Mystery of 'ocean quack sound' solved (BBC)

[eppur_se_muova]

By Rebecca Morelle
Global science correspondent, BBC News

The mystery of a bizarre quacking sound heard in the ocean has finally been solved, scientists report.

The noise - nicknamed "the bio-duck" - appears in the winter and spring in the Southern Ocean. However, its source has baffled researchers for decades.

Now acoustic recorders have revealed that the sound is in fact the underwater chatter of the Antarctic minke whale.

The findings are published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters.

Lead researcher Denise Risch, from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Massachusetts, said: "It was hard to find the source of the signal.
***
more: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-27117669

[shenmue]

1. You mean it's not the mysterious duckfish?

[Sancho]

2. The decoded whale language...

"what does the duck say?"

[lastlib]

3. (and all this time I thought it was Liz Cheney....my stupid.....)

[Warpy]

4. It sounds more like a kind of machine than a quack to me

and very much like it is being used for echolocation.

[hunter]

5. It's very possible that cetacean communication is abstracted from echolocation skills.

"Spoken" cetacean "words" might be evocative (to other cetaceans) of the sonar image of the object or phenomena the cetacean is describing.