Whales use complex communication systems we still don’t understand, a trope exploited in sci-fi shows like Apple TV’s Extrapolations. That show featured a humpback whale (voiced by Meryl Streep) discussing Mahler’s symphonies with a human researcher via some AI-powered inter-species translation app developed in 2046.
We’re a long way from that future. But a team of MIT researchers has now analyzed a database of Caribbean sperm whales’ calls and has found there really is a contextual and combinatorial structure in there. But does it mean whales have a human-like language and we can just wait until Chat GPT 8.0 to figure out how to translate from English to Sperm-Whaleish? Not really.
One-page dictionary
“Sperm whales communicate using clicks. These clicks occur in short packets we call codas that typically last less than two seconds, containing three to 40 clicks,” said Pratyusha Sharma, a researcher at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the lead author of the study. Her team argues that codas are analogues of words in human language and are further organized in coda sequences that are analogues of sentences. “Sperm whales are not born with this communication system; it's acquired and changes over the course of time,” Sharma said.
Seemingly, sperm whales have a lot to communicate about. Earlier observational studies revealed that they live a fairly complex social life revolving around family units forming larger structures called clans. They also have advanced hunting strategies and do group decision-making, seeking consensus on where to go and what to do.
Despite this complexity in behavior and relationships, their vocabulary seemed surprisingly sparse.
Sharma’s team sourced a record of codas from the dataset of the Dominica Sperm Whale Project, a long-term study on sperm whales that recorded and annotated 8,719 individual codas made by EC-1, a sperm whale clan living in East Caribbean waters. Those 8,719 recorded codas, according to earlier research on this database, were really just 21 coda types that the whales were using over and over.
A set of 21 words didn’t look like much of a language. “But this [number] is exactly what we found was not true,” Sharma said.
Fine-grained changes
“People doing those earlier studies were looking at the calls in isolation... They were annotating these calls, taking them out of context, shuffling them up, and then tried to figure out what kind of patterns were recurring,” Sharma explained. Her team, by contrast, analyzed the same calls in their full context, basically looking at entire exchanges rather than at separate codas. “One of the things we saw was fine-grained changes in the codas that other whales participating in the exchange were noticing and reacting to. If you looked at all these calls out of context, all these fine-grained changes would be lost; they would be considered noise,” Sharma said.
The first of those newly recognized fine-grained changes was termed “rubato,” borrowed from music, where it means introducing slight variations in the tempo of a piece. Communicating sperm whales could stretch or shrink a coda while keeping the same rhythm (where rhythm describes the spacing between the clicks in a coda).
The second feature the researchers discovered was ornamentation. “An ornament is an extra click added at the end of the coda. And when you have this extra click, it marks a critical point, and the call changes. It either happens toward the beginning or at the end of the call,” said Sharma.
The whales could individually manipulate rubato and ornamentation, as well as previously identified rhythm and tempo features. By combining this variation, they can produce a very large variety of codas. “The whales produce way more combinations of these features than 21—the information-carrying capacity of this system is a lot more capable than that,” Sharma said.
Her team identified 18 types of rhythm, three variants of rubato, five types of tempo, and an ability to add an ornament or not in the sperm whale’s communication system. That adds up to 540 possible codas, of which there are roughly 150 these whales frequently used in real life. Not only were sperm whales’ calls built with distinctive units at a coda level (meaning they were combinatorial), but they were compositional in that a call contained multiple codas.
But does that get us any closer to decoding the whale’s language?
“The combinatoriality at the word level and compositionality at the sentence level in human languages is something that looks very similar to what we found,” Sharma said. But the team didn’t determine whether meaning was being conveyed, she added. And without evidence of meaning, we might be barking up the wrong tree entirely.
Those 8,719 recorded codas, according to earlier research on this database, were really just 21 coda types that the whales were using over and over. A set of 21 words didn't look like much of a language. “But this [number] is exactly what we found was not true,” Sharma said.
Sperm whales rattle off pulses of clicks while swimming together, raising the possibility that they're communicating in a complex language. Ever since the discovery of whale songs almost 60 years ago, scientists have been trying to decipher their lyrics.
Sperm whales converse with one another through codas, short bursts of clicks with varying inter-click intervals, meaning the time to send, receive, and process communication. Their clicks create the codas, which are exchanged in long sequences, similar to a conversation.
Reiss said she thinks we will never be able to understand what the clicks mean to another whale, but understanding "what the clicks mean enough to predict their behaviour" would in itself "be an amazing achievement."
In killer whales, each family group has a specific dialect with its own variations in tone or frequency. Sperm whales within a given clan share vocalization patterns to communicate, recognize and establish social ties, but a female and her newborn use a distinct pattern to identify one another.
They are one of the loudest animals on the planet, but they vocalize in the infrasonic frequency range (too low for humans to hear). But the cool thing about blue whales is that recorders can pick them up hundreds of miles away from where the animal is vocalizing.
The whale is particularly famous for its melodious songs that echo in a hauntingly beautiful manner. But the singing may serve as more than a recreational pastime and, perhaps, serve as a way to communicate with other whales many miles away.
Like many whales and dolphins, sperm whales are highly social mammals and communicate by squeezing air through their respiratory systems to make strings of rapid clicks that can sound like an extremely loud zipper underwater. The clicks are also used as a form of echolocation to help them track their prey.
For this reason, sound has evolved to be one of the principal modes of information transmission for intelligent species like whales and dolphins, who have the capacity to learn complex combinations of sounds to mean specific messages (like languages in humans).
The range of frequencies that whales use are from 30 Hertz (Hz) to about 8,000 Hz, (8 kHZ). Humans can only hear part of the whales' songs. We aren't able to hear the lowest of the whale frequencies. Humans hear low frequency sounds starting at about 100 Hz.
Whales make noise to communicate, locate food, and find each other. A humpback whale in the singing position. Whales are very social creatures that travel in groups called “pods.” They use a variety of noises to communicate and socialize with each other.
Not only do they hear very well—some species hear more than 50 percent better than humans do—but many have also evolved vocalizations specialized for communication, navigation, and locating food. Communication is probably the most important use of sound among cetaceans.
Whales and dolphins communicate in many ways with each other, from the body language of posturing, to the high pitched 'signature whistles' of bottlenose dolphins.
Whale and dolphin brains contain specialized brain cells called spindle neurons. These are associated with advanced abilities such as recognising, remembering, reasoning, communicating, perceiving, adapting to change, problem-solving and understanding. So it seems they are deep thinkers!
Sperm whales -- which have the largest brains of any animal species on Earth -- can combine and modulate different clicks and rhythms to create complex calls, similar to human language, according to the study, which notes the sequences of clicks sperm whales project are called codas.
Recent studies have offered additional examples of "talking" animals: a beluga whale in San Diego's National Marine Mammal Foundation that could say the word "out," and a zoo elephant in South Korea named Koshik that can say, "hello," "good," "no," "sit down" and "lie down" in Korean.
One of the most widely accepted theories is that male whales use songs to attract females during the whale breeding season. A powerful and complex song may signal to females that a male is strong and genetically fit.
Whale vocalizations are the sounds made by whales to communicate. The word "song" is used in particular to describe the pattern of regular and predictable sounds made by some species of whales (notably the humpback and bowhead whales) in a way that is reminiscent of human singing.
Whales make noise to communicate, locate food, and find each other. A humpback whale in the singing position. Whales are very social creatures that travel in groups called “pods.” They use a variety of noises to communicate and socialize with each other.
Introduction: My name is Errol Quitzon, I am a fair, cute, fancy, clean, attractive, sparkling, kind person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.
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