Scientists find a ‘phonetic alphabet’ in sperm whales’ songs
Plan to use AI to try to decode their language
Ever since the discovery of whale songs almost 60 years ago, scientists have been trying to decipher their lyrics. Are the animals producing complex messages akin to human language? or sharing simpler pieces of information, like dancing bees do? or are they communicating something else we don’t yet understand?
in 2020, a team of marine biologists and computer scientists joined forces to analyze the click-clacking songs of sperm whales, the gray, block-shaped leviathans that swim in most of the world’s oceans. on tuesday, the scientists reported that the whales use a much richer set of sounds than previously known, which they called a “sperm whale phonetic alphabet.”
people have a phonetic alphabet, too, which we use to produce a practically infinite supply of words. But Shane Gero, a marine biologist at carleton university in ottawa, ontario, and an author of the study, said it’s unclear whether sperm whales similarly turn their phonetic sounds into a language.
“the fundamental similarities that we do find are really fascinating,” Gero said. “it’s totally changed the way we have to do work going forward.”
Since 2005, Gero and his colleagues have followed a clan of 400 sperm whales around Dominica, an island nation in the eastern caribbean, eavesdropping on the whales with underwater microphones and tagging some of the animals with sensors.
Sperm whales don’t produce the eerie melodies sung by humpback whales, which became a sensation in the 1960s. instead, they rattle off clicks that sound like a cross between morse code and a creaking door. Sperm whales typically produce pulses of between three and 40 clicks, known as codas. they usually sing these codas while swimming together, raising the possibility that they’re communicating with one another.
over the years, Gero and his colleagues have reviewed thousands of hours of recordings of the undersea noise. it turns out that sperm whale codas fall into distinct types.
one type, for example, called “1+1+3,” consists of two clicks separated by a pause, followed by three clicks in quick succession.
with backing from philanthropists, Gero and his colleagues started “project cEti,” (for “cetacean translation initiative”), to investigate whether artificial intelligence and other computing advances could decode whale songs. (the name is a play on SEti, the famous effort to search for extraterrestrial life; whales are also known as cetaceans.)