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I realize you can just answer, "mysterious aliens beyond our understanding," but why would a space probe have a mandate of either talk to a whale for 30 seconds or destroy Earth and disable everything in its path on the way to Earth?
Why? What does that achieve?
I think the long and the short of it was that the writers and Leonard Nimoy were going to drive home An Aesop about environmentalism, no matter what it took.
There is also some parallelism here with the real world in addition to your sonar ping observation. For instance, I always recommend anyone to read "Last Chance to See," by Douglas Adams (yes, that Douglas Adams) and in this case the chapter on the Yangtze river dolphin wherein Adams and his crew (or rather, the crew with Adams tagging along) go to China to observe said creature. The Yangtze river dolphin was -- it is now believed to be extinct, but was not at the time the book was written -- functionally blind and relied on echolocation to navigate and, you know, not bump into things. Just through the course of normal river navigation there is so much noise in the Yangtze from engines and boat propellers that the dolphins were just about deafened as well as blind, which was probably a contributory factor to their extinction.
Humans didn't set about to blast the dolphins clean out of the water via noise pollution on purpose, but nevertheless that's exactly what we did just as a result of how our vehicles worked and without thinking about it.
That is my favorite Douglas Adams book and I have read everything he wrote. I wish more people would read it.
I thought they found more Yangtze River dolphins in a lake not that long ago? Did they not?
I haven't been following closely, but the last couple of potential sightings I've read about have been unconfirmed and certainly nobody's captured one or even a picture of one sufficient for a positive ID lately.
Its status is officially "functionally extinct" which does not necessarily rule out that some individuals may remain somewhere, but researchers are pretty much agreed that however many might be left in hiding (if any) probably aren't enough to sustain any kind of ongoing population.
As Granny Weatherwax famously observed, just one of anything doesn't work. If you only have e.g. one dolphin left, maybe it's not technically extinct, but that doesn't do you any good without a mate. Same deal if there are enough of them in nooks and crannies to theoretically breed but they're all geographically disparate and can't reach each other.
Or if you prefer:
Yeah, even Wikipedia goes with "probably extinct." How sad.
Anyway, it's an amazing book. There was also a radio series which is decent (I believe you can get it on the Internet Archive) and Stephen Fry did a follow-up TV series around 15 years go.
This is a good take.