Talking to whales: can AI bridge the chasm between our consciousness and other animals?
Tom Mustill was kayaking with his friend Charlotte in Monterey Bay, California, when an animal three times the size of the largest Tyrannosaurus Rex hurtled from the water and crashed down on their tiny craft. As the flying humpback whale fell upon them and their kayak was sucked beneath the waves, Mustill assumed he would die. Miraculously he and Charlotte found themselves gasping for breath, clinging to their capsized kayak. How had they survived a smash with a creature three times the weight of a double-decker bus?
What happened next was almost as weird. Mustill and Charlotte went viral. Passing whale-watching tourists had videoed the pair’s near-death encounter and stuck it on YouTube. Mustill, a wildlife filmmaker, became what he calls “a lightning conductor for whale fanatics”. Interviewed by the global media, he was soon quivering with different and extraordinary stories of whale meetings from around the world: a submariner told him about whales singing to his ship; a book publisher reported being apparently scanned by the sonar-like echolocation of a pregnant female dolphin – a few days later, she discovered that she too was pregnant. “It was really addictive finding out all these other stories,” says Mustill, “because each one was like another lens on the animal and our relationship to them.”
These stories alone could fill a book, but Mustill first made a BBC documentary about humpback whales, before writing his book, How to Speak Whale, which is a thrilling exploration of past, present and future scientific endeavours to communicate with animals and better understand cetaceans in particular. What begins with questions about his own brief encounter soon plumbs profound scientific and philosophical depths.
As Mustill explains when I meet him beside a watery realm – a reservoir close to his home in east London – his wondering about how he survived became a bigger question. Professor Joy Reidenberg, a whale scientist, told him the footage suggested the whale veered away from Mustill’s kayak mid-breach, as if it didn’t want to hit them. “It made sense because I couldn’t figure out how it hadn’t smashed us to bits,” he says. “More spiritual friends said, ‘Ah well, the whale didn’t want to hurt you.’ I felt it was more like walking into a cellar at night, hearing a rat squeak and not wanting to tread on it – it’s not necessarily out of compassion. The whale might have thought, ‘Urgh, what’s that?’”
Did the whale mean to spare Mustill? “You can’t just ask a whale,” said Reidenberg. But perhaps we will soon. “This is the beginning of augmented biology,” he says, “where our human deficiencies – what we can’t sense, where we can’t go, what we actually have the time to find patterns in – all seem to be falling down.” We’re at a moment in time, he argues, comparable to Antonie van Leeuwenhoek’s mid-17th-century invention of the modern microscope and microbiology. Today, big data and machine learning could probe an impenetrable frontier – the chasm between our consciousness and those of other animals. Can we communicate with whales? If so, what will we say? And what will they say back?
The history of human relations with whales is mostly bloody and exploitative, but Mustill argues that science and technology helped change it for the better. One of many scientific heroes in his book is American researcher Roger Payne. In 1967, when commercial whaling was at its peak, Payne received recordings of whale sounds from the US navy, whose underwater listening stations were eavesdropping on Soviet submarines. Payne was haunted by the beauty of the sounds, and by the fact that they repeated themselves. His 1971 Sciencepaper on whale “song” was a blockbuster; Payne also released albums of humpback whale song, which moved millions of people. His science – and the power of song – chimed with the nascent environmental movement and Save the Whales became a sound of the 70s.
