Scientists are bridging the language gap between humans and whales. What then? - Canada's National Observer

Marina: Welcome to Deep Voices — the show that dives beneath the surface, into the world of whales and dolphins, their songs, their families, their secrets, and the remarkable science working to unlock them. I'm Marina, a marine biologist who has been completely, hopelessly in love with cetaceans for as long as I can remember. So glad you're here with me today. Marina: Before we dive in, a huge thank you to our sponsors who make this show possible. Ada — helping businesses integrate A I into their workflows in ways that actually work. Ago Consulting — that's "Ahh-Go" — silicon development experts guiding everything from A I to full system-on-chip design. And Zen Semiconductor — an umbrella company with a whole portfolio of businesses shaping the future of the silicon industry. We are grateful for all of them. Marina: Today on Deep Voices — scientists are getting closer than ever to bridging the language gap between humans and whales, and the question everyone is starting to ask is: what do we actually do when we get there? We've also got a heartbreaking story about the world's most endangered marine mammal getting an extraordinary digital lifeline. And we're going back to the nineteenth century, because it turns out some old sailors knew something about sperm whales that scientists have only just now been able to confirm on camera. Let's go. Marina: So let's start with voices. Because that is, after all, what this show is about. And I want to take you somewhere specific — into the deep, dark, extraordinary acoustic world of the sperm whale. Marina: Sperm whales don't sing the way humpbacks do. They click. These are called codas — short, rhythmic bursts of sound, almost like Morse code tapped out in the dark. And they're social. Sperm whales make these codas when they're with each other, greeting each other, apparently talking to each other. Different groups of sperm whales have different coda repertoires — like dialects. Like accents. Like culture, passed down through generations. Marina: But here's the thing about sperm whales that has always made researchers shake their heads in amazement. They have the largest brains of any animal that has ever lived on this planet. Ever. A sperm whale's brain can weigh up to nine kilograms. For context, yours weighs about one and a half. And a huge portion of that brain is devoted to acoustic processing. To sound. To listening. Marina: So what are they doing with all that capacity? That question has driven researchers for decades. And now, something filmed recently is giving us a new piece of the puzzle. Newsweek reported on behavior that nineteenth-century whalers described in their logs — sailors who spent years at sea watching sperm whales up close, sometimes too close. They wrote about something that looked like the whales logging at the surface in tight groups, barely moving, almost like they were resting together in a kind of communal stillness. Marina: For a long time, scientists weren't sure what to make of those old accounts. Were the sailors exaggerating? Misinterpreting? But now, for the first time, researchers have captured this behavior on camera. And it's real. Sperm whales, resting together at the surface, synchronized, close, in what looks unmistakably like a social, coordinated state. Not just resting — doing it together. Doing it as a group. Marina: And that matters enormously, because it tells us something about the texture of sperm whale life. These are not solitary, silent giants drifting through the dark. They are social creatures, with relationships, with routines, with ways of being together that nineteen-century sailors noticed and modern cameras are only now confirming. There is something deeply moving about that — about the fact that the ocean has been holding these secrets, and we are only just beginning to see them. Marina: Now, let's talk about the science that is trying to go even deeper. Because if sperm whale codas are like a language — and there is serious reason to think they might be — then what does that language actually say? That's the question at the heart of Project CETI, and it's one of the most ambitious scientific undertakings in the history of animal research. Marina: CETI stands for Cetacean Translation Initiative. And the name is not accidental — it's a deliberate echo of SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Because the researchers behind this project believe that if we're going to find a mind genuinely different from our own, we might not need to look to the stars. We might just need to look into the ocean. Marina: Here's what they're doing. Project CETI, in partnership with MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory — MIT CSAIL — is using A I to analyze sperm whale codas at a scale that was simply impossible before. They're deploying underwater microphones, robotic fish, even tags on the whales themselves, to collect thousands and thousands of coda recordings from a community of sperm whales in the Eastern Caribbean, near the island of Dominica. Marina: And then they feed all of that data into machine learning systems — the same kind of A I architecture that underlies large language models — to look for structure. For patterns. For the kind of complexity that might indicate something like meaning. Early findings, published in peer-reviewed research, have already shown that sperm whale codas are more complex than we thought. There appear to be features like rhythm, ornamentation, tempo — combinatorial elements that begin to look, mathematically, like the building blocks of language. Marina: Now — and I want to be careful here, because the science is genuinely careful too — this does not mean we've decoded whale language. We haven't. We don't know what any individual coda means. We don't even know for certain that they mean things in the way human words mean things. But what this work is doing is establishing, rigorously, that the structure is there. That there is something to decode. And that is a profound and thrilling thing to establish. Marina: Which brings us to the question that Canada's National Observer recently put front and center, and honestly it's a question I think about a lot. Scientists are bridging the language gap. What then? If we do decode what whales are saying — even partially — what are our obligations? What does it mean, ethically and legally, if an animal can be shown to have something like language? Does that change how we treat them? Does it change what we're allowed to do to the oceans they live in? Marina: These aren't rhetorical questions. Researchers and ethicists are genuinely wrestling with them right now. Some argue that demonstrating language-like complexity in whales could be a watershed moment for animal rights law. Others worry about overpromising — that the gap between "complex communication" and "language" is huge, and we have to be honest about it. But almost everyone working in this space agrees on one thing: the act of trying to listen, seriously and scientifically, to what whales are saying — that itself is a moral