Sperm whales are one of the loudest animals on this planet. They produce crackles and clicks to communicate with other whales that live around them or even a few hundred kilometers away. That sequence of sounds, known as ‘codas’, is complex enough to be recognized as a language. But could humans ever understand what these popular cetaceans are saying?
The answer is that, scientifically speaking, perhaps we could. However, to do this, researchers would have to collect and analyze an unprecedented amount of communications from various sperm whales.
With brains about six times the size of ours, sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus) have very elaborate social structures, spending much of their time socializing and exchanging codas. These messages can be short and last around ten seconds or last half an hour.
In fact, the complexity and duration of whale vocalizations suggest that, in principle at least, they are capable of exhibiting more complex grammar than other nonhuman animals.
Studying sperm whales
What little researchers know about sperm whales has been learned recently. They began to study them in the 1950s because they noticed that they made sounds, and it was not known that they used those sounds to communicate until the 1970s, as reported by the CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative).
On the other hand, according to the Woods Holes Oceanographic Institution, sperm whales are capable of diving more than 1,200 meters deep, that is, three times deeper than nuclear submarines. Because there is no light at that depth and it is completely dark, sperm whales have evolved to feed on squid and other small sea creatures. To do this, they make use of ‘echolocation’, a mechanism that they also use in their social vocalizations.
Researchers currently have recordings of about 100,000 clicks of sperm whales, painstakingly compiled by marine biologists over many years. However, to create automatic learning algorithms they need to collect around 4 billion clicks. So researchers are creating numerous channels to record sperm whales.
This includes everything from underwater microphones placed in waters frequented by sperm whales to robotic fish that can discreetly follow and hear whales from a distance. But even with all this data, will we be able to decipher it? Many of the machine learning algorithms have found that audio is more difficult to analyze than text.
The barriers between spoken words are more ambiguous and less regular, and therefore patterns may require more data to detect.
In addition, researchers have discovered that sperm whales have dialects, according to a study published in the journal Royal Society Open Science that analyzed the codas of nine different groups of sperm whales in the Caribbean over six years.
What one sperm whale tells another is still as intriguing and dark as the waters they swim in, but that mystery makes any kind of response worthwhile.
