ROSEAU, Dominica (AP) — Scientists studying sperm whales living around the Caribbean island of Dominica have described the basics of how they can talk to each other for the first time, in an effort that could one day help better protect them. .
Sperm whales, like many whales and dolphins, are highly social mammals and communicate by compressing air through their respiratory systems to create rapid clicking sequences that can sound like an extremely loud zipper underwater. Clicks are also used as a form of echolocation to help them track their prey.
Scientists have been trying to understand what these clicks mean for decades, but have made little progress. Although they still don’t know, they now think whales have click sequences that they believe form a “phonetic alphabet” that humans can use to create the rough equivalent of what people think of as words and phrases.
“We are now beginning to find the first building blocks of whale language,” said David Gruber, founder and president of the Cetacean Translation Initiative, or CETI, an effort dedicated to translating the communication of sperm whales.
In a study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, researchers analyzed more than 8,700 sperm whale click fragments, known as codas. They say they found four basic components that they think make up this phonetic alphabet.
This alphabet could then be used by whales in an unlimited number of combinations, said Pratyusha Sharma, the lead researcher on the paper.
“It doesn’t seem like they have a fixed set of codas,” said Sharma, an expert in artificial intelligence and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “This gives whales access to a much larger communication system,” he said, noting that whales seem to have a very large vocabulary.
Sperm whales have the largest brains of any animal on the planet; It weighs up to 20 pounds, six times the size of the average human brain. They live in matriarchal groups of about 10 individuals and sometimes encounter hundreds or even thousands of other whales. Sperm whales can grow up to 18 meters long and dive to depths of approximately 1000 meters to hunt for squid. They sleep vertically in groups.
Sperm whales appear to have complex social bonds, and decoding their communication systems could reveal parallels with human language and society, said Gruber, a biology professor at the City University of New York.
In Dominica, where approximately 200 whales live, scientists created a giant underwater recording studio with microphones at different depths to get enough samples of sperm whale clicks. Tags on the whales also record what position they were in when they clicked (e.g. diving, sleeping, breathing at the surface) and whether there were other whales nearby with which they could communicate.
Jeremy Goldbogen, an associate professor of oceans at Stanford University, called the new research “remarkable” and said it has “huge implications for how we understand ocean giants.”
Goldbogen, who was not involved in the research, said that if we can one day understand what sperm whales are saying, that information should be used for conservation purposes, such as minimizing the risk of whales hitting ships or reducing ocean noise levels.
Sperm whales are classified as “vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Whales have been hunted for centuries for the oil in their giant heads, and the species is still regenerating.
Diana Reiss, an expert in marine mammal behavior and communication at the City University of New York, said scientists have a pretty good understanding of certain aspects of marine animal communication, including the whistles used by dolphins and the songs sung by humpback whales.
But even this basic information is missing when it comes to sperm whales.
“What’s new about this study is that they tried to look at the basics of the whales’ communication system… not just the specific calls they make,” he said.
Reiss, who was not involved in the new research, said he hopes one day we will be able to match whales’ clicks with their behavior.
“We’ll never understand what the clicks mean to another whale, but we can understand what the clicks mean enough to be able to predict their behavior,” he said. “That alone would be an incredible achievement,” he said.
Gruber, the CETI founder, said millions and possibly billions of whale coyotes would be needed to collect enough data to understand what the whales are saying, but he expects artificial intelligence to help speed up the analysis. Other sperm whale populations (whales are found in deep oceans from the Arctic to Antarctica) likely communicate in slightly different ways, he said.
___
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Education Media Group. AP is solely responsible for all content.