Discovery of potentially complex communication could reveal way to interpret what these marine mammals are saying—but not everyone is convinced
Clicking sounds made by sperm whales, such as this pod near Dominica in the Caribbean Sea, are a more complex system of communication than previously known.When two sperm whales from the same family meet in the warm waters of the Caribbean Sea, they make clicking sounds, like telegraph operators tapping out Morse code.
“This is the tip of the iceberg,” says David Gruber, a biologist at City University of New York and an author on the new paper., an initiative founded by Gruber that has brought together high-profile marine biologists, computer scientists, and linguists to see whether advances in artificial intelligence and animal monitoring tools can open the door to cross-species communication.
At first glance, “you feel like is producing kind of the same call over and over again,” says Pratyusha Sharma, a Ph.D. student who did much of the analysis. “But one of the things that really stood out is how there’s this fine-grained variation.” The team’s analysis also revealed that whales would gradually slow or accelerate the tempo of a series of codas. Imagine a waltz that speeds up or slows down while always maintaining the same relationship between individual beats. An analysis showed codas delivered close in time shared similar shifts in tempo, supporting the idea that it was a gradual fluctuation, rather than chance. The team dubbed this phenomenon “rubato”—a musical term denoting a subtle change in tempo.
The research reveals intriguing new features in sperm whale communication, particularly the matching of tempo between whales, says Luke Rendell, a marine mammal scientist at the University of St Andrews whose work helped identify sperm whale dialects around the world. Gruber agrees that whales might not be using a language in the same way humans do. But he says the new research reveals more about the structure of a species’ communication system, much as scientists deciphered how the waggles of honey bees
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