chris_walsh

...a solitary whale, species unknown, ...has been tracked since 1992 in the North Pacific...

...[I]t makes a distinctive stream of sounds at around that basso profundo frequency, just above the lowest note on a tuba.

Its sonic signature is clearly that of a whale, but nothing like the normal voice of the giant blue or the next biggest species, the fin, or any other whale for that matter, said Mary Ann Daher, a marine biologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod.

...In the current edition of the journal Deep-Sea Research, members of this team report that all signs are that the sounds come from a single animal, whose movements "appeared to be unrelated to the presence or movement of other whale species."

Team members and other experts have proposed a host of explanations for the whale sounds, among them that the animal is malformed or, most likely, is a hybrid of a blue whale and another species.

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