0:00

This message comes from NPR

0:02

sponsor HubSpot. Imagine growing a

0:04

business with high quality leads,

0:07

fast closing deals, wildly happy

0:09

customers, and more benchmark breaking

0:11

quarters. It's not a miracle.

0:14

It's HubSpot. Visit hubspot.com to

0:16

get started today. This

0:19

message comes from NPR sponsor Synchrony

0:21

Bank, empowering you to tackle your

0:24

savings goals with flexible access to

0:26

your money and no monthly fees

0:28

or minimums. It's never been easier

0:30

to take control of your financial

0:32

future. Go to synchronybank.com/NPR. Remember FDIC.

0:36

You're listening to Shortwave from

0:39

NPR. Hey, Shortwavers. Regina

0:42

Barber here. So when

0:44

I think about whale songs, I think

0:46

this. But

0:50

not this.

1:03

That's a family of sperm whales. Here

1:05

today to tell us more about this

1:07

whale conversation is NPR's climate correspondent, Lauren

1:10

Summer. Hey, Lauren. Welcome back. Hey, Gina.

1:12

So, Lauren, I'm not going to lie.

1:14

This whale chatter kind of sounds like

1:16

bike spokes to me. Yeah,

1:21

I kind of get like Morse code

1:23

combined with microwave popcorn. Mmm, microwave popcorn.

1:26

I need to eat lunch. Okay. So

1:28

hearing these sounds makes me wonder, like,

1:30

are these whales really talking to each

1:32

other? And like, what are they saying?

1:35

Yeah. What is happening there? You're not

1:37

alone in wondering that. It's kind of

1:39

this age old question. Like, what are

1:42

animals saying? Right, of course. Yeah. And

1:44

especially whales because sperm whales have big

1:46

brains. They have close family groups and

1:49

they coordinate a lot. They

1:51

dive together. They hunt together. They

1:53

even babysit for each other. Shane

1:56

Garo, who is a sperm whale biologist who

1:58

has spent years with these whales. He

2:00

says he sees that kind of family

2:02

dynamic all the time. It's hard

2:04

not to see cousins playing while

2:07

chatting to not see mom's hand

2:09

over to a babysitter and Exchange

2:12

a few words before sort of walking out the

2:14

door so to speak to go eat in the

2:16

deep ocean Oh my gosh, I

2:18

can relate to this a lot as like the

2:21

older cousin babysitter and as a mom But

2:24

as someone who has listened to

2:26

like a lot of audio these

2:28

sounds sound pretty complicated to decode

2:30

They have so many clicks. Yeah,

2:33

it sounds pretty messy It's not

2:35

easy for us to figure out

2:37

but that's where computers are coming

2:39

in researchers are hoping artificial Intelligence

2:41

could tease out what the whales are

2:44

saying and as a first step They

2:47

figured out a sort of sperm

2:49

whale alphabet. Oh, okay an

2:51

alphabet So I'm this is starting to

2:53

sound like a language language. Okay, that's the

2:55

tricky word here. It's kind of a tough question There's

2:58

been a very heated debate for

3:00

years about whether animals can have

3:02

language or whether that's something special

3:04

that only we humans can claim So

3:08

today on the show how technology is helping

3:10

us figure out the mysteries of animal communication

3:13

And if we could figure out

3:15

what sperm whales are saying should we try to

3:17

talk to them? I'm Regina

3:19

barber and you're listening to show the

3:21

science podcast from npr Support

3:34

for NPR and the following message

3:36

come from the American Cancer Society.

3:38

Dr. Alpa Patel leads a team

3:41

that researches cancer risk factors, and

3:43

she shares how her team makes

3:45

an impact. We always

3:47

do what we like to think of

3:49

as actionable science. So the

3:51

work that we do makes its way

3:53

to things like nutrition and physical activity

3:56

guidelines for cancer.org, where millions of people

3:58

come each year to learn

4:00

about how they can

4:02

better prevent cancer. So

4:30

Lauren, sperm whales are somewhat famous for being like in

4:32

Moby Dick, but what are their

4:49

lives actually like? Yeah, so

4:51

sperm whales are diverse. They're

4:55

the size of a school bus, they're

4:57

kind of those big foreheads, for lack

4:59

of a better term, foreheads, and

5:02

they spend most of their time diving

5:04

in the deep ocean, searching for their

5:06

favorite food, which is squid. Me too.

