Tower and Town, December 2022

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Why Do Whales Sing?

Year 4 children have been engaged by their fiction book, Why the Whales Came by Michael Morpurgo, to create descriptions of one of the main characters, Birdman. They were so inspired by the whales in the story that they wrote some non-fiction writing about why they sing.

Reasons to sing
Male humpback whales will sing for twenty-two hours to mate. Other reasons to sing are to fend off and warn rivals away so they can’t mate with the female, to stop trespassing into feeding and breeding grounds, to co-ordinate migration and to communicate with their young.

How whales communicate
Communication is challenging underwater. Orders will be washed away and sight doesn’t work because the sun’s rays don’t reach deeper down. So a whale’s last resort is sound. You can hear groans, moans, clicks and trills.

Who sings?
Toothed whales use clicks, whistles and cries to communicate but they do not compose them into a song. The species of whales that do sing are called Humpback, Blue Fin, Bowhead and Minke. These are all baleen whales.

Arthur Mainwaring (Yr 4)