They’re lonesome and blue.
Blue whales, the largest creatures known to man, have been identified in the waters off Long Island — performing love songs.
Scientists from Cornell University’s Bioacoustics Research Program recorded the mating songs of two of the whales, one only 70 miles offshore.
“The largest animal ever to have lived on this planet is singing off the shores of the city that never sleeps. I think this is incredible,” said Christopher Clark, the director of the program.
“I’ve never listened to them so close to New York before,” he said. “The whale is saying the equivalent of, ‘Hey, baby, here I am. Is anybody listening?’ ”
Blue whales — which are 70 to 100 feet long and can live up to 150 years — sing at 18 cycles per second, below human hearing. The wavelength is the size of a football field. It can travel 800 miles.
It takes a whale 25 sec onds to sing a single note, and it sings one every 70 seconds. Thus, it takes 20 minutes to sing a song.
When the song is sped up 20 times, it sounds like a cross between a moan and an owl’s hoot. Only males sing.
Clark said the low wavelength allows for “very long listening. Because of poor visibility in the ocean, the whale can barely see its tail, 100 feet away. But it can communicate with another whale 500 miles away.”
The song of the first whale was detected Jan. 10-11 by acoustic recorders in the ocean.
Clark said the whale had headed down from Nantucket Island, swam along the Long Island shore, headed down the New Jersey shore and disappeared.
He believes it has headed north and is likely off Newfoundland or Labrador — or even Iceland or Ireland.
The monitoring was stopped in March because of a loss of state funding, but the scientists are hopeful the money will be restored.
Blue whales were almost hunted to extinction until 1966, when they be came a protected species. There are 1,000 to 2,000 of them now, and they normally are found in deeper water hundreds of miles offshore.
andy.geller
@nypost.com