220 WHALES 



industry to identify large shoals of fish by analysing the noises they emit. 

 To do so, all the different submarine noises had to be classified, including, 

 of course, those produced by Cetaceans. 



Aristotle was aware that dolphins could produce sounds at the surface, 

 and it has often been suggested that the enticing melody of the sirens, 

 which forced Odysseus to have himself tied to the mast of his ship lest he 

 respond to their call, was really the song of leaping dolphins. In any case, 

 the ancient Greeks included dolphins when they depicted this scene 

 (Fig. 114). Rapp (1837) says that he heard stranded dolphins bellow like 

 oxen, while the noise of a White-beaked Dolphin stranded on the Dutch 

 coast in 19 18 was said to resemble the lowing of a cow. The bigger 

 Cetaceans, however, \vere always believed to be silent and the great 

 Hunter (1786) asserted unequivocally that they were dumb. Only a few 

 years later, however, Schneider (1795) and Lacepède (1804) mentioned 

 the screams of wounded whales, probably those of Biscayan and Green- 

 land Right Whales, since Rorquals were not generally hunted at that 

 time. In any case, all whales exhale with a whistling noise, which, as we 

 saw in Chapter 4, can be heard from quite a long distance away. At the 

 beginning of this century, a whale (probably a Humpback) put in a regu- 

 lar appearance in a Bermudan bay, and the local population could easily 

 distinguish it by its particularly piercing whistle, probably caused by the 

 presence of a large acorn-shell in its blowhole. From about that period we 

 also have an account by Ravits of a noise resembling a siren being made 

 by a school of forty Humpback Whales. It rose and fell continuously, and 

 Ravits thought that it may have had some connexion with courtship. 

 More generally, all these 'blowing' noises are believed to establish mutual 

 contact, and particularly to re-establish contact with a school when an 

 individual whale has become separated from it. 



So far we have only discussed the noises Cetaceans make at the surface, 

 and we shall now investigate whether they can produce underwater 

 sounds as well. Such sounds have been reported long ago, especially in 

 the case of the Beluga, whose scream is, in fact, proverbial in Russia, a 

 noisy man being said to 'squeal like a Beluga'. The Beluga's submarine 

 scream is so loud that it can easily be heard above the surface of the water 

 where it is said to resemble the call of a song bird. Because of this sound 

 and also because of its colour, the Beluga is known among British whalers 

 as the 'Sea Canary'. But apart fi-om 'singing', the Beluga is also reported 

 to growl, roar, and squeal. Submarine sounds of Common Dolphins and 

 Risso's Dolphins have also been heard quite often by listeners outside the 

 water and have even been recorded without special amplifiers. KuUen- 

 berg (1947) says that the noise of dolphins swimming seven feet below the 

 surface resembles the piping sounds of fighting or playing mice, and 



