by ROSEAU, Dominica (AP) – Scientists studying the sperm whales that live around the Caribbean island of Dominica have described for the first time the basics of how they might be talking to each other, in an effort to one day could help them protect them better. .
Like many whales and dolphins, sperm whales are highly social mammals and communicate by squeezing air through their respiratory systems to make strings of rapid clicking sounds that can sound like an extremely loud zipper. water. The clicks are also used as a form of echo to help them track their prey.
Scientists have been trying for years to understand what those clicks might mean, with only minimal progress. Although they don’t know it yet, they now think there are sets of clicks that they believe make up a “phonetic alphabet” that the whales can use to construct a very rough equivalent of what humans think of as words. and phrases.
“We are now starting to find the first building blocks of whale language,” said David Gruber, founder and president of the Cetic Translation Initiative or CETI, an effort aimed at translating sperm whale communication.
In a study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, researchers analyzed more than 8,700 clips of sperm whale clicks, known as codas. They say they have found four basic components that make up what they believe is this phonetic alphabet.
Pratyusha Sharma, the paper’s lead researcher, said the whales could then use this alphabet in an unlimited number of combinations.
“They don’t seem to have a fixed set of codes,” said Sharma, an artificial intelligence and computer science expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “That gives the whales access to a much larger communication system,” she said, explaining that it was as if the whales had a very large dictionary.
Sperm whales have the largest brains of any animal on the planet at up to 20 pounds, as much as six times the size of the average human brain. You live in matriarchal groups of about 10 and sometimes meet up with hundreds or thousands of other whales. Sperm whales can grow up to 60 feet (18 meters) long and dive to nearly 3,280 feet (1,000 meters) in search of squid. They sleep vertically, in groups.
Gruber, a professor of biology at the City University of New York, said sperm whales appear to have sophisticated social connections and that dismantling their communication systems could reveal similarities to human language and society.
To get many examples of what happens when sperm whales are in Dominica, where there is a resident population of about 200 whales, scientists created a huge underwater recording studio with microphones at different depths. Tags on the whales also record where they are when they click – for example diving, sleeping, breathing at the surface – and if there are any other whales nearby that they might be communicating with.
Jeremy Goldbogen, an associate professor of oceans at Stanford University, called the new research “extraordinary,” saying it had “big implications for how we understand ocean giants.”
Goldbogen, who was not involved in the study, said that if one day we were able to understand what sperm whales were saying, that information should be used for conservation purposes, such as minimizing reduce their risk of being hit by ships or ocean noise levels.
Sperm whales are classified as “vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The whales were hunted for centuries for the oil in their huge heads and the species is still recovering.
Diana Reiss, an expert on marine mammal behavior and communication at the City University of New York, said scientists understand some aspects of marine animal communication reasonably well, including the whistles that dolphins use and the songs that humpback whales sing.
But when it comes to sperm whales, even basic knowledge is lacking.
“What’s new in this study is that they’re trying to look at the basis of the whales’ communication system … not just the specific calls they’re making,” she said.
Reiss, who was not involved in the new research, said she hoped one day we would be able to match the whales’ clicks with behavior.
“We will never understand what the clicks mean to other whales, but we may be able to understand what the clicks mean enough to predict their behavior,” she said. “That alone was quite an achievement,” she said.
CETI founder Gruber said millions and possibly billions of whale pods would be needed to collect enough data to try to work out what the whales are saying, but he hopes AI will help. speed up the analysis. He said that other populations of sperm whales – the whales found in the deep ocean from the Arctic to the Antarctic – probably communicate in slightly different ways.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Section is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Science and Media Education Group. The AP is solely responsible for all matters.
