AI Being Tapped to Understand What Whales Say to Each Other
AI is being applied to whale research, especially to understand what whales are trying to communicate in the audible sounds they make to each other in the ocean.
For example, marine biologist Shane Gero has worked to match clicks coming from whales around the Caribbean island nation of Dominica, to behavior he hopes will reveal the meanings of the sounds they make. Gero is a behavioral ecologist affiliated with the Marine Bioacoustics Lab at Aarhus University in Denmark, and the Department of Biology of Dalhousie University of Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Gero works with a team from Project CETI, a nonprofit that aims to apply advanced machine learning and state-of-the-art robotics to listen to and translate the communication of whales. Project CETI has recently announced a five-year effort to build on Gero’s work with a research project to try to decipher what sperm whales are saying to each other, according to a recent account inNational Geographic.
The team includes experts in linguistics, robotics, machine learning, and camera engineering. They will lean on advances in AI which can now translate one human language to another, in what is believed to be the largest interspecies communication effort in history.
The team has been building specialized video and audio recording devices, which aim to capture millions of whale sounds and analyze them. They hope to gain insight into the underlying architecture of whale chatter.
“The question comes up: What are you going to say to them? That kind of misses the point,” Gero stated. “It assumes they have a language to talk about us and boats or the weather or whatever we might want to ask them about.”
The scientists wonder whether whales have grammar, syntax or anything analogous to words and sentences. They plan to track how whales behave when making or hearing clicks. Using advances in natural language processing, researchers will try to interpret this information.
The Project CETI team includes David Gruber, a professor of biology and environmental science at City University of New York. He became interested in sperm whales while a fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute. He wondered if sperm whales could have a communication system that could be called language, that linguists heretofore have thought non-human animals lack. After learning of Gero’s work, the two joined forces.
Gruber’s machine learning colleagues applied AI techniques to some of Gero’s audio, to identify individual sperm whales from their sounds. The system was right more than 94% of the time. The fact that whales rely almost exclusively on acoustic information, narrowed the task.
The CETI researchers have spent a year developing an array of high-resolution underwater sensors that will record sound 24 hours a day across a vast portion of Gero’s whale study area off Dominica. Three of these listening systems, each attached to a buoy at the surface, will drop straight down thousands of feet to the bottom, with hydrophones every few hundred meters.
“We want to know as much as we can,” Gruber stated to National Geographic. “What’s the weather doing? Who’s talking to who? What’s happening 10 kilometers away. Is the whale hungry, sick, pregnant, mating? But we want to be as invisible as possible as we do it.”
Similar whale research is going on in Alaska, where scientists are using a machine learning application to collect information essential to protect and recover the endangered Cook Inlet beluga whale population, according to a post from NOAA Fisheries. (NOAA is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, an agency within the US Department of Commerce.)
In 1979, the Cook Inlet beluga population began a rapid decline. Despite being protected as an endangered species since 2008, the population still shows no sign of recovery and continues to decline.
Beluga whales live in the Arctic or sub-Arctic.
