Translations:Beluga whale/34/en

The most intensively studied candidate contact signal is a stereotyped broadband pulsed sound often labelled Type A. In observations of a captive social group, Type A calls formed 24–97 percent of recorded vocalizations during situations in which contact was especially important—including separation, reunion, isolation, births, and the death of a calf—but only 4.4 percent during ordinary sessions. Researchers divided 2,835 Type A calls into five acoustic variants. The variants were not unique signatures of single animals: some were shared by a mother and her offspring.