Living whales fall into two groups. The mysticetes are the baleen whales. In place of teeth they carry plates of baleen hanging from the upper jaw, through which they filter krill, small fish and other prey from mouthfuls of water. They breathe through two blowholes, their skulls are symmetrical, and every species is large, from the pygmy right whale at around six metres to the blue whale at over thirty. Their sounds are low, often below the range of human hearing, and can carry across ocean basins.
The odontocetes are the toothed whales: sperm whales, beaked whales, dolphins and porpoises among them. They have teeth, a single blowhole and an asymmetrical skull, and in the forehead a body of fatty tissue, the melon, which focuses the clicks they use for echolocation. They vary far more in size than the baleen whales, from porpoises under a metre and a half to the sperm whale at eighteen metres or more, and their sounds reach far higher, into frequencies well beyond human hearing.
The outlines are adapted from Wikimedia Commons size-comparison drawings by Chris huh and Kurzon, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0, and, for Rice’s whale, from a drawing by Macrophyseter released under CC0. The divers in the originals have been removed.
Lengths are taken from the NOAA Fisheries species pages (fisheries.noaa.gov) and the International Whaling Commission species factsheets (iwc.int), with Fisheries and Oceans Canada for narwhal and beluga, Cerchio et al. (2015) for Omura’s whale and Pallin et al. (2022) for the Antarctic minke whale. The pygmy right whale figure could not be confirmed against an authoritative page.
The Society for Marine Mammalogy currently recognises these fifteen baleen whale species.
SoundsPulses and long tonal calls, mostly between about 15 and 100 Hz, and short grunts and “blurps”; among the loudest sounds made by any animal, up to about 188 dB.
WhoStructured songs are produced by males and differ by region, so that a blue whale population can often be told from its song alone. Four subspecies are recognised, the Antarctic, pygmy, northern Indian Ocean and northern blue whale. Both sexes make short down-sweeping calls around feeding.
PurposeSong is produced through the year with seasonal peaks and is generally read as a male display; whether it also carries contact across long distances is not settled.
SoundsShort pulses at about 20 Hz, each a second long, repeated in regular series for hours.
WhoSong by males. A 40 Hz call, whose makers have not been sexed, is heard mainly where the whales feed.
PurposeThe 20 Hz song is linked to breeding; the 40 Hz call to feeding. Fin whale pulses are among the loudest animal sounds and are picked up tens to hundreds of kilometres away.
SoundsDown-sweeping calls from about 100 Hz to 40 Hz, one to two seconds long; a few older recordings hold short bursts of pulses near 3 kHz.
WhoNot established.
PurposeUnknown.
SoundsLow moans, tones and pulsed calls, mostly under 200 Hz and never much above 900 Hz, with regional variants.
WhoNot established.
PurposeUnknown.
SoundsLong moans and down-sweeps around 100 Hz, known only from the Gulf of Mexico.
WhoNot established.
PurposeUnknown.
SoundsAn elaborate song: units built into phrases, phrases into themes, themes into a song that repeats for hours, from below 100 Hz to several kilohertz with harmonics above 20 kHz. Social sounds of many kinds, at least 34 types in one migrating population, among them grunts, moans, wops, snorts, growls, shrieks, trumpets and pulse trains; click trains and buzzes during night feeding; and feeding calls in some populations.
WhoSong by males, mainly on the breeding grounds and less often on the feeding grounds. Social sounds by both sexes, including mothers and calves: off Madagascar, mother–calf groups use some thirty call types, and calves have calls of their own.
PurposeSong is tied to breeding; whether it attracts females, sorts males, or both, is not settled. The song changes from year to year and spreads between populations, a case of learned culture. Calf calls are tied to suckling and other behaviours, and some may be begging calls. Feeding calls accompany group bubble-net hunting in Alaska; whether they coordinate the whales or herd the fish is not settled.
SoundsLong, low, pulsing calls at about 15 to 50 Hz, repeated every few minutes for hours in song-like bouts.
WhoNot established.
PurposeNot confirmed; the regular repetition suggests a breeding display, as in other rorqual song. The species was only recognised in 2003.
SoundsDown-sweeps, pulse trains and, in the North Pacific, the “boing”, a sound picked up by US Navy hydrophones in the 1950s, first described in 1964, and traced to minke whales only in 2005.
WhoNot established.
PurposeLikely breeding; unknown in detail.
SoundsThe “bio-duck”, a regular series of down-swept pulses between about 50 and 300 Hz recorded in the Southern Ocean for decades and attributed to this species in 2014.
WhoNot established.
PurposeUnknown.
SoundsAmong the most varied songs of any mammal, from below 100 Hz to a few kilohertz, with dozens of distinct song types in a single winter, sung under the Arctic ice.
WhoPresumed mainly males in the breeding season.
PurposeBreeding display is the usual reading; the diversity of songs is not explained.
SoundsUp-calls, a short rising note; gunshot-like sounds; screams, moans and other tonal calls; down-calls. Mothers and calves exchange very quiet calls.
