Will we ever speak with whales?

The idea of talking to animals has fascinated humans for millennia. Stories are full of talking animals, like the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland or talking lambs, wolves, asses and lions in Aesop's fables. But the communication wasn't always for good — it's a talking serpent in the Book of Genesis which tempts Eve to eat the forbidden fruit.

In the real world, scientists are getting ever closer to understanding animal communication, if not talking back to them. And the one species we might soon understand is the sperm whale.

Scientists have spent years recording sperm whales, trying to define the rules of a sperm whale language, which they "whalish".

New research reveals sperm whale phonetic alphabet

Thanks to machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence, scientists have identified what they call a "sperm whale phonetic alphabet."

In a study published in Nature Communications, they describe how the team applied machine learning to identify the features of sperm whale communications and predict what they will say next.

"We found that their vocalizations vary significantly in structure depending on the conversational context, demonstrating a far more intricate system than previously thought," said Daniela Rus, a computer scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), US. 

Along with colleagues from MIT, Rus co-led the new research with others from Project CETI, a non-profit organization that says it aims to translate sperm whale communication.

Sperm whales communicate with codas

Sperm whales typically live in social clans of around ten animals. They communicate underwater over distances of hundreds of meters, via highly complex sequences of clicking sounds.

For the study, Rus and the team used data collected from whales from an  Eastern Caribbean Clan off Dominica. In 2023, Dominica said it would set up the world's first sperm whale reserve. 

The whales were tagged with recording devices which tracked their movements and recorded their clicks.

This revealed that sperm whale clicks are arranged in at least 150 known repeatable patterns, or codas.

Codas are the communication signals of sperm whales — bursts of clicks arranged in different frequencies and timescales. These vocalizations are a bit like the phonemes of human speech — like "æ", "p",  "l", and "ə".

"Before, people were analyzing single clicks, but in this study, they studied long sequences of clicks, and the intervals between them," said Roee Diamant, a marine scientist at the University of Haifa, Israel. Diamant was not involved in the research by MIT and CETI.

By showing long strings of codas in relation to each other, the researchers found new ways the clicks contained information.

"It shows the clicks have rhythm, a tempo, different lengths in sounds, and extra sounds. It means you have more ways for transmitting data. The whales are really packing a lot of information into these sequences of clicks," Diamant told DW.

We don't know what whales are saying, yet

In human speech, we know the phonemes "æ", "p",  "l", and "ə" put together contain meaning — they create the word "apple".

However the researchers can't yet decipher any meaning from sperm whale codas.

"We don't know what the whales are saying. We only know that, in principle, they can express a lot more [information], given the fixed set of sounds they are capable of producing," Rus told DW via email.

Diamant, meanwhile, said the field was getting closer to understanding some whalish, but that getting further would require a much broader approach than just studying vocalizations.

"We really need to see what they're doing during their communications, and this is what new research projects are doing. For example, we know there is a certain type of sound they make every time before they dive. Maybe it's like saying goodbye, I'm diving, or something like that," said Diamant.

What's fascinating, Diamant said, was that whales in different clans might carry different meanings in their codas.

"Sperm whales don't really mix between clans. Each clan uses a distinct set of coda patterns that function somewhat like dialects in human languages. It might be that each clan doesn't really understand each other," he said.

Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany

Primary source:

Contextual and combinatorial structure in sperm whale vocalisations, published in Nature Communications by Sharma, P., Gero, S., Payne, R. et al. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-47221-8