Scientists studying humpback whales living around the Caribbean island of Dominica have described for the first time the basic elements of how they might communicate with each other, in an effort to one day better protect them.
The light shines on a whale swimming off the coast of Dominica. Scientists studying humpback whales have described for the first time the basic elements of how they might talk to each other. (AP)
Like many whales and dolphins, sperm whales are highly social mammals and communicate by forcing air through their respiratory systems to produce a series of rapid clicks that can sound like an extremely loud shutter underwater. The clicks are also used as a form of echolocation to help them track their prey.
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Scientists have spent decades trying to figure out what those clicks might mean, with minimal progress. Although they still don’t know, they now think there are sets of clicks that they believe make up a “phonetic alphabet” that whales can use to build the very rough equivalent of what humans think of as words and phrases.
“We are now beginning to find the first building blocks of cetacean language,” said David Gruber, founder and president of the Cetacean Translation Initiative, or CETI, an effort dedicated to translating the communication of sperm whales.
In a study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, researchers analyzed more than 8,700 clips of humpback whale clicks, known as codas. They say they have found four basic components that they think make up this phonetic alphabet.
Pratyusha Sharma, the journal’s lead researcher, said whales could 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. “It gives whales access to a much larger communication system,” she said, explaining that it’s like whales have a very large vocabulary.
Sperm whales have the largest brains of any animal on the planet, weighing up to 20 pounds, as much as six times the size of the average human brain. They live in matriarchal groups of a dozen or so whales and sometimes encounter 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 pursuit of squid. They sleep vertically, in groups.
Gruber, a biology professor at the City University of New York, said sperm whales appear to have sophisticated social connections and that deciphering their communication systems could reveal parallels with human language and society.
To get enough examples of sperm whale clicks in Dominica, where there is a population of about 200 whales, scientists built a giant underwater recording studio with microphones at different depths. The tags on the whales also record the position they are in when they click – for example diving, sleeping, breathing at the surface – and whether there are other whales nearby to interact with.
Jeremy Goldbogen, an associate professor of oceans at Stanford University, called the new research “remarkable,” saying it has “huge implications for how we understand ocean giants.”
Goldbogen, who was not involved in the study, said that if we could one day understand what humpback whales are saying, we should use that knowledge for conservation purposes, such as reducing the risk of ship collisions or reducing ocean noise levels.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature has classified humpback whales as “vulnerable”. Whales have been hunted for centuries for the oil contained in their giant 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 have a fairly good understanding of certain aspects of marine animal communication, including the whistles used by dolphins and the songs sung by humpback whales.
But when it comes to sperm whales, even that basic knowledge is lacking.
“What’s new about this study is that they’re trying to look at the basis of the cetacean communication system … not just the specific calls they make,” she said.
Reiss, who was not involved in the new research, said she hopes to one day be able to compare whale clicks with behavior.
“We will never understand what the clicks mean to another whale, but we may be able to understand what the clicks mean enough to predict their behavior,” she said. “That alone would be an incredible achievement,” she said.
CETI founder Gruber said it would take millions, perhaps billions, of whale code to gather enough data to try to understand what the whales are saying, but he expects AI to help speed up the analysis. He said other populations of baleen whales — whales found in deep oceans from the Arctic to Antarctica — probably communicate in slightly different ways.
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Source: newstars.edu.vn