Whales use vocal fry to catch food

Dolphins and other toothed whales are large-brained top predators that captivate our imagination; they are extremely social, they cooperate and can hunt prey down to 2 km deep in complete darkness with echolocation.

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All these remarkable behaviours are mediated using sound that travels far and fast in murky and dark waters. However, how these amazing animals make their rich vocal repertoires in the deep has remained a mystery. Now a new study in the prestigious journal Science reports that toothed whales evolved an air-driven nasal sound source that operates at different vocal registers like the human voice.

The study was led by Professor CoenElemans, voice scientist at the Department of Biology, University of Southern Denmark and Professor Peter Madsen, a whale biologist at the Department of Biology, Aarhus University in Denmark.

The study shows that toothed whales, like humans, have at least three voice registers; the vocal fry register (also known as creaky voice, which produces the lowest tones), the chest register (which is our normal speaking voice) and the falsetto register (which produces even higher frequencies).