New research in Monterey Bay finds whale communication more complex than originally thought

By Molly McCrea

South of Santa Cruz, where coastal waters meet the open Pacific, are the deep waters of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. It’s home to an amazing array of creatures: over 300 marine mammal species, 525 fish species, and a vast number of invertebrates.

“The coast of California, especially here in central California, is an amazing place for marine mammal diversity,” explained Dr. Ari Friedlaender, a renowned marine ecologist in the Ocean Sciences Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. 

Friedlaender is an expert in California’s imperiled whale populations. The Friedlaender Lab seeks to use new biotelemetry technology to better understand the underwater behavior and ecology of marine mammals that live mostly hidden from our eyes.

Included in the sanctuary are several species of whales, including humpbacks, gray whales, killer whales and sperm whales.
A sperm whale was recently spotted off Monterey Bay in early February. These whales, who are champion deep divers, are a challenge to study.

“They dive very deep and live in the open ocean, and it’s actually very difficult to follow them,” said Professor Gašper Beguš, a linguist at U.C. Berkeley. He is also a member of Project Ceti, a nonprofit that applies advanced machine learning and state-of-the-art robotics to listen to sperm whales more accurately and decipher their communications.

For Beguš, these whales have grabbed the attention of his expert ears.

“I spend a lot of time just listening. I have them on my computer all the time. I listen to them,” said Beguš.

Beguš and his team are listening to more than 1,000 recordings of sperm whales to decode what they are saying. At first, the conversations sound like staccato clicks, followed by moments of silence. These groupings of clicks are called whale “codas.”

“It’s like this alien communication system,” Beguš said.

But then, with the help of AI and a custom machine learning program, the team made a major discovery that Beguš called “powerful” and “just amazing.” He explained that sperm whales live at a far slower pace than humans and that their time perspective is slower. With the machine learning program pointing the way, he and his team sped up the whale recordings and cut out the silent moments to more closely match the pace of human speech.

What they got was a revelation: the clicks are not just clicks.

“Their clicks are actually just very slow vowels,” Beguš said. “They’re very similar to our vowels when we speak.”

With vowels, it became clear to the linguist that sperm whale communication is far more complex and sophisticated than previously believed. Inside their heads, whales have phonic lips and an air sac that looks similar to how humans manipulate sound. 

Some of the codas also contained diphthongs, which are gliding, two-sound vowels. They can represent regional, social, and dialectal variations in a language.

 Beguš explained that sperm whales have dialects.

“It’s so obvious,” Beguš said. “I can listen to a minute of their conversation, and I’ll roughly know whether they’re from this clan or whether they’re from the Pacific or from the Atlantic Ocean.”

The findings and research are published in the journal Open Mind.

And while we still don’t understand a word of what these whales are saying, Friedlander says the effort is critical.

“It affords us an even greater connection to them, which hopefully down the line is something we want to preserve and protect even more,” Beguš said.

Sperm whales sleep vertically. Once we can communicate with them, Beguš knows what he would ask them first.

“For me, it’s always, ‘What do you dream about?'” he said.

Now, thanks to this research, we just moved a little closer to making that dream a reality.