5:09

They can go thousands of feet below the

5:11

surface, and so Shane told me they are

5:13

in the dark a lot. So

5:15

sound is everything to sperm whales. In

5:18

the darks of the deep ocean, these are

5:21

places where sunlight never gets to. So

5:24

they navigate their world

5:26

through sound, just like bats

5:28

in the dark sky, they use echolocation. And

5:33

they use sound to stay in touch with

5:35

one another and coordinate with the families in

5:39

which they live. Wow. Yeah, it's

5:41

also just hard to see underwater, right,

5:43

in general. So I can see how

5:45

sound would rule almost like everything. Yeah,

5:47

yeah. And they live in these tight-knit

5:49

groups. They're female led, so

5:52

there's grandmothers, mothers, and daughters. They all

5:54

stay together their entire lives. The

5:56

males get to hang out until they're adolescents, and then they

5:58

have to leave to head out on own. I

6:01

totally would love watching like these

6:03

whales family dynamics. Right, yeah,

6:05

because they live a long time. And

6:08

Shane studies these whales in the Caribbean

6:10

with the Dominica Sperm Whale Project. He

6:13

knows these families and they vocalize

6:15

a lot. They have long exchanges

6:17

with each other.

6:20

It's not rude in sperm

6:22

whale society to talk at the same

6:24

time and overlap one another. It

6:28

sounds like an extended family, like

6:30

loud summer barbecue. Yeah,

6:33

a lot going on. It sounds

6:35

kind of messy, but actually all

6:37

those clicks can be broken up

6:39

into patterns of clicks. And they're

6:41

ones that the whales use over

6:43

and over. They're called cotas. One

6:46

that's really common in the Caribbean

6:48

is the one plus one plus three

6:51

coda, which sounds like this. You know,

6:53

one plus one plus three. Sounds like a

6:55

salsa dance. Yeah, it's cha cha cha. Yeah.

7:02

So what sounds like a whole bunch

7:04

of like clicking is actually like these

7:06

discrete units, these discrete chunks. Yeah, yeah,

7:08

all kind of strung together and family

7:10

groups can have dozens of these different

7:12

cotas. They all have a different number

7:14

of clicks or a different pattern of

7:16

clicks. And

7:21

researchers like Shane, you know, they've been recording

7:23

these for years because they've been trying to

7:26

tease out the patterns and how

7:28

the whales use them. And more

7:30

recently, they teamed up with artificial

7:33

intelligence researchers in a collaboration called

7:35

Project SETI. And their goal

7:37

using that technology is to decode what

7:39

the whales are saying. So

7:42

AI has been learning human languages and

7:44

researchers are trying to like test the limits

7:46

of what it can do. But learning

7:48

whales seems really complicated. For sure. Yes.

7:52

You know, they kind of took this

7:54

first step where they use machine learning to

7:56

analyze more than 9000 recordings of sperm whales.

7:58

Wow. And Daniella who directs

8:01

MIT's computer science and artificial

8:03

intelligence laboratory, she told me

8:05

it was key to use computers because it could

8:07

find clicks that humans couldn't find on their

8:09

own. It really turned out that firmware

8:12

communication was indeed

8:14

not random or simplistic, but

8:17

rather structured in a very

8:19

complex combinatorial manner. They found

8:21

far more variation than researchers

8:23

thought there was. Like Shane says

8:25

sometimes it's the same coda, the same

8:27

set of clicks, but they make it

8:30

slightly longer. So that one plus one

8:32

plus three coda we talked about might be half a

8:34

second long or it might be 1.3 seconds

8:37

long, nearly three times as long, right?

