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Like a group of scheming teenagers who change their conversation when a teacher passes by, the sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus) change the way they communicate when ships are nearby. The time between their clicks becomes shorter and they even change the way they use certain vowel sounds. The findings add another piece to the sperm whale language translation puzzle and are published today in the journal Green Computing.
talking whale
For the past six years, the CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative) Project has been listening to the chatter of sperm whales in the Eastern Caribbean off the coast of the island of Dominica. They have used various robotics and machine learning methods to study and try to translate what the whales say.
“We’re starting with an unknown communication system that’s almost like an alien,” says David Gruber, founder and executive director of the CETI Project and a National Geographic explorer. popular science. “And in the early years, it was about understanding the fundamental units that sperm whales use to communicate. Now, we are starting to create language models that are able to predict diving behavior from their voices, as we understand more about their alphabet.”
Codas, vowels and ships.
For this new study, the team used acoustic recordings of sperm whales near Dominica. They observed vocalizations called codas, or structured sequences of clicks that whales use to communicate. Sperm whales also use sounds that resemble vowels called vowel A and vowel I. In total, they analyzed more than 1,000 codas collected from acoustic tags placed on 15 individual whales over four years.
When boats are present, the whale’s codas change. The codas are shorter and will raise certain vowels, particularly the A vowels.
“One key thing is that they are [the codas] They will be very close. We call it click interval. So the space between each click becomes very compressed,” says Gruber. “And then they will increase the use of a certain vowel. So they will use more scrambled vowels. They [the vowels] “They become harder to distinguish and look like spaghetti.”
According to Gruber, this is similar to what happens with humans talking in a crowded and noisy nightclub or bar. The conversation likely won’t be a whisper, an in-depth analysis of a favorite author’s work, or an explanation of a complicated recipe. Instead, the noise may mean you have to ask the same question three times, and the conversation may focus more on having another drink, hitting the dance floor, or leaving.
The team also found that the presence of ships in the area can also be predicted by changes in the sperm whale’s codas, and that the codas themselves can indicate that a ship is present nearby.
“We recently discovered vowels in the vocalizations of sperm whales. This study is the first to show that whales change the way they use these vowels in response to their environment when there is navigation noise,” CETI Project linguistics leader Gašper Beguš of the University of California, Berkeley, added in a statement. “This may be a glimpse that the complex features of sperm whale codas potentially convey information about what is happening in the world around them.”
A team of ‘baby whales’
The results also show that certain features of the coda, particularly those related to the rhythm and timing of the click, are the strongest predictor of the presence of a glass. Noise produced by humans intersects and influences whale communication in other parts of the world, and may reflect stress-related behavior.
Long-finned pilot whales (Globicephala melas) in the busy Strait of Gibraltar have to reach the upper limits of their vocal range and are basically shouting at each other over shipping traffic. Ship noise is also forcing humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) mothers and their young dive into deeper, more dangerous waters. While Dominica is not currently on a major shipping route, overall global shipping has increased by 300 percent in just 30 years.
With more scientific listening on sperm whales, the CETI Project team hopes to translate whale language as best we can and use how humans impact it to help inform conservation policy. Learning a new language is also quite fun.
“We look more like baby whales. Now we understand the basics of the alphabet and vowels,” says Gruber. “So in a sense, we are imagining that we are now two-year-old whales, and as we move forward in the project, we will be three- and four-year-old whales, as we continue to gain a more complex understanding of their language.”
It’s an understanding that can help save one of the largest animals on the planet.
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