i wonder how they separated out other factors, particularly increasing ocean noise.
seems it might be entirely coincidentally that a rise in population has correlated with falling song use, especially when we know the oceans are getting noisier. ( and also when we know whales hate answering survey questions )
I was going to bring up the same thing. I would hazard a guess the real driver for less singing is human-made noise pollution
the lead author is apparently a well known researcher on sound pollution ( although, probably like most researchers, largely funded though industry grants )
hmmm … based a super quick skim of the paper, it looks like they used a small study of individual whales over the course of a single migration. observing when songs started and stopped based on how close individual males were to other males
For this analysis we chose one time period, the 2003/2004 dataset, which had the most instances of individual males being observed both singing and not singing.
and then they related that back through some data models to the larger studies of singing for populations and population density… one year of individual behavior sampling seems rather small but im no marine biologist so 
they don’t seem to mention ocean noise levels in the paper but one interesting aspect they do mention is age.
the overall population is still relatively young, and the paper notes ageing might change whether they’re inclined to sing or not
My mother always used to pose the question “what noise annoys an oyster?”…
I had to read that headline twice to get it.
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