"Atlantic Blue Whale"
Blue whales are fascinating animals, and you might have noticed some patterend lines in my last lino print background - well, these are visualised blue whale calls, albeit with some creative freedom. ;) For visualisation, we often use spectrograms, which show time in one axis and frequency in the other. This is a relatively intuitive way of seeing the sound as it happens.
Blue whales produce low frequency calls, some of which are only audible to us humans if sped up. Our hearing range reaches down to roughly 25Hz, but some blue whale calls are as low as 19Hz!
Here are two minutes of blue whale calls recorded in Svalbard and published by Llobet et al. 2023, sped up to 5x to hear more easily:
Here is the link to the audio :)
The calls used as reference for this print originate from the following two publications:
Indeck, Katherine & Gehrmann, Romina & Richardson, AL & Barclay, David & Baumgartner, MF & Nolet, V & Davies, KTA. (2024). Variation in glider-detected North Atlantic right, blue, and fin whale calls in proximity to high-traffic shipping lanes. Endangered Species Research. 54. 10.3354/esr01327.
Haver, Samara & Klinck, Holger & Nieukirk, Sharon & Matsumoto, Haru & Dziak, Bob & Miksis-Olds, Jennifer. (2017). The not-so-silent world: Measuring Arctic, Equatorial, and Antarctic soundscapes in the Atlantic Ocean. Deep Sea Research Part I: Oceanographic Research Papers. 122. 10.1016/j.dsr.2017.03.002.
And the sound example comes from here:
Llobet SM, Ahonen H, Lydersen C and Kovacs KM (2023) The Arctic and the future Arctic? Soundscapes and marine mammal communities on the east and west sides of Svalbard characterized through acoustic data. Front. Mar. Sci. 10:1208049. doi: 10.3389/fmars.2023.1208049