Baleen whales navigate oceanic basins using multiple cues: geomagnetic field sensing, bathymetric memory, ocean temperature gradients, and possibly stellar orientation. Their migrations are among the longest of any mammal — humpbacks travel ~16,000 km, gray whales up to 20,000 km round-trip.
The SOFAR channel (Sound Fixing and Ranging) — a depth of ~1,000 m where sound speed is minimized — acts as a waveguide, allowing blue and fin whale calls (10–40 Hz) to travel thousands of kilometers with minimal attenuation. Individual whales can communicate across entire ocean basins.
Humpback whale song is a complex, hierarchically structured acoustic display: sounds → phrases → themes → songs → song sessions. Songs evolve culturally across populations, with new motifs spreading from west to east across the Pacific. This represents the longest-range cultural transmission in any non-human animal.