Sperm Whales Have Something Like Language
Research suggests Sperm Whales use clicking sounds to communicate and experts are figuring out what they're saying
Hiya!
The global ocean is an alien world where majestic whales rule — even though they’re mammals like us and breathe air. It also seems whales are likely quite intelligent. The sperm whale has the largest brain on Earth — on land and in the ocean — and while brain size doesn’t necessarily mean high intelligence, sperm whales are highly social and known to display a wide range of complex behaviors during their long lives.
Yet, one aspect of sperm whale behavior has perplexed scientists for years — their communication style, or seemingly lack thereof. But now, through collaboration and technological advancements, experts have figured out a new approach for analyzing sperm whale communication — and the results suggest sperm whales’ complexity may extend even farther than anyone dreamed.
Sperm Whales
To refresh your memory, sperm whales are gray, with giant cubical heads. Their heads contain a waxy substance called spermaceti, which the species is named after and helps them focus on sound. From 1800 to 1987, spermaceti made sperm whales the primary target of the commercial whaling industry, which decimated sperm whale populations. All because humans used it in candles, oil lamps, and lubricants.
While whaling isn’t a major threat anymore, the sperm whale is still considered depleted under the Marine Mammal Protection Act and is on the Endangered Species Act as populations still haven’t recovered.
I already told you sperm whales have the largest brains of any animal on Earth, but they’re also the largest toothed whale and one of the most widely distributed marine mammals. They’re found in every deep ocean worldwide — in the Arctic, Antarctic, and even around the equator.
Sperm whales grow to between 40 and 50 feet (12 to 15 meters), longer than a semi-truck, and can dive an impressive 6,500 feet (1,981 meters) and stay there for over an hour at a time to hunt about a ton’s worth of fish, sharks, and their favorite, squid, per day.
Sperm whales are typically observed in groups called pods, which include about 15 to 20 female relatives and their young. These female pods mostly hang out, dive, and hunt together in the warmer waters around the equator. They even raise the calves communally by babysitting each other’s young.
Meanwhile, males migrate to colder oceans to the north and south, alone or in groups, and only visit the equator to mate. Their tale fluke, which measures about 16 feet (4.8 meters) from tip to tip, allows them to glide through the oceans at around 23 miles (37 km) an hour.
Communication
Despite everything experts have learned about sperm whales, their communication style remains mysterious. Unlike the melodious songs humpback whales are known for, sperm whales exchange clicking sounds that Lauren Sommer of NPR describes as “a blend of Morse code and popcorn popping.”
But biologist Shane Gero was intrigued by these clicks and spent years with sperm whales in the Caribbean as part of the Dominica Sperm Whale Project trying to understand them. Gero, who is also a National Geographic Explorer and co-author of the new study I’ll tell you about soon, observed sperm whales exchange vocal clicks for an hour. He told Sommer:
“It's not rude in sperm whale society to talk at the same time and overlap one another.”
Scientists have recorded these clicking conversations for decades, hoping to identify patterns. Experts have named the rapid-fire clicks sperm whales to create “codas,” which contain between 3 and 40 clicks each.
While studying a clan of 400 sperm whales in the Eastern Caribbean between 2005 and 2018, the Dominica Sperm Whale Project used underwater listening stations and placed acoustic tags on individual animals to record the whales. They managed to capture almost 9,000 uses of codas by at least 60 individuals. Gero told Jason Bittel of National Geographic:
“The luxury of the Dominica Sperm Whale Project, is that we've known these sperm whales for so long.” […] “We know that it's the mom talking to a baby, or the babysitter talking to her little cousin, or the social family context of it.”
Gero is also the biology lead for the Cetacean Translation Initiative, known as Project CETI, which works toward understanding what whales are saying. He explained to Bittel that watching whales communicate is,
“when you really start being able to turn towards, what are these whales needing to say to each other? What information might be being shared?”
Until recently, scientists analyzed sperm whale codas in isolation, but the process is time-consuming. Just a few minutes of sperm whale recordings can take researchers hours to catalog. However, a recent breakthrough, thanks to advanced technology and collaborative research, will make analyzing codas more efficient.
New Research
Gero, with his colleagues at Project CETI, the Dominica Sperm Whale Project, and Pratyusha Sharma, a Ph.D. student at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), published new research in Nature Communications that is revolutionizing our understanding of sperm whale communication.
Using the almost 9,000 codas collected by the Dominica Sperm Whale Project, the team wanted to try something different when analyzing them. Sharma explained to Bittel:
“If you were to listen to the sounds of sperm whales, or even plot them, like how they're traditionally plotted, it could look like the whales just make the same sounds over and over again.”