WhoUp-calls by both sexes; gunshots mainly by males; the screams of a surface active group come from the female at its centre.
PurposeUp-calls keep contact; gunshots are associated with males in breeding groups; the quiet mother–calf calls appear to avoid attracting attention.
SoundsUp-calls, down-calls, down-up calls, gunshots, hybrid calls and harsh, growl-like pulsed sounds. The gunshot is a brief, very loud crack spanning 20 Hz to 20 kHz.
WhoBoth sexes; whether the gunshots are a male sound, as in the North Atlantic, has not been checked in this species.
PurposeContact and social interaction in surface groups; gunshots are linked to mating activity.
SoundsUp-calls and gunshots, as in its Atlantic relative, and, alone among right whales, a song built mostly of gunshots. The population is tiny and rarely seen; most of what is known comes from moored recorders in the Bering Sea.
WhoGunshots by both sexes; song, so far, only by males.
PurposeSong is read as a breeding display, by analogy with other whales; the rest as for the North Atlantic right whale.
SoundsLittle is known. A short, low thump that sweeps down, usually given in pairs, was recorded from a young whale in 1992; this paired “doublet” is now used to track the species off southern Australia.
WhoNot established.
PurposeUnknown.
SoundsKnocks, pulses and “bonging” sounds, grunts, moans and rumbles, mostly between about 20 Hz and 2 kHz, especially in the breeding lagoons.
WhoNot established in detail; mothers and calves have calls of their own.
PurposeSocial contact, including between mother and calf; the details are not established.
The entries were checked against these papers, from the full text where it was available and otherwise from the abstract. Where a claim could not be confirmed, it was reworded or removed.
The outlines are adapted from Wikimedia Commons size-comparison drawings by Chris huh and Kurzon, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0. The divers in the originals have been removed.
Lengths are taken from the NOAA Fisheries species pages (fisheries.noaa.gov) and the International Whaling Commission species factsheets (iwc.int), with Fisheries and Oceans Canada for narwhal and beluga, Cerchio et al. (2015) for Omura’s whale and Pallin et al. (2022) for the Antarctic minke whale. The pygmy right whale figure could not be confirmed against an authoritative page.
The toothed whales number around seventy-five species, far too many to list here. The Society for Marine Mammalogy groups them into these families: sperm whale (1 species), pygmy and dwarf sperm whales (2), beaked whales (about 24), narwhal and beluga (2), oceanic dolphins, including orca and pilot whales (about 38), porpoises (7), and the river dolphins of South Asia, the Amazon and the La Plata (4). Six of them are described here.
SoundsClicks: regular echolocation clicks, fast creaks when closing on prey, and codas, short patterned sequences of clicks.
WhoAll animals click; codas are exchanged mostly by females and young in social groups; large males make slow clicks.
PurposeEcholocation for hunting in the deep; codas carry social identity, with clans distinguished by their coda repertoires; slow clicks are read as long-range communication by males, perhaps signalling maturity.
SoundsEcholocation clicks, whistles and pulsed calls.
WhoAll members of a pod; each pod has its own call dialect, learned rather than inherited.
PurposeCoordination and cohesion of the group, and identity: dialects mark family lines over generations.
SoundsClicks, whistles and pulsed calls, some of them stereotyped and shared within a group.
WhoAll members.
PurposeGroup cohesion and coordination; hunting at depth by echolocation.
SoundsEcholocation clicks, whistles and pulsed calls.
WhoAll members.
PurposeEcholocation and contact; individually distinct calls have been recorded but their use is little studied.
SoundsA very large repertoire of whistles, chirps, squeals, pulsed calls and clicks, which earned it the name “sea canary”.
WhoAll members.
PurposeEcholocation, contact between mother and calf, and social interaction.
SoundsSignature whistles, echolocation clicks reaching beyond 100 kHz, and burst-pulse sounds.
WhoAll members; each animal develops its own signature whistle early in life.
PurposeThe signature whistle identifies the individual and keeps groups in contact; clicks serve echolocation.
The entries were checked against these papers, from the full text where it was available and otherwise from the abstract. Where a claim could not be confirmed, it was reworded or removed.
In Bidirectional Interactions With Humpback Whale Singer Using Concrete Sound Elements, an art–science study of live sound exchanges with a singing humpback whale, Pénitot, Schwarz, Nguyen Hong Duc, Cazau and Adam open by recalling how the human view of whales has shifted over time. In the West, whales were long depicted as monsters with distorted bodies, while in other parts of the world they were honoured as gods. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought industrial hunting for food and materials, and even after the whaling moratorium of 1982 most encounters remained harmful, through fishing, shipping, plastic, chemical and noise pollution, and a changing climate. Attitudes turned only gradually, as films, documentaries and marine parks renewed public interest, a new science of the oceans took hold, and international, regional and national laws to protect cetaceans came into force. The authors note that it was the appearance of whales, not the sounds they make, that most shaped whether people feared or admired them.1