stance. It says: these minds matter. These voices matter. Let's find out what they're telling us. Marina: And that brings me to a story that is, honestly, one of the saddest and most beautiful things I've come across in a long time. It's about a tiny porpoise. The vaquita. And I need to tell you about her, because she is running out of time. Marina: The vaquita — whose name means "little cow" in Spanish — is the world's smallest cetacean. She lives only in one place on Earth: the northern end of the Gulf of California, in Mexico. And she is, without any close competition, the most endangered marine mammal on the planet. We're talking about a species teetering on the absolute edge of existence. Current estimates put the population somewhere in the single digits. Maybe ten individuals. Maybe fewer. Marina: How did it get this bad? Illegal fishing. Specifically, gillnets set to catch a fish called the totoaba, whose swim bladder is trafficked illegally because it's considered a delicacy in some markets. Vaquitas swim into those nets and drown. It has been happening for decades, and despite international attention, despite conservation efforts, the population has collapsed catastrophically. In the 1990s there were hundreds of vaquitas. Now there are almost none. Marina: And so scientists have done something both heartbreaking and extraordinary. Since getting close enough to study living vaquitas is almost impossible — they're incredibly shy, and so rare that encounters are vanishingly uncommon — researchers have turned to the animals that have already been lost. Using advanced imaging technology, they have created highly detailed, photorealistic three-dimensional models of vaquita skeletons. A digital archive. A portrait of a species in its final moments. Marina: These 3D models capture the vaquita's anatomy in extraordinary detail — the curve of her rostrum, the structure of her ribs, the proportions that make her uniquely, heartbreakingly herself. Scientists can study these models to learn things about vaquita biology that would otherwise be impossible to access. And the archive will exist even if — when I say "if" I mean I desperately hope it's "if" and not "when" — even if the living animals disappear. Marina: There's something both devastating and defiant about this project. It's a refusal to let the vaquita vanish without a trace. It's scientists saying: we are going to bear witness. We are going to remember her. And maybe — maybe — if these digital models and the attention they bring can inspire greater conservation action, can put pressure on the governments and enforcement agencies that need to do more, then this archive becomes not just a memorial but a lifeline. A tiny, fragile, digital lifeline for a tiny, fragile, extraordinary animal. Marina: The vaquita also communicates — she produces clicks, like other porpoises, to navigate and find food through echolocation. We know almost nothing about her acoustic world, her social life, whether she has culture in the way sperm whales do. And we may never know. That silence — the silence of a voice we never got to hear — sits with me every time I think about her. Marina: I want to end today on something that I think captures why this all matters — why the science, the listening, the trying, is so important. Because when humans and cetaceans meet, when we actually pay attention, remarkable things can happen. Marina: And I also want to be honest with you, because this world isn't all wonder — sometimes it's complicated too. PETA recently filed an FTC complaint against the Dolphin Research Center in Florida, alleging that the facility uses terms like "sanctuary" in ways that mislead the public about the nature of captivity for the dolphins in their care. I'm not going to adjudicate that complaint — that's for the regulators to sort out. But I think it's worth naming, because it points to something real. Our relationship with dolphins and whales exists on a spectrum, from the profound respect of field researchers who spend years earning the trust of wild animals, all the way to commercial arrangements that can obscure difficult realities behind warm language. And as we get closer to understanding what these animals are actually saying, as A I helps us decode their communication, the ethical stakes of how we treat them only get higher. We owe it to them — and to ourselves — to be honest about what "care" and "sanctuary" actually mean. Marina: Because the encounters that move me most are the ones built on genuine curiosity and respect. Researchers who float quietly in the water off Dominica, listening for codas. Scientists who tag humpbacks with suction cups that fall off harmlessly after a few hours, gathering acoustic data and then letting the whale go on her way. Conservationists fighting to keep gillnets out of the Gulf of California so a tiny porpoise might — might — have a chance. Marina: And ordinary people, too. There are documented accounts from around the world of wild dolphins approaching boats not because they want fish, but because they seem, genuinely, curious. Bottlenose dolphins in Shark Bay in Western Australia have been studied for decades — individual animals known by name, their life histories mapped across generations, their tool use documented, their friendships between males tracked over years. These are not abstractions. These are individuals. With histories. With relationships. With, as best we can tell, something like inner lives. Marina: When I think about all of it together — the sperm whales clicking in the dark, the vaquita's fragile survival, the A I systems parsing the structure of coda sequences, the ethical questions we're only beginning to ask — what I feel most strongly is urgency. Not panic, but urgency. The feeling that we are at a genuinely pivotal moment. That the tools exist, for the first time in human history, to actually listen. And that what we do with that listening will say as much about us as it does about the whales. Marina: That is what Deep Voices is here for. To keep listening with you. Marina: Thank you so, so much for spending this time with me today. These stories — the sperm whale behavior that nineteenth-century sailors saw and modern cameras just confirmed, the A I decoding project that might one day tell us what a coda means, the digital memorial for a porpoise we're losing too fast, and the honest, complicated questions about how we treat the cetaceans already in our care — they all point in the same direction. Toward the ocean. Toward attention. Toward a kind of respect we're still learning how to offer. Marina: Deep Voices is brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor. Their support lets us keep making this show, and I'm genuinely grateful. Marina: If today's episode moved you — if it made you think, or wonder, or feel something — please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone you think needs to hear about the vaquita, or the sperm whales, or the A I that's learning to listen to the sea. All the links and sources for today's stories are in the show notes. Go explore. Marina: Stay curious. Stay kind to the ocean. And I'll see you next time, in the deep.