Featured Image Credit: Jürgen Freund
Deep, deep underwater, and not far off of the coast of Guam, there lies the Mariana Trench. It is home to some of the deepest places on earth, and some of the weirdest-looking creatures. But also home to something which was the cause of a peculiar call on a recording, that has been labeled the “Western Pacific Biotwang”, a mystery for some time, that might now be solved.
The Mariana Trench has known depths of up to 36,000 feet (10,994m) and it is home to so many species— unidentified and not.
Between 2014 and 2015, the aforementioned sound was recorded by a passive acoustic ocean glider, which is an instrument that can travel unmonitored for months at a time and dive up to 1,000 meters.
The sound has 5 different “parts” to it, ranging from 38 hertz to as high as a metallic-sounding 8,000 hertz.
Analyzers at Oregon State University now believe that it is a minke whale, a type of baleen whale that made the distinctive “Star Wars”-esque vocalization.
An example of the WPB call recorded 14 October 2014. Credit: Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
Minke whales can be found in most of the world’s oceans, so it isn’t necessarily odd to hear that it could be what made this sound. What is interesting, though, is that the calls happened frequently throughout most months of the year… meaning that it, most likely, wasn’t just a mating call— which are typically heard during winter months.
“We don’t really know that much about minke whale distribution at low latitudes,” said Sharon Nieukirk, whose results were recently published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.
Nieukirk finished her publication by saying… “In publishing these data, we hope others will be able to identify this call in past and future data, and in time identify the source of this sound. More data are needed, including genetic, acoustic, and visual identification of the source to confirm the species and gain insight into how this sound is being used.”
And we certainly hope that more understanding can be brought to this mystery in time!