This is pretty cool. From National Geographic:

“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.”

Meanwhile, machine learning (AI) researchers have started to succeed in translating certain human languages to English without having the slightest information about the non-English language used to create the “translation machine”.

Without going into detail, these new “machines” don’t strictly learn to translate between languages, they learn hidden structural links between languages.

So, as I understand it, the aim with whales is to use the (hidden) structural links learned between pairs of human languages, and then transfer this knowledge to whale “languages” and hope for the best.

It’s much more complicated than that, but I hope you get the idea at least.

“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.

“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.”

I’ll bet the most common whale sentence turns out to be, ‘Another ferking big container ship coming right at you, Gero!’

[Cover photo: Sperm Whales—National Geographic]