But for their study, the scientists invented a new plotting technique called an “exchange plot.” Using advanced computer algorithms, they discovered patterns in the whale codas, suggesting sperm whale communication may be more complex than previously thought.
Rather than plot the codas individually as previous research has done, Gero, Sharma, and their colleagues looked beyond the clicks to see how the sperm whales expressed them.
They wanted to understand how the codas relate to each other and focused on new variables like the tempo, sound length, and rhythm, along with any new or extra sounds that might change a coda’s meaning. To understand their process better, Gero suggests thinking about all the ways you can say a phrase to communicate different meanings. For example, he told Brillet:
“’Oh my God!’ is very different from ‘Oh, my God.’ It’s really the first time that we’re looking at codas in context of how they’re exchanged conversationally between whales.”
The analyses showed that the whales can also speed up or slow down the tempo beyond changing the number of clicks in a coda. In musical terms, changing the speed of a tempo is known as “rubato,” so that’s what the researchers call the whales’ ability. Sometimes sperm whales will even tack on an extra “click” at the end of a coda, which scientists call “ornamentation.”
In total, the researchers identified 156 unique codas with distinct rubatos, rhythms, and tempos. These findings reveal for the first time what the scientists call a “sperm whale phonetic alphabet.”
The team also thinks sperm whales might be capable of the duality of patterning, which is when meaningless individual elements are combined to express increasingly complex ideas. For example, we verbalize various sounds (syllables) that are meaningless on their own but form words when combined. In turn, words can be arranged to construct sentences, which forms more complex communication.
However, while the research suggests the variations in sperm whale codas may have more than one meaning, Sharma and the other researchers don’t go as far as calling sperm whale codas sentences. Sharma told Bittel:
“Caution should always be taken when comparing non-human to human behavior, including comparing animal communication systems to human language.”
Plus, even though the research suggests sperm whale codas are more complex than previously thought, we still don’t know what they’re saying. So, more research is needed before jumping to human comparisons.
Still, as the study’s co-author, and prominent professor of biology at the City University in New York and a National Geographic Explorer, David Gruber said:
“It's an incredibly important first step in kind of understanding the basic building blocks of the sperm whale communication system.”
In The Future
Now, researchers want to use this newly identified sperm whale phonetic alphabet to figure out how the components fit together and maybe even work out what it all means. Sharma told Clare Wilson of New Scientist that,
“Once you have this combinatorial basis, it allows you to take a finite set of symbols [and] compose them to create an infinite number of symbols by following a set of rules.”
For instance, future researchers could try matching codas with specific behaviors, like asking a pod-mate to watch their offspring while they hunt. It might not provide an exact word-to-word translation, but it could help experts grasp the gist of certain codas.
Beyond the exciting possibility of decoding sperm whale coda in the future, a better understanding of their communication would go a long way in better protecting these still endangered whales.
Even though commercial whaling is banned, human activity — including human-caused climate change, pollution, collisions with ships, getting tangled in fishing gear, and increased ocean noise — sperm whales remain highly vulnerable.
But if experts knew what sperm whales are saying, they could better protect them. The researchers also hope a better understanding of sperm whale communication might draw the public’s interest — since change happens the most and the fastest when we care about something.
Perspective Shift
Even though more research is needed, and it might be a while before we understand what sperm whales are saying, the prospect is exciting for many reasons. For one, the researchers are probably correct that more people will be interested in sperm whale conservation if they know the whales have language since it’s hard not to draw parallels between us and them. (Although, I wish it didn’t require such a revelation for people to care about conserving whales.)
Another reason is that humans have long searched for intelligent life beyond ours. We thought we were alone in our intelligence on this planet and have shifted to exploring the universe for intelligent life.
Yet, now we’re finding an abundance of intelligent life right here that we’ve overlooked. Elephants, octopuses, sperm whales, and many other animals show signs of complex intelligence. Imagine what life might be like if we could communicate with them. Besides, learning how animals communicate might better prepare us if aliens do ever make contact, just sayin’.
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“It's not rude in sperm whale society to talk at the same time and overlap one another.”
So unlike humans, they don’t think that what they’re saying is more important than anyone else. They’re actually willing to listen to each other. What a refreshing concept!
Thanks so much for another incredible read, if we understood more what these animals are saying to each other we might get along with each other a little better.
Very interesting. I’ll bet one thing they’re saying is “Thanks for the fish”.