Massachusetts Celebrates 4th Annual Right Whale Day at the New England Aquarium - Mass.gov

Marina: Welcome to Deep Voices — I'm so glad you're here. I'm Marina, a marine biologist who has spent more years than I can count falling completely in love with whales and dolphins, and this podcast is my way of sharing that love with you. Marina: Before we dive in, a huge thank you to today's sponsors — Ada, who helps organizations integrate A I into their workflows in ways that actually work; Ago Consulting, pronounced "Ahh-Go," the silicon development consultants taking projects all the way from A I to SoC; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a remarkable portfolio spanning the silicon industry. We genuinely couldn't make this show without them. Marina: And today — oh, today is a good one. We've got sperm whales with something that looks a lot like an alphabet, a mystery sound from the deep that has baffled scientists for decades, a conservation milestone for right whales off Massachusetts, and a DNA first for some of the largest creatures that have ever lived on this planet. Let's go. Marina: Okay, so let's start with Voices of the Deep — and I want to talk about sperm whales, because if you haven't heard what's happening with sperm whale research right now, you are in for something extraordinary. Marina: Sperm whales communicate using sounds called codas. These are rhythmic patterns of clicks — think of them almost like Morse code tapping through the ocean. And for years, researchers have been recording them, cataloguing them, trying to figure out if there's structure, if there's meaning, if there's something we'd recognize as language hiding in there. Marina: And here's where it gets remarkable. A I researchers working with a project called Project CETI — that stands for Cetacean Translation Initiative — have been applying machine learning to enormous libraries of sperm whale codas, and what they're finding is genuinely jaw-dropping. Marina: Their analysis suggests that sperm whale codas have what they're calling combinatorial structure. Meaning — the clicks aren't random. They're not even just individual units of meaning. They can be combined, layered, varied in tempo and rhythm and ornamentation, in ways that generate a much larger expressive vocabulary than anyone expected. Marina: The researchers identified what they described as a kind of phonetic alphabet — a set of basic coda elements that whales appear to combine and modify, in a way that's structurally reminiscent of how humans combine sounds into words. Now, we are not saying sperm whales are talking about their feelings in sentences. We are saying — the architecture is there. The combinatorial complexity is there. And that is a huge deal. Marina: Think about what this means. A sperm whale mother and her calf, floating somewhere in the dark of the Caribbean, exchanging sequences of clicks — and those sequences may carry layers of meaning we haven't begun to decode. The A I is helping us see the shape of something ancient and complex that human ears alone just couldn't parse. Marina: And speaking of sounds that human ears struggle to parse — I have to tell you about what Popular Mechanics recently called "the ocean's longest-running mystery." Because this story has everything: deep-sea acoustics, decades of bafflement, and a sound so strange that researchers genuinely weren't sure what animal could be making it. Marina: The sound is called the Bio-Duck. It was first recorded in the 1960s by submarines — passive sonar picking up this bizarre, repetitive quacking sound from the deep Southern Ocean. For about fifty years, nobody knew what was making it. Submarines crews heard it. Researchers recorded it. And the source remained a complete mystery. Marina: And then in 2014, scientists finally cracked it. They attached acoustic tags — little suction-cup recorders — to Antarctic minke whales, and they caught them in the act. The Bio-Duck is a minke whale call. These relatively small baleen whales, gliding through Antarctic waters, produce this low, repetitive, almost mechanical-sounding series of pulses that travels vast distances through cold water. Marina: What's wild is that this call had been echoing through the Southern Ocean, recorded by human technology, for half a century — and we had no idea who was singing it. It's a beautiful reminder of how much is still hidden. The ocean is enormous, it's dark, and its inhabitants have been having conversations we're only just beginning to overhear. Marina: The minke whale's Bio-Duck is now being used as a kind of acoustic marker — researchers can track minke whale populations and movements in remote Antarctic waters just by listening for it. A mysterious sound becomes a scientific tool. I love that. Marina: Now let's talk about Culture and Decoding — because there's a story this week that genuinely made me stop and just sit with it for a minute. Marina: Ocean Wise and the Whale Research Collective just announced something historic. Three of the largest animals on Earth — blue whales — received their very first D N A tests using a new non-invasive method. And I want to be clear about how significant this is. Marina: Blue whales are the largest animals known to have ever existed on this planet. They can reach thirty meters in length and weigh as much as two hundred tonnes. And yet, for all their size, they are extraordinarily difficult to study. They're rare — their populations were devastated by commercial whaling in the twentieth century — they range across vast stretches of open ocean, and getting close enough to collect biological samples has always been a challenge. Marina: What Ocean Wise and the Whale Research Collective did was collect environmental D N A — called e D N A — from the water itself. Blue whales, like all living things, shed cells constantly. Skin, mucus, microscopic traces of themselves left in their wake. And now scientists can collect seawater samples from areas where blue whales have been seen, and extract enough genetic material for a meaningful D N A profile. Marina: This matters enormously for our understanding of blue whale culture and population structure. D N A tells us about kinship — are these whales related? It tells us about population diversity — how genetically distinct are blue whales in different ocean basins? And over time, it can help us understand cultural transmission — do certain behaviors, certain song patterns, run in family