A group of sperm whales is having a get together off the coast of Dominica.
As is usual for a family reunion, many conversations are taking place.
The whales communicate through Morse-code-like patterns of clicks called "codas".
For decades, scientists have been wondering what the whales are saying.
Do they give each other tips on the best fishing grounds?
Do whale moms exchange stories about raising their offspring?
Now, a unique project might reveal the mystery.
It's likely the largest interspecies communication effort in history,
and if it succeeds, it will completely change the way we see ocean mammals.
Are we just a blink of an eye away from chatting with whales?
The ocean is a totally different place to where we live.
It's deep, enormous, and most of it is dark.
Sperm whales live in a world of sound.
Their nose is the most powerful natural sonar system on the planet.
Sound is made just below the nostril
and travels back through their head, bounces forward off their skull
and leaves through the front of their head again as a sequence of short, loud clicks.
Echolocation click sounds are used to navigate
and hunt for food such as squid in the darkness of the deep ocean.
But apart from navigation purposes, sperm whales create a complex system of click
sound variations, called "codas".
Coda click sounds are embedded in distinct patterns and used by the whales to communicate.
Similar to how humans use different sounds to form words and sentences.
Whales live in clans, all of which use varying coda patterns.
You could call each pattern a dialect or even a different language.
So the whale family in Dominica uses a coda system
that's completely different to another one in, say, Sri Lanka.
Ever since, humans first listened closely
to the outlandish yet seemingly complex clicks and sounds made by whales,
we've been captivated by the desire to be able to decode their language.
Whale sounds were first structurally recorded by the US Navy in the 1950s,
following up on multiple encounters by submarine navigators.
In the 1960s, scientists and field researchers
started to analyze these sounds more profoundly.
The first pioneer in this field was biologist Roger Payne,
whose recorded whale songs were released as a vinyl album by National Geographic.
Interestingly enough, it was also
then that whale protection and anti-whaling movements began.
People started to feel compassion for these obviously highly intelligent beings.
But we should be careful about projecting too much of our human experience
onto sperm whales or any other species, for that matter.
Despite the magnitude and highly developed structure of their brain,
we still can't say to what extent cetaceans possess a grammatical language.
Their ocean habitat certainly contains enormous differences
in ecology and fundamental structure that created vastly different evolutionary
adaptations required for aquatic communications.
What is clear, though,
is that they have cognitive abilities in societies comparable to human ones.
And human language evolved at least partly to mediate social relationships.
Around the same time as the first recordings of whale sounds started to spread,
ambitious researchers raised their attentions to the skies.
Project SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
laid the groundwork in the field of trying to locate alien species.
It has scanned the skies for signs of alien civilization since the 1960s.
So far, without finding a single message.
So perhaps we should try out our decoding skills on signals that we can detect here on Earth.
Instead of pointing our antenna toward space,
we could focus on cultures in the ocean that are alien to us.
To decode the mysterious click sounds traversing the ocean,
an interdisciplinary group of scientists started a project called CETI,
which is expected to make major breakthroughs over the next few years
by significantly enhancing the sperm whale coda database.
Why?
Well, the technology is already out there.
So-called "language models" are AI's
that decode languages automatically when fed with words and phrases.
Just like our smartphones
that complete sentences with suggestions when we're typing a text message,
though a lot more sophisticated.
They're capable of writing articles on a given topic, summarizing complex texts
and even translating between two languages.
And this is exactly what CETI researchers are now doing to sperm whale codas,
feeding them to an AI.
Their first proof of concept already showed great results:
by applying machine learning algorithms to existing data,
they were able to identify clans and individual whales with over 95% accuracy.
As promising as this sounds for its application to whale codas,
it comes with a major challenge:
Vast amounts of data are needed.
The sophisticated neural networks of model languages
possess a database of over 100 billion words.
Shane Gero, CETI's project leader
and one of the spearheads of today's sperm whale research
has collected by far the largest amount of sperm whale recordings,
with still only about 100,000 codas.
Enough to scale up the project.
With funding from the TED Audacious Project, Nat Geo Society and several major philanthropic donors,
more whale monitoring technology has been deployed to the waters of Dominica.
In addition to the hydrophone recordings,
the sounds will be enhanced with visual data from drones above
and underwater, as well as on-whale tags.
This is done to pair their clicks with the context.
It's important to have at least
an indication of what the whales are doing as they make their sounds.
Otherwise, we could fall into a trap where we've created
a perfect chat bot that can converse fluently in whale,
with researchers still unable to understand a word.
From there, the data will be processed and fed into a machine learning AI
that creates a whale language model.
By linking behavior and language,
the whale chat bot can be brought to life, ready to be analyzed by CETI's linguists.
This all sounds extremely promising and major updates on the project
can be expected in the coming years.
But, in reality, none of the people involved could provide
a serious projection as to when we might see the whale chat bot in action.
For the CETI researchers,
much of the value is in the journey of the discovery itself.
Even if, CETI never cracks the sperm whale code, researchers
are bound to make significant advancements in machine learning,
animal communications and our understanding
of one of the world's most mysterious creatures.
And while the researchers do attempt to communicate with the whales,
they don't do it for interspecies dialog,
but to understand the whale's world.
Hi I am Patrick Dykstra, sperm whale enthusiast and wildlife filmmaker,
I have been filming these amazing creatures here in Dominica,
for so many years.
I have been working a lot recently with Terra Mater
to make a film, "Patrick and the Whale", which will have its international debut really soon.
So stay tuned!