MIT CSAIL and Project CETI researchers reveal complex communication patterns in sperm whales, deepening our understanding of animal language systems.

Rachel Gordon | MIT CSAIL
May 7, 2024
Categories: Research

The allure of whales has stoked human consciousness for millennia, casting these ocean giants as enigmatic residents of the deep seas. From the biblical Leviathan to Herman Melville’s formidable Moby Dick, whales have been central to mythologies and folklore. And while cetology, or whale science, has improved our knowledge of these marine mammals in the past century in particular, studying whales has remained a formidable a challenge.

Now, thanks to machine learning, we’re a little closer to understanding these gentle giants. Researchers from the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative) recently used algorithms to decode the “sperm whale phonetic alphabet,” revealing sophisticated structures in sperm whale communication akin to human phonetics and communication systems in other animal species.

In a new open-access study published in Nature Communications, the research shows that sperm whales codas, or short bursts of clicks that they use to communicate, vary significantly in structure depending on the conversational context, revealing a communication system far more intricate than previously understood.

Nine thousand codas, collected from Eastern Caribbean sperm whale families observed by the Dominica Sperm Whale Project, proved an instrumental starting point in uncovering the creatures’ complex communication system. Alongside the data gold mine, the team used a mix of algorithms for pattern recognition and classification, as well as on-body recording equipment. It turned out that sperm whale communications were indeed not random or simplistic, but rather structured in a complex, combinatorial manner.

The researchers identified something of a “sperm whale phonetic alphabet,” where various elements that researchers call “rhythm,” “tempo,” “rubato,” and “ornamentation” interplay to form a vast array of distinguishable codas. For example, the whales would systematically modulate certain aspects of their codas based on the conversational context, such as smoothly varying the duration of the calls — rubato — or adding extra ornamental clicks. But even more remarkably, they found that the basic building blocks of these codas could be combined in a combinatorial fashion, allowing the whales to construct a vast repertoire of distinct vocalizations.

More:
https://computing.mit.edu/news/exploring-the-mysterious-alphabet-of-sperm-whales/

thank you for posting~

More intelligent, sophisticated, organized and interactive.

That humans are in fact the true "alien" species. We appear to be the only inhabitants of this planet that have not evolved into our environment, where as all other species have.
We chose to destroy our surroundings to forge a life vs. adaptation of the surroundings.
The reason we don't know what animals are communicating is because we don't adapt and listen...

We have assumed animals are totally deserving of no respect and with no merit
except as a source of food, transportation and entertainment (zoos).

Humans have usually been about conquering others and assuming they
are the superior beings, everyone else is to be subservient.

Is spot on, throughout the entirety of our recorded history we have been taking stuff that didn’t belong to us and destroying the culture, land and lives of the conquered. This is why so many humans fear any extraterrestrial species, we assume they are like us and just want to conquer.

Destroying the indigenous culture has been what we do, I blame the destruction of Alexandria for the stupid ancient aliens theory.

Yes we assume an alien species would do the same.

I have not ruled out anything about alien theories.
Keeping an open mind about it.

But yes if other planetary inhabitants are like humans, it does not bode well.

By some alien culture that seeded humans with some info to kick start our knowledge. But some of the things on those shows are just too ridiculous. Modern day humans watching a show on tv or a smart device can’t fathom how ancient humans could possibly have built things like pyramids.

Let’s see: no distractions, eat, sleep, work, repeat. When you have time on your hands, knowledge is easy. And a large workforce without union representation can be made to work in crazy situations.

We underestimate the intellectual functioning of our ancestors.

We assume our era is the smartest when that is simply not true.

Historically humans have invented amazing and brilliant things.
Over and over.

The genetics are incontrovertible. And we're not the first species to make life very tough for our neighbors. See the Great Oxidation Event, when some bacteria figured out how to photosynthesize, producing free oxygen. A poison to most life on earth at the time. Free oxygen also royally mucked up earth's climate, making life tough for the photosynthesizers and everyone else. The difference is, we have a brain and can chose to limit our impact. Photosynthesizing cyanobacteria did not, much like MAGAs in that regard.

https://asm.org/articles/2022/february/the-great-oxidation-event-how-cyanobacteria-change

So many of us seem to be out of sync with our environment.

Thank you so much for sharing this. I have long been fascinated by their languages, and wished we had a cetacean rosetta stone.

Hopefully it's not "So long and thanks for all the fish."