8:40

And whale, the same whale will make short ones

8:42

and long ones and different families will make short

8:44

ones and long ones. Which kind of sounds like this.

8:52

That's subtle, right? Yeah, to us humans.

8:54

But whales actually pick up on these

8:56

differences and they even repeat them back

8:59

to each other. So, you know, sometimes

9:01

it's the tempo of the clicks that's

9:03

different. Sometimes the whales throw in an

9:05

extra click at the end of the

9:07

coda, Daniel says. And this was very

9:09

interesting. We started wondering is this extra

9:11

click sort of like a, the end

9:13

of a sentence or something else. And

9:15

doing this analysis, they identified what they're

9:18

calling the sperm whale phonetic alphabet, which

9:20

catalogs all these variations. It's

9:22

actually making me think like, what if

9:24

they're slang with the different family members?

9:26

Okay. If we're using like the word

9:28

alphabet, that again makes me think of

9:31

language. Like are all these different codas

9:33

different words? Are they like parts of

9:35

words? You know, like the sounds that

9:37

make up an alphabet. Right. And that's

9:39

what's hard to figure out because the

9:41

thing that researchers say is exciting is

9:44

that these codas don't seem to

9:46

be random. They can be

9:48

predicted by machine learning in

9:51

the same way in which you

9:53

might predict the sequence of syllables

9:55

or the sequence of words in

9:57

a sentence. She's saying there could be a

9:59

possible. ability of recombining these

10:01

codas to make meaning. And

10:04

that's something we do as humans in language,

10:06

right? We take sounds that don't really mean

10:09

anything on their own, like short,

10:11

right? Shh, ort becomes short,

10:13

and we combine it to make something

10:15

that has meaning. Okay, but like, just because you

10:17

understand like the rhythm of the cliques doesn't mean

10:20

you might understand like what they mean.

10:23

So could scientists understand what the sperm

10:25

whales mean? Like how could they prove

10:27

sperm whales are conveying complex things like

10:30

language? Yeah, that's really hard to do.

10:33

Shane says they're working on recording sperm whales

10:35

and observing their behavior at the same time

10:37

to kind of build up a data set.

10:39

But you know, it's kind of hard to

10:41

know if you're capturing their world and what's

10:43

important to a sperm whale in that moment. If

10:45

we only ever studied North

10:47

American English-speaking society in the

10:49

dentist's office, first of all,

10:51

we'd walk away with the fact that the key part

10:54

of their communication system is the

10:56

word root canal, right? And

10:58

we'd just be wrong because we

11:00

didn't have a comprehensive picture. Yeah,

11:02

I mean, that's a really good point. And those

11:04

are two words in a dentist's office I'm really

11:06

actually scared of. Yes, very much so.

11:09

And it kind of

11:11

just shows like we're used to looking at things

11:13

in a very human centric way.

11:16

And people have been debating this animal language

11:18

question for a really long time. It

11:22

goes back, you know, 1970s researchers

11:24

were teaching chimps and gorilla sign

11:26

language, you might remember. Yeah. And

11:29

the question was whether they were copying

11:31

us or really using language the way

11:33

we do. And there's a

11:35

lot of other examples like bees, you know, they

11:37

do that special waggle dance in a hive. It

11:40

tells other bees like how far the flowers

11:42

and what direction they are. And I talked

11:44

to Taylor Hirsch about this. She's a researcher

11:46

at the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon

11:49

State University and she studies sperm whales.

11:51

Some of what they're doing may be

11:53

totally different from our way of communicating.

11:56

And we're probably never going to be able to fully

11:58

grasp those differences. So

12:00

I think there is value in

12:03

seeing as patterns in animal communication

12:05

near patterns in human language. But

12:07

I think it's important to remember that perhaps

12:09

just because we don't find evidence of something

12:11

doesn't mean that that system isn't complex in

12:13

ways that we don't understand. Right.

