Scientists hail breakthrough in decoding whale communication

After poring over recordings from sperm whales in the Caribbean, UC Berkeley linguist GasperBegus had an unlikely breakthrough.

According to a new study from Begus and his colleagues with Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative), the whales make sounds that resemble vowels, a key part of human language. Their research was published Wednesday in the journal Open Mind. 

Although scientists already knew that sperm whales communicate with codas — sequences of clicks analogous to Morse code — the study indicates a more complex communication system. 

“It was striking just how structured the system was. I’ve never seen anything like that before with other animals,” Begus, a UC Berkeley linguistics professor and the linguistics lead at Project CETI, told SFGATE. “We’re showing the world that there’s more than meets the eye in sperm whales and that, if one cares to look closely, they’re not as alien. We’re much more similar to each other than we used to think.”

With the help of a machine-learning model to identify patterns, Begus and his team combed through recordings collected from social units of sperm whales off the coast of the island of Dominica between 2005 and 2018. When they sped up the audio, removing the silences between clicks, they heard new patterns. They found acoustic properties that share similarities with two vowels — a and i — and several vowel combinations.

“Before, people were looking just at the timing and the number of clicks exchanged between sperm whales, but now we have to look at the frequencies, too. A whole new set of patterns have appeared,” Begus said. “Now, it’s one of the most complex non-human communication systems we have observed.”

Project CETI includes artificial intelligence expert researchers, marine biologists, cryptographers, roboticists and underwater acousticians — all trying to understand sperm whale communication. The title of the initiative pays homage to SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. 

Researchers from Project CETI published a study last year that described sperm whale codas with musical qualities like tempo and rhythm, creating a “sperm whale phonetic alphabet.” Their analysis expanded the known codas for the Caribbean clan, implying the whales can say much more to one another.

But some researchers have expressed doubt about the latest findings publicly, including about whether the whales produced the patterns on purpose or whether the scientists misinterpreted the recordings.    

Denise Herzing, a dolphin communication expert, told Science News that she objects to the word “vowel” out of concern that people might assume whales are using “something like human language.” Overpromising could hurt the scientific field, she suggested.

But Begus said the research only shows how much more we have to learn about whales’ style of communicating. He is particularly interested in exploring how the system may differ for whales between regions and how whale babies learn to communicate in this way. Most importantly, he wants to understand the meaning behind the sounds, as a “window into whale thoughts and lives.”

In the meantime, the newly published discovery has already triggered some ethical and legal questions for Begus: If whales have the capacity for language, they may need greater protections and rights. 

“Animal rights have been denied because people said they didn’t have feelings or feel pain — but science has proven all that wrong,” he said. “In a sense, language is the last frontier.”