then breaks off a twig to use as a drumstick.

"Music is far, far older than our species," said Roger Payne, president of the Ocean Alliance in Lincoln, Mass., and a co-author on one of the papers. "It is tens of millions of years old, and the fact that animals as wildly divergent as whales, humans and birds come out with similar laws for what they compose suggests to me that there are a finite number of musical sounds that will entertain the vertebrate brain."

Neuroscientists have just begun getting a handle on how the brain perceives and appreciates music, and the results are as yet confusing and somewhat contradictory. On the one hand, Dr. Isabelle Peretz of the University of Montreal and her colleagues have studied patients with lesions in the auditory cortex that impair only their ability to recognize music, while leaving unscathed their power to understand speech, environmental sounds and other acoustic information.

Dr. Peretz's results suggest that the brain has something specifically designed to process music, although the precise location or nature of such a do-re-mi keeper remains unknown.

On the other hand, Dr. Mark Jude Tramo, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School, argues in the second Science paper that neuroimaging studies of people performing or listening to music have failed to find a "music center" in the brain devoted strictly to music cognition.

All of the neural structures that participate in the musical experience, he argues, are players in other forms of cognition, auditory and otherwise. For example, Dr. Tramo says, a region called the left planum temporale, which is critical for perfect pitch, is also involved in language processing. And though the right hemisphere of the brain traditionally has been considered the "music hemisphere," recent neuroimaging studies from his and other laboratories reveal a more subtle interplay between the left and right halves of the brain in the course of a musical experience.

The left hemisphere seems particularly important for so-called "fast acoustic" processing, which would tell a listener whether, say, a note was being bowed on a violin or plucked on a guitar. The right hemisphere takes over in "slow acoustic" processing, appreciating the notes following that initial "attack." At which point, if all goes well, the brain cedes control to the body, and the party begins.