Scientists astounded as two whales 60 miles apart suddenly started synchronizing their every move

From chimpanzees displaying an ability to use words like human beings to elephants naming each other, the animal kingdom is full of surprises. In 2010, researchers combing the waters of Qeqertarsuaq Tunua Bay on Greenland’s west coast found that two Arctic whales were enjoying a long-distance interaction. The pair had set forth to feast on a plankton population that blooms between January and May each year when the sea ice breaks. Even when they were separated by a considerable distance, their diving seemed to be perfectly synchronized with each other.

While it was unclear what they were telling each other, this long-distance communication piqued the curiosity of scientists and they dug up a 53-year-old theory called “acoustic herd theory,” according to Hakai Magazine. A detailed study of their analysis will be published in the journal Physical Review Research. “At first blush, bowhead whale diving behavior looks pretty chaotic and unpredictable,” Evgeny Podolskiy, an environmental scientist at Hokkaido University in Japan and lead author of the research, told the outlet. He added that the whales synchronized their diving for hours before becoming silent for no apparent reason. Podolskiy and his fellow researchers from Japan, Greenland, and Denmark, were astonished and got to work.

They extracted 144 days of information about diving depth and location from 12 bowhead whales, who were tracked through a satellite. Then they merged the animal behavior data with some complex mathematics to uncover patterns hidden in this data. Using algorithms based on “chaos theory,” they found that the whales depicted certain patterns in communication, diving, and social behavior.

The first behavior they noticed in most whales was a 24-hour diving cycle, in which the whales glided from shallow waters to deeper parts until their appetite for plankton was satisfied. While the team was analyzing more patterns, Podolskiy noticed two whales diving synchronously over a considerably long distance. That’s when he felt perplexed. “This is very, very peculiar underwater behavior,” Podolskiy told Hakai Magazine. “It was very exciting.”

“Without direct observations, such as recordings of the two whales, it isn’t possible to determine that the individuals were exchanging calls,” said researcher Teilmann, in a Hokkaido University press release, “The observed subsurface behavior might be the first evidence supporting the acoustic herd theory of long-range signaling in baleen whales proposed by Payne and Webb back in 1971.” The possibility that two whales can remain acoustically connected even when they are miles apart, is mind-bending.

However, Christopher Clark, a bioacoustics researcher at Cornell University in New York, wasn’t yet sure that this synchronization observed between the two whales was solid proof that could explain the acoustic-connection theory. “It’s operating over a scale that is unobservable to humans,” he said. Hence the synchronization of whales remains a mystery for now. Perhaps the two whales were communicating with each other about plankton or maybe warning each other about human activity. In any case, the fascinating discovery shows that there's still a lot that human beings can learn from nature and other species.