Songs from the sea

Venice is a wonderful place to explore. The Italian city is built on an archipelago in a shallow lagoon with over 177 canals and 400 bridges. The Piazza San Marco, the Grand Canal and the Doge’s Palace are only a few of its historic sites to enjoy.

The Museo di Storia Naturale di Venezia

When I’m staying in another city, I usually seek out its science center or natural history museum to visit (who doesn’t?). And Venice has a beauty!

The Museo di Storia Naturale di Venezia is Venice’s museum of natural history. Facing the Grand Canal, the museum is in the Fontego dei Turchi, built in the first half of the 13th century by Giacomo Palmieri as a palazzo for the Pesaro family.

The Natural History Museum, which is celebrating its 100th birthday in 2023, features collections that focus on the natural history of the Venetian lagoon that surrounds the city. But it also has a wealth of items from other areas.

The Cetacean Gallery on the ground floor

The Cetacean Gallery on the ground floor, for instance, features the skeletons of a sperm whale and a fin whale. Almost 20 meters long, the skeleton of Balaenoptera physalus, the fin whale, hangs above your head in the west portico.

The whale was found in 1928 on the beach at San Giovanni a Teduccio in Naples.

The order of cetaceans is divided into two subgroups: those with teeth and those without. Misticeti (baleen whales) are those with no teeth while odontoceti are those with teeth, like the sperm whale. Herman Melville’s white whale Moby Dick was based on two real-life sperm whales.

But it’s the song of the whales I’m interested in here. I was recently reading the Venetian museum’s guidebook I bought (odd, I know!) and was intrigued by the item on sound communication by cetaceans. It says whales do not have vocal cords and cannot generate sound signals with the passage of air through laryngeal structures.

A humpback whale

Humpback whales can produce continuous sounds for 30 minutes without emitting a single bubble of air.

Whale songs have ties to popular music and the desire to protect these awesome creatures of the sea. Their haunting vocalizations are included in Pearl Jam’s “Whale Song” from 2003, for instance. Written by Jack Irons, the lyrics include a passage: “They swim, it’s really free. It’s a beautiful thing to see. They sing.”

The Patridge Family from Season 1

Go back to 1971 to the American sitcom “The Partridge Family” and the second season episode “Whatever Happened to Moby Dick” and whale vocalizations play a big part in their sweet, sad “Whale Song.”

Science may explain whale vocalizations, but their songs are beautiful, artistic and worth heeding.

As the Partridges sing:

“Song of the whale so sweet and so clear

But no song at all to the ones who won’t hear

And if people don’t listen, and if people don’t know

Might be the song of the man be the next song to go”

Check out a video of the song here: The Partridge Family - Whale Song - Bing video