Can We Talk to Whales?

Three humpback whales swim in Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary. (Photo: Ed Lyman/NOAA Fisheries Permit #14682-38079)

Earlier this week, Ross Andersen wrote an article for The Atlantic that asked questions about whether whales have language, how they communicate, and—if we can learn how to speak their language—what we should say to them.

Project CETI (which I’m guessing is a play on SETI?) aims to learn what whales are saying by recording their clicking sounds (using special microphones, known as hydrophones) and then trying to decipher them with the help of AI and neural networks. Another project, the Earth Species Project, will use AI and a collection of humpback whale calls (built by Michelle Fournet, an acoustic ecologist) to create a way of being able to talk back to them.

I, for one, think this is a splendid idea. One of my all time favorite episodes of Wild Thing is in Season 2—it’s called “E.T. Phone Home” and it’s about how we’d communicate with aliens if we ever found them.

Listen to the episode

And learn more about Wild Thing: Space Invaders

An organization known as METI (which stands for Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence) thinks we should send targeted, intelligent messages towards areas of the galaxy that might support life—the sooner the better. I tend to agree but that whole process of sending and (maybe) receiving a message will take a VERY long time. So in the meantime, a couple of other scientists I spoke with suggested that we could actually start practicing how we’d communicate with aliens by talking to some of the life forms that we share this planet with—namely whales and dolphins.

Do dolphins have language?

Dr. Laurance Doyle is an astrophysicist affiliated with the SETI (not CETI) Institute. He’s spent a lot of time researching exoplanets and thinking about extraterrestrial life, but he also developed an interest in animal communication. He was specifically looking into something called Zipf’s Law, which shows that all human languages follow a certain pattern. (I’m not going to get into the details of that here but I break it down very clearly in that podcast episode and in Is There Anybody Out There?)

Zipf's law plot for the first 10 million words in 30 Wikipedias (as of October 2015) in a log-log scale, created by SergioJimenez.

Doyle and Dr. Brenda McCowan (of UC Davis) and her graduate student Sean Hanser tested the hypothesis that applying Zipf’s Law to dolphin squeaks and whistles would result in the same pattern as human languages. And it did.

“It was one of those moments in science where you go, ‘Whoa,’” Doyle told me. “I remember very clearly that I went and had a cup of tea and then did the plot again, just to make sure.”

Conversations with whales

And whales? Well, he told me, they have their own syntax—this is how words and phrases are arranged to create sentences that make sense. They can also fill in blanks of a “conversation”. Humans do this all the time—we can determine what someone is saying even if we can’t hear all of the words. Doyle told me that whales can do the same—even if they miss part of a call, they can still figure out the message.

“We were recording humpack whales in the presence and absence of boat noise,” he explained. “We wanted to see how much they were being affected by the noise.”

Humans, if there’s a lot of background noise, have to slow down what they’re saying in order to get their point across. Doyle observed a pod of humpback whales while they were in the process of feeding, which requires them to coordinate with each other. He found that, like humans, the whales also had slow down their “talking” when there was boat noise—but not as much as he’d calculated.

“They didn't have to slow down all the way because they could fill in the missing words because there are quote, big quotes here, grammar and spelling rules.”

Practice for aliens?

Pretty amazing stuff. And no, as that Atlantic article pointed out, we still don’t know what the whales are saying. But if whales and dolphins are following the same patterns as human speech, it could be that these kinds of language patterns are universal—they’re literally all over the universe. Should we ever be lucky enough to get ahold of an alien transmission, learning to speak (or at least understand) whales might be the first step in deciphering that extraterrestrial message.

And as for what we should say to the whales and dolphins? I think we should issue an enormous apology for the damage we’ve caused them—and then let them decide if they want to talk to us.

For more on Zipf’s Law, dolphin and whale speech, talking to aliens, and sending messages into outer space, listen here: