Tuesday November 26, 2024
Science Alert —
In the waters around Antarctica, decades ago, humans heard a strange sound: a repeating noise that sounded like the quacking of a duck, if the duck was a giant kraken.
In the years following the first report of the so-called Bio-Duck in 1960, scientists struggled to explain it. We still don’t have a complete answer, but new work analyzing Bio-Duck sounds suggests that whatever is making it is having a conversation.
“We discovered that there were usually several different speakers at different places in the ocean, and all of them making these sounds,” says ocean scientist Ross Chapman of the University of Victoria in Canada.
“The most amazing thing was that when one speaker was talking, the others were quiet, as though they were listening. Then the first speaker would stop talking and listen to responses from others.”