Take it away, little silver-haired bat! While all bats use clicks to echolocate prey and avoid running into things in the dark, singing is not in their usual repertoire. 

But a new study in the Wildlife Society Bulletin has documented silver-haired bats in southern British Columbia tweeting, trilling and chirping through the treetops. “The song patterns were relatively consistent with each song phrase consisting of a lead call, followed by a droplet call, and finishing with a series of multiple chirp calls,” the study reads.

The next step is to try to figure out what prompts silver-haired bats to break into song. Is this the equivalent of bat crooning — a way to woo a mate? That’s the most likely reason, but researchers have also recorded a bat singing when it’s alone, leading them to wonder if it could be practising, or perhaps warning others to stay away. 

“We don’t know if there is another bat a long way off that it’s trying to communicate (with) or is it just flying around singing to his little heart’s content trying to hopefully pick up a mate somewhere,” Cori Lausen, director of bat conservation with the Wildlife Conservation Society and one of the authors of the study, told the Canadian Press. Want to sing along? Listen in here.

Not so different

Historians and scientists have long been fascinated by how our societies developed, how they were structured, and how they interacted with the natural world. What may come as a surprise are the similarities between how early humans lived and sperm whales now live: in structured clans. 

Published in Royal Society Open Science, a new study out of Dalhousie University has examined how the behaviour of sperm whales showed strong similarities to human social associations, revealing a close parallel to how humans formed ethnolinguistic groups. According to the research paper, these sperm whale clans are determined by vocalizations involving distinct sequences of clicks. It also states that the clans can contain thousands of members and span thousands of kilometres. And although two or more clans may use the same waters, their members do not interact with each other. 

The paper concludes that despite sperm whales being vastly different from humans, there are some broad-scale similarities, such as the large scale both humans and whales share in their numbers and geographical extent.

Can green energy heal the St. Lawrence?

Green hydrogen energy production could have another environmental benefit — a steady supply of oxygen that could be added to increasingly hypoxic oceans and waterways.

A growing region of the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the St. Lawrence Estuary is currently under threat from decreased oxygen in subsurface waters, due in part to a climate-related reduction in the supply of oxygen-rich waters to the gulf through the Cabot Strait between Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. This could potentially lead to shifts in species distribution, reductions in fish stocks, and increased greenhouse gas emissions due to unusual algal blooms.

Now, in a new study, researchers from Dalhousie University are suggesting one way to stem the loss would be to actually pump oxygen back into these waters using a by-product of green hydrogen production. They’ve demonstrated that the proposed green hydrogen industry could produce more than enough oxygen regionally to match what is currently being lost from the Gulf of St. Lawrence every year. Typically, oxygen generated in the production of hydrogen would be released into the atmosphere, but this could instead be diverted into the Gulf’s waters to re-oxygenate the marine environment. 

A slippery business