Hear Humpback Whales Sing In Waters Outside NYC

NEW YORK CITY — Under the busy waters outside New York City, a tranquil song can be heard.

The song lilts slowly, like a rising and falling tide. It travels far along the sea floor far outside Long Island and toward New York Harbor.

It's the music of a humpback whale — a visitor, like so many others, to the New York City region.

“By listening for humpback whales in waters off New York, we found exciting evidence of humpback whale presence in winter and spring, which emphasizes both the conservation needs for this area and the many questions we still have about humpback whale occurrence in this habitat," Julie Zeh, a scientist who studied the whale songs, said in a statement.

A team of scientists, including Zeh, recently published the first peer-reviewed study of humpback whale songs recorded in the New York Bight — the offshore area that includes the Port of New York and New Jersey.

The team — which included researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society, Cornell University, Columbia University and Syracuse University — listened to old acoustic recordings from the seafloor 70 miles off Long Island.

They did so as sightings of humpback whales outside New York City increased.

Back in 2010, the Rockaway-based nonprofit logged a scant five sightings. By 2018, the group documented 272 that year alone — and almost all were humpbacks.

The underwater recordings reviewed by the researchers were actually made in 2008 and 2009, before the whale sighting boom. But they were only recently analyzed for humpback whale songs.

The researchers reasoned that the recordings could help complement the visual sightings and provide a better picture as to when and where the whales are.

Humpback whales are "cryptic" animals, as the study notes, meaning they're often difficult to find. Undersea audio and visual surveys alike can help inform future conservation efforts.

"The more we know about how and when whales use these areas, the more we can make informed decisions on how to better protect them in some of the busiest commercial waters on the planet," Howard Rosenbaum, who co-authored the study and is part of Wildlife Conservation Society's Ocean Giants Program, said in a statement.

Read the study here.

Visit the Wildlife Conservation Society's page on the study for more information, including videos.