A FOREIGN song has become an instant hit among the humpback whales that breed
off Australia’s east coast. Humpbacks from different oceans have markedly
different songs, which usually change only slowly. But in 1996, Mike Noad of the
University of Sydney heard two odd voices among the whales along Australia’s
Pacific coast. They were singing the song of humpbacks from Western
Australia—an Indian Ocean song (Nature, vol 408, p 537).
“By the end of 1997 all the males were singing the new song and the old song
was extinct,” he says. Noad thinks a few western whales went…
