August 24 -- Real news rarely floats across Antongil Bay; but scuttlebutt blasts over all the time. Usually, the hearsay involves some famous person who allegedly is en route to our remote beach on Nosy Mangabe: singer Harry Belafonte, for instance, or Disney CEO Michael Eisner.

Had these particular rumors panned out (which they didn't), Howard's team was ready: They can sing "Banana Boat" and "It's a Small World" in Malagasy -- no small feat, I can assure you, given that my own command of this enigmatic language is limited to a few oft-heard words such as "trozona" (whale).

One visitor who really did make it here in the flesh is Howard's wife, Julie Rosenbaum, a New York physician on a research fellowship at the Institut Pasteur Madagascar in the capital city of Antananarivo. As this was Julie's day off from studying infectious diseases, Howard promptly handed his newlywed a camera, notebook, pencil and GPS along with her life vest. Whale science is not a spectator sport.

After we spend a dismal couple of hours sloshing around and seeing nothing, Julie is the first to spot the telltale blow of a humpback against the gray horizon. She dutifully records one Megaptera novaeangliae about 2 1/2 miles away from our random starting point in the bay. We motor over and wait. And wait. What a letdown, I think.

But Howard is thinking something else. Clued in by the fact that this was a single whale that evidently dove deep, he suspects it might be a singer: Only males sing, and most often they sing alone. At Howard's cue, the boat pilot cuts the engine.

Before Howard has a chance to finish unpacking an underwater microphone called a hydrophone, extraordinary sounds fill the silence. I watch the still gray water, not a little incredulous. The song of a humpback is unmistakable -- even for one who has never heard it before.

Certainly, the whalers must have heard the same ethereal medleys. Sound most certainly reverberated better through the wooden hulls of their rowboats than it does through our motorized craft of fiberglass. I wonder if they could have so wantonly slaughtered had they attributed the communiqués to their prey, valuing only the oil and whalebone from their carcasses.

'He's Right Under the Boat'

I am tempted to jump in, duck my head under, and feel the full force of the song: If we can clearly hear it up here without the aid of any electronic equipment, I can only imagine the volume down there. Sound travels better in water than in air. Our singer can likely be heard by other whales more than 50 miles from here.

"He's right under the boat," Howard says, lowering the hydrophone overboard.

Singers assume a distinct posture, hovering about 50 feet below the surface with flippers outstretched, head down and tail flukes pointing up.

With earphones now in place, Howard detects at least three singers close enough (within about 18 miles) for our hydrophone to monitor them. When it's my turn to listen, I am amazed by the variety of the sounds: repetitive moans and groans, the rising inflections of which seem to be posing questions.

The whales in this bay are all singing variations of the same song, although not in unison. In fact, all of the humpbacks in a particular winter breeding ground sing the same song, regardless of where they go in the summer to feed. (Keep in mind that this is winter in the Southern Hemisphere.)

The song that we're hearing being sung here and now in the Indian Ocean differs from the one that is sung, for instance, by humpbacks who breed in the Atlantic. And both differ from the song of the whales that breed in the Pacific.

It gets even more intriguing: Scientists know that songs change progressively from year to year, and that all of the singers in a certain ocean manage to keep up with the changes. Why and how? The answer is the same for almost every question about whale songs, as well as questions regarding their behavior in general: Nobody knows.

Now I hear what sounds like a bow being drawn languidly back and forth across the strings of a violin. Then puppies yipping and mice squeaking and cattle lowing and someone blowing into a jug.

Surface Activity

Roger Payne, the scientist who "discovered" that whales use songs to communicate, has speculated in his writings that their song serves any number of purposes. It might be a way in which males attract mates: How long one can hold its breath and sing underwater might give females in the area an idea of his general fitness. Song might also be a whale's way of defining territory, or maintaining contact between migrant groups, or warding off other competing males.

Perhaps the singer immediately below us is sending a message to the whales we see breaching in the distance. Howard asks Julie to record our location and note that there are two groups of humpbacks swimming off in different directions. She's eager to get closer to some of the foam-producing surface activity that's going on all around us.

She's never in her life actually seen a whale breaching, Julie admits. This is something of a standing joke, given her husband's occupation. Howard has a choice to make: science or love; protocol or passion. He promises Julie that we'll head over to where the action is ... soon. She wants him to collect the data he needs, really she does. But she feels like she's found a short checkout line in a crowded supermarket and knows that if they stop to pick up one last item, the opportunity will be gone.

Suddenly, our singer surfaces. He is on the move. And so are we.

"Just because he came up doesn't mean he stopped singing," Howard says.

Humpback whale songs, which last anywhere from a few minutes to half an hour, are among the most complex in the entire animal kingdom. Humpbacks string together units of sound to form patterns of phrases which, repeated, make themes.

Biologists' recordings indicate that songs have anywhere from two to nine separate themes. Once a whale finishes his long and complicated song, he returns to the beginning to start again. Whales will sing continuously for hours and even days at a time while in their breeding grounds.

Humpback whale songs have been compared by some to bird songs that are drawn out and slowwwwed wwwwaaaaay dowwwwwn.

If you ask Howard what humpback singers sound like, he mimics them as best he can, producing cow-like noises from the back of his throat. His point is that the songs defy verbal description: What one person calls ratcheting is another's violin, he says. What one calls a moan, another calls a whistle.

Love Songs?

Whales don't produce sound in the same way that humans do. They have a larynx but no vocal cords. Some scientists think sound is produced when a whale transfers air from one cavity inside its head to another -- something like the way bagpipes work.

Yvette Razafindrakoto, Howard's Malagasy assistant, will be especially eager to hear the recording we are making now. She's in the midst of writing the first description of humpback whale songs in Antongil Bay. Her study involves the use of spectrograms -- graphs produced by analyzing recordings with a computer program that charts the frequency, duration and amplitude of each unit of sound. Spectrograms make whale songs as recognizable as "It's a Small World," for instance.

Yvette says the sounds often remind her of the opening and closing of a door -- a very outspoken door in a seriously haunted house, I would add.

Later tonight, when everyone's busy prepping equipment and reviewing data in the makeshift laboratory that is the hub of this field station, Yvette wears a Walkman, keeping time to music and singing quietly as she sharpens biopsy darts.

I wonder if she's listening to the whales we heard today.

"It's a traditional Malagasy song," she says.

"What about?" I prompt.

"Love."

Whether or not the humpbacks in this breeding ground are expressing the very same need that gives rise to many a human song is anybody's guess.

But I'll bet you my CD collection that they're not singing about banana boats.

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