Scientist helped decode whale’s alphabet
Ontario biologist part of major step toward connecting with another species
Despite dwelling in deep oceanic waters and many measuring larger than a school bus, sperm whales have more in common with us than you might expect.
The highly social and intelligent creatures communicate through a series of morse-code-like clicks, called codas. Now, after more than a decade of tracking their vocalizations in the east Caribbean, scientists have unravelled what they call the sperm whale “phonetic alphabet” — a major step toward translating the language of a different species.
“They’re fundamentally different from us. They live in the darkest parts of the ocean that even our best submarines have a hard time getting to on a regular basis,” Shane Gero, lead biologist for the project and a scientist in residence at Carleton University, told the Star. “And yet there are some things about being highly social, largebrained mammals that are parallel to us.”
The peer-reviewed study is the latest major paper from Project CETI (the Cetacean Translation Initiative), spearheaded by Gero and members of MIT’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Published Tuesday in journal Nature Communications, the study sheds new light on the complexities of whale speech.
How sperm whales communicate
Gero described his lifelong fascination with sperm whales that took root when he was a kid: “they’re this amazing enigma,” he said. The creatures have the largest brains of any animal and can dive to depths of 6,000 feet in search of giant squid and other prey.
“And yet, because they live farther from shore, we knew a lot less about them than we did orcas or bottlenose dolphins or even humpback whales,” he said.
The whales produce clicking sounds by squeezing air through their respiratory systems. Aside from using the zipper-like noise to converse with each other, it also serves as a form of echolocation to locate prey.
For years, Gero and other scientists with Project CETI worked from the island nation of Dominica, recording nearly 9,000 codas from at least 60 whales of the Eastern Caribbean clan.
“They make many of these codas back to back, sometimes for minutes or even hours, when they’re socializing or when they make deep dives together. That’s the basis of their communication system,” Gero explained.
In 2020, the thousands of recordings were shipped to collaborators at MIT, who analyzed the vocalizations using machine learning and AI technology.
The results suggested their calls were far more complex and nuanced than previously believed, sharing characteristics with other animal speech patterns — including humans.
“We’re now starting to find the first building blocks of whale language,” said David Gruber, founder and president of Project CETI, and a biology professor at the City University of New York.
The language of the sea
The team identified four features of whale speech: variations in tempo and rhythm, as well as context-specific alterations in length and occasional extra clicks added to some phrases but not others.
In English, we also produce specific sounds related to letters — a phonetic alphabet — which make up words that can then be combined into meaningful sentences, Gero explained.
It stands to reason then, that whales could also use their phonetic alphabet to create meaningful words and sentences that relay great amounts of information, he continued, although we do not yet know what they are saying.
“To be clear, we don’t make any claims about what the meaning of any of these codas are in the sperm whale communication system, just that it has a similar structural system (to us),” Gero said.
“It just means that there’s more space to potentially encode information.”
That said, we know distinct clans of sperm whales around the globe have their own regional dialects, that can help identify members of the same group when they converse with each other. “Sometimes there’s hundreds or even thousands of animals in the clan,” he added. “We know that these clans are sort of cultural boundaries between the animals.”
“(Sperm whales) have families and they appear to have a sense of identity. And they have to co-ordinate and make group decisions as a family,” Gero said.
“Those are where there will be similarities between our primate experience of the world and their whale experience of the same world.”
Will we be able to speak to sperm whales?
Jeremy Goldbogen, an associate professor of oceans at Stanford University who is unaffiliated with the study, called the new research “extraordinary” and had “vast implications for how we understand ocean giants.”
That being said, more research is needed before we can determine if communicating with whales is even possible — or if it would be a good idea to make contact in the first place, Gero said.
“The aspect of having a two-way communication isn’t really what drives me,” he explained. “… Fundamentally, this is about listening and trying to understand what’s important to whales, and then asking, well, what does that mean to us?”