When you think about the Cold War, you immediately think about whale songs right? Okay, maybe not everyone makes that connection, but in a delightfully random way, the political rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1950s had a lot to do with the discovery of the beautiful whale song, and ultimately, the collapse of the commercial whaling industry altogether. 

 

Back in the 1950s, the United States had gone gangbusters with submarines. Travelling under the Arctic Ocean, they were set on going the longest, the deepest, the hardest. But they were worried about other countries doing it too… particularly the Soviets.  

 

They knew they couldn’t stop them, but they at least wanted to know where the Red subs were. That’s when Frank Watlington was tasked by the US Navy to develop hydrophones (microphones they could stick in the ocean) to listen for submarine sounds. 

 

So Watlington set off to Bermuda and got to work. One day he dropped his hydrophone 1,500 feet into the ocean and heard strange, eerie sounds coming from the deep. For the Navy, these sounds were just annoying distractions from detecting submarine activity but for Watlington, well, they were captivating. Ditching his original task of detecting Soviet submarines, Watlington became obsessed with the ethereal sounds he had recorded and he played them to anyone who would listen...

CHAPTERS:

• 00:00 Everyone knows the whale song
• 02:08 A dog’s breakfast: 20th century whaling
• 03:32 The Cold War and the end of whaling
• 05:21 Frank Watlington and hydrophones
• 07:22 Roger Payne: From science to viral sensation
• 10:35 Patterns and rhythm in the whale song 
• 12:19 Humpback Whale record goes viral
• 14:58 Rock stars, Greenpeace and whaling ban
• 16:49 What next on The Wholesome Show

 

SOURCES:

• Francis W. Watlington; Recorded Whale Songs, NY Times  
• 'It always hits me hard': how a haunting album helped save the whales, The Guardian  
• It Took A Musician's Ear To Decode The Complex Song In Whale Calls, NPR  
• Listening to Whales by Douglas Allchin in The American Biology Teacher  
• Number of whales killed, World, Our World In Data  
• Oral conception. Impregnation via the proximal gastrointestinal tract in a patient with an aplastic  distal vagina. Case report, by Douwe A A Verkuyl, in BJOG 
• Whale song: A grandfather's legacy, CBS News  

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