lines? Marina: Because yes — blue whales sing. The males produce extraordinarily low-frequency songs, so low that humans can't hear them without slowing the recordings way down. And here's a cultural twist: blue whale songs change over time, and those changes spread across populations, almost like musical trends. A new song motif appears in one region and propagates — whales in distant parts of the ocean start incorporating it. We don't fully understand the mechanism, but it looks for all the world like culture. Marina: And now, with e D N A, we can start connecting the genetic dots. We can ask — are the whales sharing song innovations the same ones who are genetically connected? Are there blue whale lineages, families, cultures, that we can now begin to trace? Marina: This connects beautifully to the broader A I story too. Project CETI and similar initiatives are building the data infrastructure to analyze cetacean communication at scale. E D N A gives us the genetic layer. Acoustic recording gives us the vocal layer. A I helps us find patterns across both. We are — slowly, carefully, humbly — assembling the tools to understand what these animals are actually doing when they talk to each other. Marina: And I think that's worth sitting with. The idea that a blue whale song rippling through the Pacific might be carrying cultural information — a tradition, a identity marker, maybe something we'd recognize as meaning — and that we are, right now, in this decade, developing the science to start reading it. Marina: Now let's talk about people and whales — because this week brought a story that is equal parts hopeful and heartbreaking, and I think it deserves your full attention. Marina: Massachusetts just celebrated its fourth annual Right Whale Day at the New England Aquarium. And if you don't know the story of the North Atlantic right whale, I need to tell it to you, because it is one of the most urgent conservation stories in the ocean right now. Marina: North Atlantic right whales are critically endangered. There are estimated to be fewer than three hundred and seventy individuals left — and that number includes calves. This is a population on the knife's edge. They were called "right whales" by whalers because they were the "right" whale to hunt — they swam slowly, they floated when killed, they were close to shore. And the hunting nearly wiped them out entirely. Marina: Commercial whaling of right whales ended, but the threats didn't. Today, the two biggest killers of North Atlantic right whales are entanglement in fishing gear — particularly vertical lines from lobster and crab traps — and vessel strikes. These whales live along one of the busiest shipping corridors in the world, off the northeastern United States and eastern Canada. And despite legal protections, they keep dying. Marina: What makes Right Whale Day at the New England Aquarium so meaningful is that it's not just a celebration — it's a rallying point. Scientists, policymakers, fishermen, and advocates gather to talk honestly about what's working and what isn't. The aquarium's right whale research team has been cataloguing individual right whales for decades — they know these animals by name, by the patterns of the rough patches on their heads called callosities, by their family histories. Marina: There's a whale named Punctuation, first identified in 1971, who became one of the most studied individual whales in history. Her descendants have been tracked across generations. When a right whale is born, researchers can often tell you who her mother is, who her grandmother was. These are known individuals with known lives — and when they die, it is felt. Marina: Right Whale Day is a reminder that conservation is not abstract. It's about Punctuation and her grandchildren. It's about a mother and calf spotted off Georgia in winter, making the long migration north. It's about the people who go out in small boats in cold water to take photographs and check for new injuries, new entanglements, new signs of trouble. Marina: And there is real reason for measured hope. Ropeless fishing gear — trap systems that don't require vertical lines at all — is being tested and slowly adopted. Speed restrictions for vessels in right whale habitat areas have been shown to reduce strike risk. A I is being used to detect right whale calls in real time, triggering automated alerts to nearby ships to slow down. The technology and the will exist. The question is whether we move fast enough. Marina: Three hundred and seventy animals. We know their faces. We know their voices — right whales make a low, moaning call, and researchers can identify individuals by their calls, just like we'd recognize a friend's voice on the phone. They are not a statistic. They are individuals with cultures and bonds and histories. And they need us to do better. Marina: I also have to mention — a story caught my eye this week that technically involves whale sharks, not whales or dolphins, so a little outside our usual lane — but it's too delightful not to mention. Researchers attached cameras to whale sharks and found that these giants of the sea are essentially constant snackers, grazing on tiny prey in short bursts throughout the day rather than having big feeding events. Whale sharks: relatable energy. Sometimes the ocean just hands you something joyful, and you take it. Marina: So. What do we take from today? Marina: A sperm whale's clicks may carry the structure of language. A mysterious sound haunted submarines for fifty years before we learned it was a minke whale singing. Blue whales leave their D N A in the water behind them, and now we can read it. And off the coast of Massachusetts, a community of scientists and advocates gathers each year to fight for three hundred and seventy whales they know by name. Marina: The ocean is full of voices. Ancient, complex, irreplaceable voices. And the most important thing we can do — with our science, our A I, our attention — is listen. Marina: Deep Voices, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor. Thank you to each of them for making this show possible. Marina: If today's episode moved you, please share it with someone who loves the sea, or someone who doesn't yet know they do. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and check the link in show notes for sources, further reading, and ways to support right whale conservation. Marina: I'm Marina. Stay curious, stay kind, and keep listening to the deep.