The World's Loneliest Whale, a story that will make you pale, is it a male or Female?

For years a mysterious whale with a unique song was tracked in the Pacific Ocean. Is it still out there? And is it really alone?

The story begins in 1989. An array of hydrophones called SOSUS, built by the US Navy to detect enemy submarines, picked up some strange signals. They were whale songs, and they were similar to blue whale calls, but there was one big difference.

It's been nicknamed "the loneliest whale in the world". It sings a song like no other. Some say it wanders alone across the Pacific Ocean, crying out for companionship that never comes.

No-one knows for sure whether the whale is male or female, what species it is, or even if it still lives. The last in the original series of recordings was made in 2004.

It's one of the animal kingdom's great mysteries. But we might have been thinking about it the wrong way.

Maybe its unusual song doesn't isolate it after all. Perhaps instead it sings this way to ensure it can be better heard by its companions, or to impress members of the opposite sex. One way or another, this unusual whale can tell us a lot about whales and their songs.

The key notes of the song were at a frequency of 52 Hertz. To human ears this is a low bass note, but it is significantly higher than the blue whale, which sings between 10 and 40Hz.

He is a lone voice crying out for love in the wilderness. For years he has roamed singing unrequited songs of yearning, searching for a soul to share his solitary world. His plaintive love songs have been heard by many yet he has never been seen. He is the loneliest whale in the world.

The subject of a documentary currently being filmed, the lovelorn mammal has been tracked by scientists since 1989 as he migrates up and down the world's largest ocean along the Pacific north-west coast of North America.

He cries out in long, low moans, his musical mating calls ringing for hours through the darkness of the deepest seas. His strong voice carries for miles through the briny, broadcasting a wide repertory of heartfelt tunes.

But although he swims in waters that are populated by thousands of other whales no female ever responds because his voice is unusually high for a whale - about 52 Hertz - which is what researchers have named him.

For many lovelorn humans 52 Hertz has come to symbolise the hopeless romantic in us all. "It's very sad that so many people identify with this whale," says marine biologist Mary Ann Daher of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, who co-authored the original research on the discovery of 52 Hertz.

"I receive letters, emails and poems - mostly from women - and it's heartbreaking to read some of the things they say. 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."

Though 52 Hertz has never been seen many have heard his watery love songs, recorded by scientists and US navy sonar detectors.

Although he may be lonely in the ocean 52 Hertz has won many landbound admirers whose interest has helped to promote greater study of the ocean giants. Numerous deaf people have also written to researchers, wondering if 52 Hertz might share their disability.

While he continues to moan his unrequited songs of romantic longing scientists confess that they cannot know what truly lies in the heart and mind of a whale, no matter how unloved.

"We don't know if he's lonely," says oceanographer Mary Ann Daher. "The supposed emotional yearnings of 52 Hertz say much more about the humans who hear his story than it does about the whale himself."

The Heartbreaking Story of the World’s Loneliest Whale

By Sumitra on January 25th, 2016 Category: Animals

Having to roam the world in search of company, constantly calling out for a mate but never getting an answer sounds terrifying and sad, which is why so many around the world empathize with ’52’, the loneliest whale in the world.

The solitary whale, named after the distinctive 52 hertz frequency of its call, belongs to an unknown, unidentified species. 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. So it roams the world’s largest ocean, year after year, desperately calling out for a mate but never finding one.

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. 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. He happened to be studying the mating calls of male whales in the North Pacific, when he came across the anomaly of 52.

The US navy's sophisticated billion-dollar hydrophone system, designed to track Soviet nuclear submarines during the Cold War, recorded his migratory patterns in great detail each year, cruising from central California to the Aleutian Islands in the north Pacific. He always travels solo, "unrelated to the presence or movement of other whale species", according to the original report in Deep Sea Journal. He swims up to 42 miles a day and one year covered more than 6,873 miles.