Groundbreaking effort launched to decode whale language

On a crisp spring morning in 2008, Shane Gero overheard a pair of whales having a chat. Gero, a Canadian biologist, had been tracking sperm whales off the Caribbean island nation of Dominica when two males, babies from the same family, popped up not far from his boat. The animals, nicknamed Drop and Doublebend, nuzzled their enormous boxy heads and began to talk.

Sperm whales “speak” in clicks, which they make in rhythmic series called codas. For three years Gero had been using underwater recorders to capture codas from hundreds of whales. But he’d never heard anything quite like this. The whales clicked back and forth for 40 minutes, sometimes while motionless, sometimes twirling their silver bodies together like strands of rope, rarely going silent for long. Never had Gero so desperately wished he understood what whales were saying. He felt as if he were eavesdropping on brothers wrestling in their room. “They were talking and playing and being siblings,” he says. “There was clearly so much going on.”

Over the next 13 years, Gero, a National Geographic Explorer, would record and get to know hundreds of sperm whales. But he kept coming back to a revelation that struck him as he’d listened to Drop and Doublebend: If humans were ever to decode the language of whales, or even determine if whales possessed something we might truly call language, we’d need to pair their clicks with the context. The key to unlocking whale communication would be knowing who the animals are and what they’re doing as they make their sounds.

One of humanity’s most enduring desires is the enchanting notion that we might one day converse with other species. In the years since Gero’s insight, and partly because of it, the potential to bridge this communications gap has grown less fanciful. On Monday, a team of scientists announced that they have embarked on a five-year odyssey to build on Gero’s work with a cutting-edge research project to try to decipher what sperm whales are saying to one another.

Such an attempt would have seemed folly even just a few years ago. But this effort won’t rely solely on Gero. The team includes experts in linguistics, robotics, machine learning, and camera engineering. They will lean heavily on advances in artificial intelligence, which can now translate one human language to another without help from a Rosetta Stone, or key. The quest, dubbed Protect CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative), is likely the largest interspecies communication effort in history.

Already, these scientists have been at work building specialized video and audio recording devices. They aim to capture millions of whale codas and analyze them. The hope is to expose the underlying architecture of whale chatter: What units make up whale communication? Is there grammar, syntax, or anything analogous to words and sentences? These experts will track how whales behave when making, or hearing, clicks. And using breakthroughs in natural language processing—the branch of artificial intelligence that helps Alexa and Siri respond to voice commands—researchers will attempt to interpret this information.

Nothing like this has ever been attempted. We’ve trained dogs to respond to our commands, and dolphins have learned to mimic human whistles. We’ve taught chimpanzees and gorillas to use sign language and bonobos to answer questions by tapping symbols on a keyboard. An elephant in Seoul, named Koshik, can even speak a few words in Korean—really.

But the goal isn’t to get whales to understand humans. It’s to understand what sperm whales say to one another as they go about their lives in the wild.

The project started with another marine biologist and with a simple conceit: Great advances often come when top experts from different rapidly advancing disciplines collaborate.

David Gruber is also a National Geographic Explorer, but his interests have long crossed traditional boundaries.