Are Greenland whales jazz musicians (but Japan has already killed over 300)?

333 specimens have already been killed and who knows how many will still die. Japan resumes whaling in the Southern Ocean, challenging worldwide criticism and supporting the scientific purpose of the operation.

He is about to end up run over, his mother saves him

333 specimens have already been killed and who knows how many will still die. Japan resumes the whaling in the Southern Ocean, challenging worldwide criticism and supporting the scientific purpose of the operation.

In February, the prime minister had already announced it Shinzo Abe: Japan aims to resume commercial whaling. The mobilization of the international community has been of little use and in the meantime that the agreement between the EU and the Japanese country is signed, it is once again slaughter for the whales.
For the past three decades, the country has ignored the International Whaling Commission's 1986 ban on commercial whaling and continued to kill them and sell their meat and other body parts. returned without having had to face any protest from animal rights groups in defense of whales.

As Japanese media say, the country is among the signatories of the Moratorium on Whaling promoted by the International Commission on Whaling (Iwr), however "it exploits a loophole that allows whaling for scientific reasons".

For example, Tokyo states that the killing of cetaceans is necessary for a deeper understanding of their behavior and cetacean biology, despite Japan having already received a warning in 2014 from the Hague Court of Justice, according to which "scientific hunting" is nothing more than a pretext for commercial purposes.

According to the data, whale meat is consumed less in Japan, the reason seems to be that of the probable contamination from mercury and other pollutants such as PCBs (used in commercial refrigerants), dioxins (a by-product of medical waste or commercial incinerators) and PBDEs (flame retardants).

These harmful toxins are easily stored in whale fat and can be dangerous to humans. Without forgetting that whales are the key species for fight against climate change and have a huge impact on the marine ecosystem.

For this, Whale and Dolphin Conservation had launched a petition addressed to Bernd Land, Chairman of the Trade Committee, asking the European Parliament not to sign the trade agreement unless Japan promises to permanently ban whaling. The petition has collected 270 signatures and is currently under discussion in the EU.

The jazz concert of the whales

And as Japan continues undaunted in the slaughter, it turns out that whales have another extraordinary power, that of making sounds that look so much like a sinfonia jazz.

We are talking about the Greenland whale (Balaena mysticetus), also known as the Greenland right whale or Arctic whale which, like dolphins and humpback whales, is able to 'sing' simple songs repeated several times.

This is established by a study led by Kate Stafford, a marine biologist at the University of Washington where the sound emitted by whales is compared to the symphonies of Beethoven or Bach. The songs would be different depending on the season, the sounds were captured by special equipment in the Strait of Fram, a freezing water channel between Greenland and the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic.

After analyzing the sounds of whales for over five years, the biologist and her staff came to the conclusion that the songs can last from 45 a 90 secondie that can be repeated even for 24 hours a day.

“Sometimes they sing like they're screaming, other sounds are shrill, sometimes they sound like police sirens,” says Stafford, whose work was published today in Biology Letters.

Stafford still doesn't know why these songs are so different, nor what the purpose is. In humpback whales, only males sing during the breeding season, but scientists don't know if this same pattern exists in arctic whales.

Check out this wonderful concert:

We had also talked about the slaughter of the whales here: