During the era of commercial whaling, fin whales were hunted so intensively that only a small percentage of the population in the Southern Hemisphere survived, and even today, marine biologists know little about the life of the world's second-largest whale. That makes the findings of researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) and the Johann Heinrich von Thünen Institute for Sea Fisheries, which show that a large number of the baleen whales regularly frequent the krill-rich waters surrounding Elephant Island, all the more welcome. Evidence for this is provided by underwater sound recordings from the region, where in the peak month of May, so many fin whale vocalizations can be heard that the individual calls merge into a veritable chorous of sound, as the research team now reports in the journal Royal Society Open Science. In view of this, the marine biologists call for protective measures for this important habitat so as not to jeopardize the apparent recovery of the fin whale population.