Like us humans who emit different sounds to mean different things, narwhals do the same, and scientists have identified some of the sounds that these creatures make, in order to better understand what they do.
Evgeny Podolskiy, a geophysicist at Hokkaido University in Japan. Podolskiy and his colleagues study the soundscape of glacial fjords. They are noisy places, where icebergs crash into the ocean and air bubbles fizz out of melting ice. These fjords are also home to narwhals.
The animals are sometimes called Unicorns of the Sea because of their single long spiraled tusk. And they are shy, which makes them hard to study. So Podolskiy teamed up with local Inuit hunters, who snuck up on narwhals in kayaks and captured audio.
Listen to the many sounds that narwhals emit over at Scientific American.
(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)