Somewhere in the vast North Pacific Ocean, there is a singular whale singing a unique song, which was first recorded in 1989. For close to thirty years, researchers monitoring anti-submarine hydrophone arrays have heard a whale call which is much higher than the calls of other large whales. While most blue whale calls are around 10–25 hertz and fin whales tend to be around 20-hertz, this whale has been calling at 52-hertz. If most blue and fin whales are singing bass, this whale is an alto, at least by whale standards. 52-hertz is just higher than the lowest note on a tuba.
Scientists do not know even what type of whale it is. The whale’s movements have been similar to a blue whale but the timing of its calls are similar to fin whales. Scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute speculate that it could be malformed, or a hybrid of a blue whale and another species.
The whale has been nicknamed the 52-hertz whale as well as Blue-52. As no other whale has been observed singing at 52 Hz, some scientists, in a burst of anthropomorphic creativity, have dubbed it “the loneliest whale in the world.”
The EarthSky blog sums up that viewpoint as: “A lonely whale of unknown species has been swimming the Earth’s seas for years, ostracized from its own kind thanks to an inability to communicate. Not that it doesn’t try. It does. But the whale sings in a sound frequency that is so high, no other whales will respond. In the language of whales, it’s like speaking Klingon anywhere on Earth outside a Star Trek convention.”
Others, however, say, not so fast. Chris Baraniuk in the BBC notes: One critic is Christopher Willes Clark of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He made recordings of the 52Hz whale in 1993 and says it’s not quite as anomalous as it might seem.
Many types of idiosyncratic whale calls have been detected, and some studies suggest that groups of whales living in particular regions have dialects. When you consider that, the 52Hz whale is “not completely mind-bogglingly unique,” he says.
Furthermore, Clark and others reject the idea held by some that the 52Hz whale cannot be heard or understood by “normal” blue whales that make lower-frequency calls. “The animal’s singing with a lot of the same features of a typical blue whale song,” he says. “Blue whales, fin whales and humpback whales: all these whales can hear this guy, they’re not deaf. He’s just odd.”
Blue 52 has become something of a whale celebrity, part myth and part metaphor. The idea of “the loneliest whale in the world” swimming the vast oceans in complete isolation has caught the imagination of writers, musicians and film-makers. Documentarian Joshua Zeman has been working for the last four years on a film “52: The Loneliest Whale in the World“, which he hopes to release later this year.
Kieran Mulvaney in the Washington Post writes: Is not physically the whale,” says documentary maker Joshua Zeman. “The whale itself — honestly, if you talk to scientists, they will tell you that it’s not lonely. Other whales can probably hear it. Other whales can probably understand it. But my next question is: Why do we prescribe that emotion, and why does that emotion affect us as human beings?”
As part of the documentary, Zeman and his crew set off to actually locate the whale Blue-52.
“It’s a crazy idea to go out and try to find one whale in the entire ocean,” he explained over the phone from his New York office. “It’s kinda like Moby Dick in a number of ways. And I came to realize that everyone in the film has their own Ahabian quest.”
Zeman has not revealed whether they found the whale or not.
Blue 52 isn’t actually singing at 52-hertz anymore. Whale’s voices tend to deepen as they mature and Blue 52 is now reported to be singing at around 49-hertz.