12:16

Like, can our human brains

12:19

comprehend whatever system these sperm

12:21

whales have worked out for themselves? Like, it

12:23

actually makes me think of, like, a rival,

12:25

that film. Oh, yeah. All

12:27

we really know is how our own

12:29

language works. Right. And that's, I guess,

12:32

where we start. Yeah. And researchers like

12:34

Shane, he agreed that looking for those

12:36

similarities is valuable. You know, when we can

12:38

talk about whales and how important

12:40

their grandmothers are or how important being

12:42

a good neighbor is or learning from

12:44

different cultures is and the importance of

12:46

cultural diversity in society, that really sort

12:49

of resonates with people and can

12:51

drive change in human behavior in

12:54

order to sort of protect the whales. And, you

12:57

know, sperm whales are still coming back

12:59

from commercial whaling where their numbers were

13:01

just decimated. Today, they face threats like

13:03

ship strikes and plastics in the ocean.

13:05

So, Shane said it's important to appreciate

13:07

what they share with us because we

13:10

have such a big impact on their

13:12

world. So if artificial intelligence

13:14

figures out sperm whale language, what's the

13:16

next step? Like, are researchers hoping to

13:18

talk to them? Yeah, it's kind of

13:20

an ethical question, right? Like, do you

13:23

play some sounds back to sperm whales

13:25

to try to say something to them?

13:27

What does that do to them, especially

13:29

if we don't really know exactly what

13:31

we're saying to them? Right. Like, are

13:33

we going to scare them? Like, like,

13:35

I would be a little worried. And

13:38

do we want to like hear what they say back

13:40

to us? Like humans, they might

13:42

not like us. Yeah, we

13:45

don't have a great track record.

13:48

Right. And, you know,

13:50

everyone I talk to in reporting this,

13:52

all these researchers told me they get asked

13:54

a lot of what they would want

13:56

to say to sperm whales. And Taylor

13:59

told me, you know, She's not like

14:01

raring to go on this. There's this

14:03

implicit like do I have the

14:05

right? What gives me the right to say anything

14:07

to them? I Mean

14:10

sperm whales have been communicating with

14:12

each other a lot longer than

14:14

humans have right? They've been doing it

14:16

before humans had language. So clearly

14:19

they've got it figured out on their own Wow,

14:22

Lauren, thank you so much for

14:25

communicating all this to all of us. Thank

14:27

you so much. Yeah, thanks Before

14:31

we head out a quick shout out to our shortwave plus

14:33

listeners We appreciate you and we thank you

14:35

for being a subscriber Here

14:37

we've plus help support our show and if you're a

14:39

regular listener We'd love for you to join so you

14:41

can enjoy the show without sponsor interruptions find

14:44

out more at plus dot NPR org

14:46

slash This

14:49

episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and edited

14:51

by your showrunner Rebecca Ramirez Lauren check

14:53

the fact Patrick Murray and

14:56

Stacy Abbott were the audio engineers Betts

14:58

on it in is our senior director and

15:00

Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of

15:02

podcasting strategy I'm Regina Barber.

15:05

Thanks as always for listening to sure

15:07

with the science podcast This This

15:21

message comes from NPR sponsor,

15:23

Viore, a new perspective on

15:25

performance apparel. Clothing designed with

15:27

premium fabrics, built to move

15:29

in, styled for life. For

15:31

20% off your first purchase,

15:33

go to viore.com/ NPR. Support

15:36

for Npr and the following message

15:38

come from our sponsor Whole Foods

15:40

Market. Whos that? celebratory brunch for

15:42

a less with three Sixty Five

15:44

by Whole Foods Market featuring while

15:46

it happy fines like hold smoked

15:48

Atlantic salmon and. More. Last

15:54

year over 20,000 People joined

15:56

the body electric study to change

15:58

their sedentary. Greenfield lives

16:00

in. Guess What? We saw

16:03

amazing effects. Now you can try

16:05

and br his body. Electric Challenge

16:07

yourself listen to updated a

16:09

new episodes where ever you

16:11

get your podcasts.