Sperm whales are always talking to each other.
They use patterns of clicks called codas. Scientists have known this for a long time, but we still do not really know what the whales are saying.
Gašper Beguš, a linguist at UC Berkeley working with Project CETI, is trying to change that. His team uses AI to study thousands of whale sounds and look for patterns that would be almost impossible for a person to find by listening one recording at a time.
Recently, they found something unexpected. Some whale clicks seem to contain vowel-like sounds, a little like the vowels in human speech.
That does not mean we can translate whale language yet. In some ways, it makes the problem even more interesting.
A whale lives in a world very different from ours. It spends much of its life underwater, sometimes in almost complete darkness. Sound is one of the main ways it experiences the world. So even if we figure out the structure of whale communication, will we understand what the whales are talking about?
Beguš was once asked what he would say to a whale if we finally learned how to communicate with one. He said he would listen first. I think that may be the most interesting part of this whole project.
Humans have spent centuries studying animals. Maybe, for the first time, we are getting close to letting them tell us something back.
Daniel Kim, December 2024