Could humans ever communicate with whales? - video - The Guardian

Marina: Welcome to Deep Voices — I am so glad you're here. I'm Marina, a marine biologist and science communicator, and this podcast is my love letter to the most extraordinary communicators on the planet: whales and dolphins. Every episode, we dive into their songs, their cultures, their family bonds, and the cutting-edge science — including A I — that's helping us get closer to understanding what they're actually saying to each other. A huge thank you to our sponsors today: Ada, who helps businesses integrate A I into their workflows in smart, practical ways; Ago Consulting — pronounced "Ahh-Go" — silicon development consultants working across everything from A I to SoC; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a remarkable portfolio across the silicon industry. We couldn't do this without them. Okay — today's episode? It's a good one. We've got mysterious humpback whale behavior that has scientists completely stumped, we're going deep into the extraordinary complexity of sperm whale clicks, and we're asking one of the biggest questions in ocean science right now: could humans ever actually communicate with whales? Let's go. Marina: So let's start with a sound. Imagine you're floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean — no boat engine, no wind, just open water — and then, from somewhere far below you, you feel it before you hear it. A click. Not a tiny little tick like a clock — we're talking about a sound so powerful it's the loudest communication sound produced by any mammal on Earth. That's a male sperm whale, and he is talking. Male sperm whales produce clicks that can reach around 230 decibels. To put that in perspective, a jet engine at close range is about 140 decibels. These animals are broadcasting at a level that is almost incomprehensible to us. And for a long time, scientists assumed these were mostly navigational — echolocation, finding prey in the dark depths. But here's where it gets really interesting. Marina: Recent research has been pushing back hard on that assumption. Sperm whale clicks — particularly the patterned ones called codas — may be far more complex than we ever imagined, and some researchers are now drawing careful comparisons to features we associate with human language. Now, I want to be precise here, because this is science and precision matters. We're not saying sperm whales have language in the way humans do. But what researchers have been finding is that sperm whale codas have properties that linguists look for when they're studying communication systems: things like combinatorial structure — the idea that smaller units get combined in different ways to produce different meanings — and context-dependency, where the same sound can mean something different depending on the situation. That's not nothing. That's actually remarkable. Marina: Sperm whales live in tight matrilineal clans — family groups led by elder females — and different clans have different dialects. A clan in the Caribbean sounds different from a clan in the Pacific. These aren't just random variations. They're learned, passed down through generations, which puts them squarely in the territory of culture. So when a sperm whale clicks, she's not just making noise. She's speaking in the dialect of her family, in a communication system that might have a structure more sophisticated than we ever gave it credit for. And that realization — that these animals might be operating at a level of vocal complexity that brushes up against what we consider hallmarks of language — that's what's driving some of the most exciting science happening in the ocean right now. Marina: Which brings me perfectly to our second thread, because the science trying to decode all of this is genuinely breathtaking. Let's talk about the effort to understand cetacean communication — and the role A I is starting to play. You may have heard of Project CETI. CETI stands for Cetacean Translation Initiative, and it is one of the most ambitious scientific projects of our time. A interdisciplinary team — marine biologists, linguists, cryptographers, A I researchers, roboticists — has come together with one audacious goal: to use machine learning to decode sperm whale communication. They're deploying underwater hydrophones and robotic tags to record sperm whales in the Caribbean at an unprecedented scale, capturing millions of clicks, trying to build a data set large enough that A I can start finding patterns that humans simply can't detect on their own. Marina: And here's why A I matters so much in this context. The challenge with whale communication isn't just that it's complex — it's that it's voluminous and it's subtle. Human researchers listening to recordings can identify patterns, but the sheer amount of data, and the fine-grained variations in timing, rhythm, and combination — that's where machine learning really earns its place. Stanford's Human-Centered A I Institute has been highlighting exactly this kind of work as a frontier for A I and science: using these tools not to replace scientific intuition, but to process at a scale and resolution that opens doors we couldn't even knock on before. The dream, and it genuinely is a dream right now — but a well-funded, seriously scientific dream — is that we might one day have enough decoded sperm whale communication to actually attempt a two-way exchange. Not a translation in the science-fiction sense, but a real, evidence-based understanding of what these animals are expressing to each other. Marina: And that question — could humans ever communicate with whales — is one scientists are starting to take seriously in a way that even a decade ago might have seemed fringe. There are already fascinating precedents. Researchers working with dolphins have had documented success with two-way communication systems using visual and acoustic signals, where dolphins could request objects or activities and researchers could respond. Wild dolphins have also been