They identify with this animal who doesn’t seem to fit in anywhere, doesn’t make friends easily, feels alone and feels different from everybody.”

“I receive letters, emails, and poems – mostly from women – and it’s heartbreaking to read some of the things they say. “It’s very sad that so many people identify with this whale,” she said in a 2013 interview. As the paper went public, more and more people began to identify with the whale’s hopeless situation, so much so that they even wrote to Daher expressing their empathy. Mary Ann Daher, a marine biologist who has spent years eavesdropping on the hidden lives of whales, co-authored the original research on the discovery of 52. Photo: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Some believe this is because the giant mammal might have a physical deformity, while others think it could be a hybrid of a blue whale and other species.

52 has always travelled solo, and according to a report in the Deep Sea Journal, its migration is “unrelated to the presence or movement of other whale species.”Įxperts figure that 52’s sonic signature, although deep to humans, is very high-pitched compared to the normal call of the giant blue whale, the fin, or any other species of whale. Since then, the US Navy’s sophisticated billion-dollar hydrophone system, designed to track Soviet nuclear submarines during the Cold War, have recorded 52’s migratory patterns every single year as he moves from central California to the Aleutian Islands in the north Pacific. Photo: 52 – The Search for the Loneliest Whale He happened to be studying the mating calls of male whales in the North Pacific, when he came across the anomaly of 52. This phenomenon is so intriguing that scientists have closely been monitoring the frequency since it was first detected by William Watkins of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in 1989. Interestingly, 52 has never actually been seen only its forlorn love songs have been picked up by navy sonar detectors, but never accompanied by another whale call. So it roams the world’s largest ocean, year after year, desperately calling out for a mate but never finding one. The sound it produces is just above the lowest note on a tuba – clearly that of a whale, but one that no other whale in the world shares or recognizes. The solitary whale, named after the distinctive 52 hertz frequency of its call, belongs to an unknown, unidentified species.

The loneliest whale