Scientist says we’ve got whale song all wrong

CBC Radio’s science program Quirks & Quarks interviewed Eduardo Mercado III for a segment about his new book “Why Whales Sing,” which reconceives whale song as a sophisticated sonar system, upending the long-held belief that whale song is a mating call. “Historically, since the 1970s, researchers believed that what whales are doing is essentially the same thing as what birds do when they sing, which is produce a performance that other animals can listen to and judge the quality of the singer,” Mercado says. “What I'm proposing in this book, which is what I've been proposing for a while, is that what scientists have been calling songs are actually a sophisticated form of echolocation, similar to what bats do, but over a much broader spatial scale. So the whales aren't performing for other whales, but are actually exploring, to generate their own internal view of what's happening around them.”