Whale choirs serenade the girls New research suggests male humpback whales form choirs to attract females to their patch of the ocean. It was previously thought the males competed for female attention with singing - as occurs with species of songbirds - but a team led by pioneer researcher Louis Herman has found that the choirs probably exist to create a big noise that declares "hey girls, we're over here." Dr Herman, who has been studying whale populations in the winter breeding season off Hawaii for 40 years, said the choirs, contrary to long-held opinion, are beefed up by sexually immature males who benefit by learning the complexities of whales music and other conventions of whale mating. This discovery - a result of measuring 87 singing males on the open ocean, and comparing the results to biological data from 20th century Japanese whaling ships - was published last month in a paper titled Humpback whale song: who sings? Around the islands of Hawaii in the winter months, there are multiple arenas (staging areas where males gather for mating). The challenge for males is to get the females in the neighbourhood, so the real competition for mating can begin. Up to this point people have thought that individual females were attracted to individual singers. This isn't the case. The males are singing to attract the females to the arenas," said Dr Herman, speaking from Honolulu. An individual whale's song travels 10 to 30 kilometres. But when you have a distribution of singers spread out over a large area - and often they are separated by several kilometres - the song is amplified by this asynchronous chorus. We believe that this works to bring more females into the arena, which increases a male's chance of mating. The competition for mating is less lyrical. Males gather around a female, escorting her as she swims along. The one closest to the female is trying to defend his position, while the others are challenging, trying to push him out of the way. It gets brutal and bloody because they're crashing into one another. The battle goes on for hours. Dr Herman says it appears the female "is exercising some choice by whether she stays close to a male or not." The biggest whale in the group usually wins the contest, great singer or not. Dr Herman's song research was published last month in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.