documented appearing to actively engage with humans — and we'll get to one of those stories in just a moment. But the deeper question, the one that keeps researchers up at night, is whether we could learn enough of a whale's or dolphin's communication system to meet them in the middle. To not just recognize their signals, but to respond in kind. That is the frontier. And A I might be the key that gets us to the door. Marina: Now — before we get to our people-and-cetaceans story, I have to tell you about something happening out in the water right now that has scientists genuinely baffled. And I love this kind of story, because it's a reminder that for all our technology and all our intelligence, the ocean keeps its secrets. Researchers observing humpback whales have been documenting a strange behavior that nobody can fully explain: humpbacks opening their mouths in this wide, sustained gape — just holding their jaws open — in situations where it doesn't seem connected to feeding or any other obvious function. It's been observed repeatedly, it's been filmed, and the scientific community is doing what good scientists do when they see something they don't understand: they're watching carefully and admitting they don't know yet. Marina: Humpbacks are already famous for being behaviorally complex. They're the ones with the extraordinary songs — those haunting, evolving compositions that male humpbacks sing for hours, sometimes days, and that spread across ocean basins as whales pick up new phrases from each other like a slow-moving musical wave. They're also known for remarkable social behaviors: cooperative bubble-net feeding, where groups of whales coordinate to herd fish in spiraling columns of bubbles; and what looks to many observers like genuine play. So when humpbacks do something that doesn't fit a known template, scientists pay attention. Is the gaping a form of communication? A social signal? A response to something in the environment? We genuinely don't know. And I find that thrilling. The ocean is still full of questions, and humpback whales are still full of surprises. Marina: Okay — our third thread. A cetacean-and-people story. And today's is one that I come back to often, because it sits right at the heart of what this podcast is about: the moments when the distance between humans and whales collapses. I want to tell you about a documented account of whale rescue behavior — specifically, cases where humpback whales have appeared to protect or assist other animals, including humans, from predators. Now, let's be careful here, because scientists rightly debate the interpretation of these events. We can describe what was observed. What those behaviors mean from the whale's perspective is a harder question. But the observations themselves are extraordinary. Marina: Marine biologist Nan Hauser has one of the most remarkable documented accounts. In 2017, while diving off the Cook Islands, a humpback whale — a massive animal, roughly 50,000 pounds — began nudging her, tucking her under its pectoral fin, pushing her through the water. At first she was terrified. And then she saw why the whale may have been doing it: there was a tiger shark in the water nearby. Hauser, who has studied humpbacks for decades, described the experience as the whale shielding her. She published about it, and the footage went around the world. Now — did the whale intend to protect her? That's the question scientists wrestle with. What we know is that humpbacks have been documented intervening when orcas attack other species — grey whale calves, seals, even a sunfish — in ways that look, from the outside, remarkably like altruism. They'll swim toward danger, position their bodies between the predator and the prey, even lift smaller animals out of the water on their backs. Marina: Robert Pitman, a marine ecologist who has studied these interactions extensively, has suggested that humpbacks may have a generalized impulse to intervene when they detect the hunting signals of orcas — and that this impulse sometimes extends to other species, including us. Whether that's empathy in a philosophical sense, or a behavioral pattern with its own evolutionary logic, or something else entirely — that debate is alive and ongoing. But what I keep coming back to is this: a fifty-foot whale, in the open ocean, chose to interact with a human in a way that, whatever its underlying motivation, may have kept that human safe. That happened. It's documented. And it fills me with something I can only describe as awe. Marina: These moments — a whale's body between a human and a shark, a dolphin leading a boat to a fishing net, the generations of sperm whale mothers clicking their family's dialect into the ears of their calves — they point to the same thing. There is something rich happening in the minds of these animals. Something we are only beginning, with all our technology and all our curiosity, to understand. The A I tools, the hydrophones, the decades of patient field work — all of it is pointing toward a picture of cetacean intelligence and communication that is more elaborate, more layered, more astonishing than most people imagined possible even twenty years ago. We are at the beginning of something. And that beginning is extraordinary. Marina: Deep Voices, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor — partners who believe in the power of science, technology, and curiosity to open up our world. If today's episode moved you even a little — if you found yourself thinking about a whale holding its jaw open in the blue Pacific, or a sperm whale grandmother clicking her dialect into the deep — please subscribe, share this with someone who loves the ocean, and leave us a review if you can. It genuinely helps more people find the show. All the sources and links for everything we talked about today are in the show notes — the link is right there waiting for you. Stay curious, keep listening, and remember: the ocean is speaking. We're just learning how to hear it. I'll see you next time.