This story has been floating around for nearly ten years now, but I hadn’t come across it until Treehugger posted on it this week.  Click on over there for their normal rich set of links out to related themes and other sources on this one.

The short version of the story is that there’s a whale, first heard in 1989 and tracked since 1992, that sings at 52Hz, significantly higher than other large baleen whales.  No one else sings at this frequency, and he or she also travels an annual migratory path that misses contact with concentrations of other whales.  Scientists speculate that this animal is either a hybrid of two species, or a remnant of an unknown species.  Either way, it’s a lonely life, calling at a frequency other whales don’t respond to, and may not even hear. The Good website has a link to the sound itself, as well as a podcast that tells more of the story.