With sets of sounds called clicks, sperm whales create ‘phonetic alphabet’

Reed. Scientists studying sperm whales living around the Caribbean island of Dominica have for the first time described the basics of how they might communicate with each other, in an effort that could one day help better protect them.

Like many whales and dolphins, sperm whales are highly social mammals and communicate by squeezing air through their respiratory systems to produce chains of rapid clicks that can sound like extremely loud zipping underwater. Those sounds are also used as a form of echolocation to help them track their prey.

Scientists have tried for decades to understand what those clicks might mean, with minimal progress. Although they don’t know it yet, they now believe that there are sets of them that they believe form a phonetic alphabet that whales can use to construct the rough equivalent of what people consider words and phrases.

We are beginning to find the first building blocks of whale languagesaid David Gruber, founder and president of the Cetacean Translation Initiative (CETI), an effort dedicated to translating sperm whale communication.

In a study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, The researchers analyzed more than 8,700 fragments of sperm whale clicks, known as codas, and found four basic elements that they believe make up this phonetic alphabet.

Pratyusha Sharma, lead researcher on the paper, said whales could use this alphabet in an unlimited number of combinations.

They don’t seem to have a fixed set of codasadded Sharma, an expert in artificial intelligence and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She added that That gives the whales access to a much broader communication system.and it’s like they have a very big dictionary.

Sperm whales have the largest brain of all animals on the planet, weighing just over nine kilos, about six times the size of a human brain on average. They live in matriarchal groups of about 10 individuals and sometimes encounter hundreds or thousands of other whales. They can grow up to 18 meters long and dive almost a thousand meters to hunt squid. They sleep vertically, in groups.

Gruber, a biology professor at the City University of New York, noted that sperm whales appear to have elaborate social bonds and that deciphering their communication systems could reveal parallels with human language and society.

To get enough examples of sperm whale clicks in Dominica, where there is a resident population of about 200 whales, scientists created a giant underwater recording studio with microphones at different depths. The tags on those cetaceans also record what position they are in when they click (e.g., diving, sleeping, breathing at the surface) and whether there are other individuals nearby that they might be communicating with.

Jeremy Goldbogen, associate professor of oceans at Stanford University, called the new research extraordinary. He highlighted that she had Vast implications for how we understand ocean giants.

Sperm whales are classified as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Whales were hunted for centuries for the oil contained in their giant heads and the species is still recovering.

Diana Reiss, an expert in marine mammal communication and behavior at the City University of New York, said scientists understand certain aspects of marine animal communication reasonably well, including the whistles used by dolphins and the songs of whales. Humpback whales. However, when it comes to sperm whales, even that basic knowledge is missing.

What’s new about this study is that they are trying to look at the basis of the whales’ communication system… not just the particular calls they make.he detailed.

Gruber noted that it would take millions and possibly billions of codas to collect enough data to try to figure out what the whales are saying, but he hopes artificial intelligence will help speed up the analysis. He said other populations of sperm whales (whales are found in deep oceans from the Arctic to Antarctica) probably communicate in slightly different ways.