Scientists are learning the basic components of sperm whale language after years of effort

ROSEAU, Dominica (AP) Scientists studying sperm whales living 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 that could one day help protect them better

Like many whales and dolphins, sperm whales are mammals and very social they communicate by compressing air through their respiratory system to make chains of rapid clicks that can sound like a very loud zipper underwater. The clicks are also used as a form of echolocation to help them track their prey.

Scientists have spent decades trying to understand what these 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 whales can use to construct the very rough equivalent of what people think of as words and sentences.

Now they were beginning to find the first building blocks of whale 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 to study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, researchers analyzed more than 8,700 fragments of sperm whale clicks, known as codas. They say they have found four basic components that they believe make up this phonetic alphabet.

Pratyusha Sharma, the paper’s lead researcher, said this alphabet could be used by whales in an unlimited number of combinations.

They don’t seem to have a fixed set of codes, said Sharma, an expert in artificial intelligence and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This gives whales access to a much larger communication system, he said, explaining that it was as if whales had a very large dictionary.

Sperm whales have the largest brains of any animal on the planet at up to 20 pounds, up to six times the size of an average human brain. They live in matriarchal groups of about 10 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) to hunt 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 bonds 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 resident population of about 200 whales, scientists created a giant underwater recording studio with microphones at different depths. The whales’ tags also record what position they are in when they click, such as diving, sleeping, breathing at the surface, and whether there are other whales nearby to communicate 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 could understand what the sperm whales were saying, that knowledge should be used for conservation purposes, such as minimizing the risk of being struck by boats or reducing the ocean noise levels.

Sperm whales are classified as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Whales were hunted for centuries for the oil contained in their giant heads and the species is still recovering.

Diana Reiss, an expert on marine mammal communication and behavior at the City University of New York, said scientists understand certain aspects of marine animal communication reasonably well, including whistles used by dolphins and songs sung by humpback whales.

But when it comes to sperm whales, even this basic knowledge is lacking.

What’s new about this study is that they’re trying to look at the basis of the whales’ communication system … not just the particular calls they make, he said.

Reiss, who was not involved in the new research, said he hoped that one day we could link whale clicks to 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, he said. That alone would be an amazing achievement, he said.

CETI founder Gruber said it would take millions and possibly billions of whale codes to collect enough data to try to figure out what the whales are saying, but he hopes AI will help speed up the analysis. He said other populations of sperm whales than whales in the deep oceans from the Arctic to the Antarctic probably communicate in slightly different ways.

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