Humpback Whales Choreograph Their Songs to Match Every Stage of a Dive

A Song Written by the Sea Itself

For male humpback whales, singing is serious business. Their haunting, complex songs can last for hours and travel for miles underwater, playing a central role in reproduction during the winter breeding season — yet despite decades of research into what these songs sound like, scientists have had far less insight into what the whales are physically doing while they sing. A groundbreaking new study published on August 3 in the journal *Current Biology* has finally answered that question, and the findings are remarkable.

Led by Dr. Julia Zeh at Syracuse University, the research reveals that male humpback whales align specific themes of their songs with distinct phases of a dive — establishing a direct link between the structure of a whale's song and its physical movement through the water. Surprisingly, some humpback whales sang continuously for up to 16 hours, with specific song "themes" mapping consistently across an entire dive cycle for the first time.

How Scientists Tracked the Giants

To gather the data, Zeh and her collaborators temporarily attached sound-and-movement recording tags to singing humpback whales off the coast of Maui, part of a research effort spanning 2018 to 2024. The non-invasive tags are small suction-cup devices about the size of a tablet, attached from small boats using long poles and, more recently, drones. Researchers attached these tags to 16 whales, and the devices recorded both underwater sounds and the whales' movements before detaching naturally, allowing the team to recover the data.

Song themes performed during the deepest, most level portion of a dive appeared to vary more between whales than themes sung during other stages — suggesting these sections could play a greater role in attracting mates, while other parts of the song may be shaped by physical demands such as managing oxygen levels and buoyancy underwater. In other words, a humpback's song is not a single, static performance. It is a fluid, physically constrained composition that shifts as the animal descends, levels off, and rises again.

What This Means for Conservation

Understanding that connection could reveal how singing affects a whale's energy use, oxygen management, and vulnerability to underwater noise and vessel strikes. Connecting humpback song structure to dive depth also helps researchers estimate a whale's position using acoustic monitoring alone, creating a baseline for normal behavior to better detect human disturbances like ship traffic and noise.

Because acoustic monitoring is already a common tool for tracking whale populations, understanding how song relates to movement could allow researchers to determine a whale's depth or position directly from a recording — which in turn could help scientists establish a clearer baseline for normal humpback behavior, an essential reference point for detecting when whales are disturbed by human activity such as shipping traffic or ocean noise.

An Ancient Cultural Tradition, Now Better Understood

Humpback whale songs are among the most extraordinary phenomena in the animal kingdom. Among animal displays, humpback whale song is remarkable for its hierarchical structure, syntax, and cultural transmission — meaning these songs are learned and passed down through populations rather than encoded in genes. New melodies spread across entire ocean basins as whales adopt and adapt what they hear from one another, making their vocal culture more similar to human music traditions than to simple animal calls.

While physiological factors likely apply to humpbacks everywhere, differences in song evolution across global populations mean further international tagging studies are needed to confirm whether this depth-song pattern holds outside Hawaiian waters. That next step — scaling this research to whale populations across the Pacific, Atlantic, and Southern Oceans — could transform how scientists monitor and protect these animals worldwide, turning the whale's own voice into a real-time map of its movements beneath the waves.