Wednesday, December 22, 2004
Thar Be Whales Here!
A fascinating post on hybrids between two different animal species having hybridized calls between the instinctive mating calls of the two parent species starts off by talking about this article on a mysterious whale that's been tracked in the Pacific for the past four years.
Submarines have always interested me. Sailors patrolling the deep back in the cold war used to hear all sorts of crazy shit on the sonar, and the navy installed a bank of deep sea listening equipment to listen in on the movements of the Soviet submarine navy. Apparently the listening system has been (at least partially) demilitarized, because the NOAA is doing research with it now and publishing discoveries on the web. Here's a few links: the possible hybrid whale, an index of different kinds of sounds, and a CNN article about an unknown beast of the deep. The listening system repeatedly recorded a sound during the summer of 1997 that would have to be made by a creature larger than a blue whale, if it is an animal sound. Here's a link to one such recording. When I get back to my office, I'm gonna tweak those audio files a bit with my phonetics software and let my imagination run wild. This stuff really excites me.
And I think I'll pick up a copy of "Blind Man's Bluff" for my holiday pleasure reading.
Submarines have always interested me. Sailors patrolling the deep back in the cold war used to hear all sorts of crazy shit on the sonar, and the navy installed a bank of deep sea listening equipment to listen in on the movements of the Soviet submarine navy. Apparently the listening system has been (at least partially) demilitarized, because the NOAA is doing research with it now and publishing discoveries on the web. Here's a few links: the possible hybrid whale, an index of different kinds of sounds, and a CNN article about an unknown beast of the deep. The listening system repeatedly recorded a sound during the summer of 1997 that would have to be made by a creature larger than a blue whale, if it is an animal sound. Here's a link to one such recording. When I get back to my office, I'm gonna tweak those audio files a bit with my phonetics software and let my imagination run wild. This stuff really excites me.
And I think I'll pick up a copy of "Blind Man's Bluff" for my holiday pleasure reading.
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